Friday, January 02, 2009

Re-Introduction

I'm not a big believer in New Year's resolutions. They are usually made by somebody at an hour where no good promises are made anyway, and every goal that I ever had that was worth a damn and that I accomplished had a date on it for completion, not a day that I started it. Besides, as someone who trains like a bastard and needs access to a swim lane and a running track with a high degree of frequency, there's nothing worse than a resoluter hogging the track, taking a ten minute break on the pulldown machine, and generally doing five of the fifteen things that you can do at the gym that really piss me off.

But this year needs a new set of goals. Most of my goals over the past couple years have been fitness related, and I'm expanding my selection on that front. 2009 will be the year I complete my first marathon (Las Vegas in December), I plan to do the Silverman half again, still want to race Chicago in less than 3 hours (maybe less than 2:50 would be nice), and there are several other races that are on the table. I'd also like to drop 25 more pounds and turn myself into a Very Dangerous Person. There is also the one remaining fitness goal of my ten from 2005, and that's to be able to do five pullups. And starting Monday I'll go back to full tracking of everything via CalorieKing.

But there's something else.

While I've doing these race recaps, I've been writing a lot. It's not uncommon for me to crank out 2000 words a night, either in letters, the books, stories or anything else. And seeing as I have three book projects running concurrently, I want to get one of them finished up. I have had double-digits worth of people tell me that I have a way with words; this is the year to do something about it.

To that end, I'm making a bet with myself. One of the things that I want to do in six months is get a working draft of one of the projects done-ANY one of them. Implosion, which is the memoir I mentioned on my website (a friend of mine who's read some of the excerpts said, "Wow...I had no idea"), is currently at about 80 pages, and I could probably jump that to 100 with an email search. The training and goals book is skeletal but would be relatively easy to put together. And the hotel book is at about 20 pages or so, and won't get me sued into oblivion.But each week, I should be able to get 4000 words pumped out toward any one of those very diverse projects.

But what if I don't?

It's time to reopen the slaughterhouse-this site. At the time I was originally doing it, about five years ago, it was strictly a place for quick, dashed-off work that didn't have a place anywhere else. But this time, I'm not choosing the topic.You will.

I've set up an email address at slaughterhouse@jameslyden.com. Rather than writing just about anything that comes to my mind, if I don't hit my target, I'll pick the third topic in the Inbox and do 500 words on that. If I do get the target, I'll put up an excerpt. My deadline is every Friday at 9 PM, so the results will be up Saturday morning. I'm hoping that you guys, and a whole host of other people I'm going to tell about this plan, will give me both the necessary incentive to keep moving forward on this and to get my mind unstuck when I get trapped in a particular section.

I'd like to try this for 12 weeks. As it was many years ago with the slaughterhouse, speed is key. And I'll write about anything. If you get a moment and you think that I might have something funny or insightful to say about something, suggest it. Let's dance.

Thank you in advance for your help!

James

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