Setbacks are natural. Roll with it.

I have been training for a marathon for several weeks now. I love to run outside, but Winter kinda sucks when it drops to single digits, and it’s dark at 6 am. I’ve had enough frozen fingers and toes to have grown tired of it. So, I’ve been running on a treadmill since roughly January. Boring, but I’ve caught up on my anime that way :-)

Well, today, I pulled a hammie. It was sudden and stinging, and I had to stop running. Luckily, my marathon isn’t until November, so I have time to recover, but it was disappointing.

It brings me back to when I was writing the book. The first time my wife read it, she told me it needed work and made lots of suggestions. It was a setback. I recovered and made changes. More re-reading, more suggested edits. I went through the Ives chapter with her so many times. I’m sure she got super tired of it.

Wrote it from different perspectives, for more intimacy. It didn’t pass muster, so I rewrote it differently. And rewrote it yet again, when the developmental edits came around. And yet again, when a friend made a suggestion on the chapter.

That chapter used to be about 7-8 pages long and full of background story for Karal and Ives’ friendship. Now it’s 3-4, emotional, but impactful.

And that’s how it goes. You get a setback. You roll with it. Don’t dwell on the past. Dwell on how to improve the present to make the future better. It’s how I’ve settled on life. It’s how I’ve settled with the book. Get to your best version, and if things get in your way, find a different path to get to your goal.

I guess I’m weight training tomorrow.