validation

I haven't posted here in a long time.  There was no single big reason, but several smaller ones, and most of them really aren't worth mentioning.  The biggest is that I was working on something else.

Before I started my hike last spring, I had already decided that I wanted to write about it.  I kept a careful journal each night of the hike (save one, on the night of what my friends and I agreed was The Worst Fourth of July Ever.  I wrote about that day on the 5th, for reasons too numerous to mention in a parenthetical aside), and frequently considered how I might describe the things I experienced along the way, the people I met, and the unbelievable discomfort of a toilet seat so cold that it prevented pooping.  Then I got home, and crashed hard.

For the first week or two, I barely moved.  I cooked, and I walked--very slowly--to the grocery.  People passed me on the sidewalk, which isn't something that usually happens to me, but my knees still ached, and my ankles, though improving quickly, still felt like they had broken glass in them.  As I shuffled along, distracted mothers pushed strollers past me, and a surly voice in the back of my head would growl, "Sure, you can pass me NOW--I just hiked two thousand miles this summer!!"

Thirteen days after my hike ended, I started writing.

I managed to take slightly less time writing about the trail than it took me to hike it.  To maintain a sort of false pressure on myself, I sent an updated copy of the manuscript to a friend at the end of every week.  To justify the email I would send her, I had to make significant progress in what I had written.  She was thrilled to get more details of my hike; I was thrilled that she seemed pleased with what I had written.

When I finished writing, I started over and read everything I had written, proofreading, correcting, and revising as I went.  I sent that second draft to the same friends, plus three other "test readers," and then closed the file.  I wanted to get feedback from people who didn't know my story.  Asking people to read 82,000 words of a deeply personal, revealing story is like showing up to a party stark naked and hoping nobody will notice you.  I was anxious and edgy for weeks.  Each Wednesday, I marked the passage of another week without word from any of my test readers.  When a month passed, I considered sending a reminder email to my tiny cadre of previewers to remind them that it was ok to say that they hated it, as long as they tried to tell me why.  I just needed to get some sort of feedback on what I had done.

This Saturday, I received a large manila envelope in the mail.  One of the readers had printed the entire manuscript and hand-written her thoughts in margins and on the backs of pages.  She'd caught some mistakes that I'd missed, and some of the annoying things people do when writing that drive me crazy when I see them elsewhere.  Somehow, I hadn't caught them all in my own work.  She also had lots of very helpful, insightful comments on the product taken as a whole.  As soon as I opened the envelope, I sealed myself in the bedroom and read everything she had written.  The Girl and her brother were in the living room watching Doctor Who, but I didn't care, because finally I'd heard back from someone who read my book, and more importantly: she'd liked it.

I was out late that night for unrelated reasons, but I still felt great until I finally got to bed at three in the morning.  For the first time since I'd finished the trail (which was itself the first time in a much longer period), I felt really good about something I'd accomplished.

Now there will hopefully be more feedback, more revisions, and then I'm going to try to get my book published.  It will be the second time I've tried to get a book through the gauntlet of publishing, and the first non-fiction attempt.  It's scary to think of it in such terms, but if all goes well, I won't be the naked guy at the party, I'll be naked in front of the world.  But I still want to do it.  I love writing.  I love sharing my adventures.  I'm not always comfortable sharing my pain and personal life, but this was a very personal story, and a very personal adventure.  I could say that I'm sharing it because it might help people, but I'm not the humanitarian people mistakenly assume that I am.  I'm doing it because I hope it helps me.