What's Up Wednesday: Summer is BUSY Edition!

What's Up Wednesday is a meme started by Jaime Morrow and Erin Funk to bring reading and writing bloggers together once a week. Go to Jaime's blog to add your link and check out posts from other writers!

What I'm Reading

Somewhat embarrassingly, this hasn't changed much since last Wednesday.  I still have that book of Nora Ephron essays sitting on my nightstand, I'm still making my way through Who I Kissed, and I'm reading a few chapters of Little Women every day with my students from Queens (coincidentally, the new school where I'll be teaching in the mornings this year chose Little Women for their all-school summer reading this summer--woo!  They're also reading Ready Player One, which I'll have to bump up my list for sure now.)  I also just got a new MS to beta-read and when I started it yesterday I had to TEAR myself away from it to get to all my other tasks.

What I'm Writing

Still moving forward on the same WiP, although I missed a writing day Monday.  I had to pit and freeze six quarts of sour cherries (they only keep a few days in the fridge, and they have a very short growing season.  If I want cherries to bake with all year--which I do--I have to put them up NOW) that I bought at the farmers' markets on Saturday, and then I had a family dinner to go to up in Canada that was very probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience: a very, very important friend of my husband's family, who is 90 years old and lives in Israel, was in Canada for a wedding, so some of her family and some of my husband's family got together for dinner.  (To give you an idea of how important this woman is to them: one of my husband's aunts flew in from New York City, and the other flew in from Bermuda.)  Then the dinner lasted until 11pm, getting us home just before midnight.  So, worth it, but a hiccup in my goals.  This week, it should be business as usual, though: 750 words minimum on weekdays, with the challenge goal of 1000 words four out of five days.

What Else I've Been Up To

I'm still running!  This weekend at the gym, I smashed my previous mile time by about a minute, running/walking an extremely difficult (and fairly pathetic) 12:35 mile.   But the milestone I'm prouder of came yesterday, when I ran a full mile without stopping to walk at all, for the very first time in my entire life.  I'm fairly certain it came in well above the 12:35 time, although I don't usually time myself when I run outside so I'm not sure.  It was a slow pace, but I did it!  That was the first big goal I had set for myself with this new running and walking thing, so I'm feeling really good about that.  It took me 24 days to get there (with a few days off sprinkled in) from...pretty much from nothing.  From not even being able to run all the way around the block (.41 miles) once.  (Oh, and I also hit my goal of 26.2 miles, or one marathon, from June 9th to the end of the month.  This month, I'm shooting for two.) 

What Inspires Me Right Now
 

In both running and writing, I love that I have found friends online who are far ahead of me in their journeys.  I feel so lucky to be able to follow along behind them, watching as they achieve goals and hit milestones that are way far in my future if I get there at all.  Yes, of course, there are the occasional twinges of "I wish I could do that," or "I wish that was happening to me," but more often it makes me feel like these far-off goals are in reach, and I'm happy to have such successful, knowledgeable guides.  Plus, it makes my current goals seem so much more doable: if I have friends who are running 150 miles a month or more, I have no excuse for not being able to do a mile or two every day.  If I have friends who are querying and getting agents and going on submission, I can put my butt in the chair and keep putting words on paper.  Right?

What's up with you?