Saturday, 26 July 2003

I'm trying to finish up my reading for the Hugo awards. So far, the hardest decisions are for the novellas--they're all great. Lots of folks before me have said that the novella is the natural length for a sf story, and it certainly seems like that to me. Short story length is often too short to fully realize the world where the story takes place, but many stories (especially "idea" stories, where the sfnial idea is the heart of the story) don't do so well when stretched out to novel length.

Novellas are hard to sell, but I think I'll stop resisting the urge to write them. If a story wants to be a novella, I'll write it as a novella.

Mostly it was a being lazy day, except that early this morning I walked over to Centennial High School and ran on their track. I did 1 mile in 10:55. I had meant to go at a "normal" pace, but got distracted when I first started and went out pretty quickly, so that's probably about the speed I go on the faster of my ordinary runs. It's not so fast that I need to completely re-estimate the length of my usual runs. Based on this and recent running times, I figure that my "1.5 mile route" is really 1.56 miles while my "2.5 mile route" is really 2.43 miles.

Since I have a watch that does laps, I went ahead and got my split times:

I feel wonderful after a run. Tired, but even after a long run, not too tired (that comes after doing something unusual, like racquetball). Loose and flexible, the way a dancer looks. Pleased with myself, satisfied that I've done the right thing. I feel like I found the right path and have taken another step down it.