Help Preserve Pennsylvania Hiking!

The Pennsylvania Game Commission has recently announced proposals affecting their State Game Lands: one would require hikers to carry permits and another would ban non-hunters during some of the best times of the year: the end of September through mid-January and mid-April through the end of May.  During these periods, the trails would only be open to hikers on Sundays, eliminating any chance for a long-distance hike.  The proposal is located here at this link. 

This would affect 95 miles of the Great Eastern Trail and would limit the season for both northbound and southbound thru-hikers, in addition to severely restricting the opportunity for people to hike sections of it during pleasant times of the year.

Please take five minutes of your day today to write to the Pennsylvania Game Commission to let them know your thoughts.  The next meeting will be on the 25th, so please send in your comments as soon as possible!  The Keystone Trails Association sums up the situation nicely and provides contact information at this link.  

A beautiful, wonderful, and fitting week

 This morning I woke up at 5:02AM to drive Bart to the airport.  After a brief yet scenic tour of the wrong terminal, we got him to where he needed to be.  This ends one of the busiest, most productive, and funny weeks of my life.

For the last week we've toiled away at the book. We've hacked it apart, chopping out huge sections and adding new chapters.  We've discovered certain words that we overuse: we had a beautiful, wonderful, and fitting time obliterating the words beautiful, wonderful, and fitting from the manuscript.

It was fun to host Bart at my apartment.  He cooked chili and walked on a frozen lake.  Other than that, it was all work.  Even working was beautiful, wonderful, and fitting because we got to relive the trail.  During every chapter we worked on, we could scarcely breathe from laughter at something we remembered.

I was sad to see Bart go.  As J.K. Rowling wrote, "There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them."  The Great Eastern Trail was our mountain troll - a beautiful, wonderful, and fitting mountain troll.

Serious editing

Although Bart and I have not talked about it much online, we are in the middle of a journey more arduous than the Great Eastern Trail: writing about it.  

Our rough draft has been done for a long time, but the process of turning a rough draft into something less painful has been long and tedious. Finally, we concluded that it needs to happen in "real life" as opposed to over the internet.  (Pro tip: Don't write your first book with someone who lives over a thousand miles away.)

Happily, Bart is able to fly to Minnesota next week for Round 1 of Serious Editing. 

Today I finished my edits on over 200 pages.  I can't wait to share them with him.  

This has been my office for the last couple of weeks.