rowyn

BYOK

A new toy arrived in the mail this month: a BYOK. It's billed as a distraction-free writing device, a miniature word processor. All it does is let you type and save your words while keeping you off the internet. The acronym stands for "Bring Your Own Keyboard." This was a selling point to me because I am getting particular about keyboards as I get older, and most of the ones included with gimmicky tech leave me cold. It's a tiny bit silly, because the gizmo itself is almost exactly the same size as a phone - maybe a little fatter - and does LESS. The lightweight option is definitely just a Bluetooth keyboard and my phone with the Obsidian app - or any Markdown writing app, but Obsidian works well for me. But on the other hand... I have an analog watch, as a piece of jewelry but also, to quote a genuinely clever Timex billboard, to "know the time without seeing you have 1,249 unanswered emails." My rower has a little computer on board to tell me how fast I'm rowing, and I love that feedback and basically never wish it was just talking to my phone instead. We've packed our entire lives onto our phones, and now people are looking into unpacking them again, at least somewhat.

I intend to draft all of book 6 on the BYOK, and see if I notice any difference in my output. I've already written this blog entry and am working on a gift short story for a friend.

BIKE

Not an acronym, just the usual machine. I upgraded my kids' bicycles, which required getting a new one for my eldest, and in the process I admitted to myself that I wanted a bike of my own again, and got one for me as well. It has been almost a decade and a half since I last owned a bike.

My father is a passionate triathlete and wanted his children to love bicycles as much as he does, and back then he set me up with a moderately intense road bike: clip-in pedals you have to wear special cleats to use, low-slung curved handlebars that pull your back all the way down into a painful but aerodynamic hunch, many many gears on both the front and back wheels. I tried to commute with it one year during an industrial internship, got threatened with second-degree murder for the two blocks where the city's trails ran out and I had to share the road with cars, sprung several flat tires and finally destroyed a wheel, and gave the experience up as not for me. I tried to keep up with a trainer - a type of frame that turns a regular bike into a stationary one - but while that worked for fitness it didn't do much for my actual riding skills, as I found the next time I competed in a triathlon. I never did stop hating how much the racing saddle hurt to sit on. Eventually it just started to feel like trying to make a bad relationship work, I gave the bike back to my dad, and lived without one quite unbothered.

Then, last summer, my youngest child started wanting to bike as much as possible. I had to borrow my partner's bike, and while I wasn't a fan of that particular bike it was - kind of fun? To cover more ground than I could on foot? It definitely made me want to try the experience again with a bike fitted to me. So, when the time came to go shopping, that's what I did.

It's nothing fancy. Straight handlebars, only 7 gears, basic axles instead of quick-release. I ride it in sweatpants and sneakers, and I spend a quarter of the time sitting straight up and steering with the fingertips of my non-dominant hand while I shake out the arm I broke the winter before last. But I finally love it the way my dad always hoped. I love being a rowdy little pack with my partner and our kids. I love the wind in my face and birdsong in my ears. And, sometimes, I love Going Fast.

It won't last into the winter. I really am treating it like a toy of sorts, to be enjoyed on dry pavement only. But I'm having fun.

BOOK

Still swimming against the current with book 5. To drag out the metaphor, maybe I'm more portaging upstream on one riverbank: rereading the previous books, rereading old favourite stories by myself and others, fiddling with bikes and videogames and that gift fic. Looking for my way back into the flow I actually want to be caught up in. I'll find it eventually. Lately I have a sensation of pressure inside me, words or energy that wants to become words, building up and wanting to push out. I suspect what I really have to do is get over myself and just rebuild the discipline of sitting down and drafting. But if that wasn't easier said than done I would have a lot more than 4 books done by now!