Running Tips for People Who Aren’t Runners

I’m a fairly big guy. Not huge, but at 5’10 and just over 200 lbs, no one seems to be overly surprised when I tell them that I played football in high school and rugby in/after college. However, many people seem a bit surprised when I tell them that I run on a (semi) regular basis. In middle school and high school, I ran track with my primary event being the half mile, but it wasn’t until a massive growth spurt during my junior year that I really began to look out of place during that event. There’s something about a 220 lb linebacker running next to 150 lb track stars that brings to mind images of an elephant running next to a herd of gazelle. In high school, I ran track to get in shape for football season. In college, I ran to keep in shape for rugby. But now, I’ve finally figured out that I kind of just like running. Rather than it being a means to an end, it has become something that I look forward to at the end of a day. Even though I identify myself as a not-a-runner (“No, I’m not a runner.”), I still have some completely inexpert, but practical, running advice for people who also aren’t runners.

My Week Without Internet

I have carried my shame with me for the last several years. Specifically, I have carried my shame in my pocket. But now, it is finally time to confess to the world: I still do not have a smartphone. I have never had a smartphone; instead, I have a slide phone. It can text and make phone calls and, occasionally, send and receive pictures, and that is about it. The list of things that my dumbphone cannot do is long, but most of the items are covered by one word: internet. Last week I moved from Virginia to North Carolina into an apartment that was formerly sans internet access, so, lacking a smartphone with the ability to look up addresses and check out social media and such, I knew there would be a period of time in which I would have to survive without regular internet access. In order to catalog the experiences of this week, I kept a journal of what it was like to be internet-less. The text of the entries has been transcribed below.

The journal basically looks just like this. But with fewer drawings. And the pages are whiter. And it might have a metal spiral in the middle. But other than that, the exact same.

How to Write a Dystopian Young Adult Trilogy

The idea of the dystopian post-apocalyptic universe has been around since George Orwell discussed Big Brother in 1984. Recently, however, the adaptation of these dystopian young adult series into movies has become massively trendy in Hollywood (see: Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner, etc). While I enjoy many of these books, we have to go ahead and admit right now that these series are all pretty much the same. I know that I have little room to speak as a lover of Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels, which don’t exactly break new ground with each release, and I am not saying that these books/movies are not enjoyable; on the contrary, I often enjoy them despite clearly no longer qualifying as a member of the authors’ target audience.

These series typically contain several mutual elements: a reluctantly heroic protagonist, an occasionally forced love story, an evil and oppressive but functional governing body, and a common plot scheme. Trilogies also seem to be the primary means of telling these stories, with an occasional prequel or collection of related stories mixed in there. Since this will be my seventeenth blog post, I am basically a professional writer at this point and am totally qualified to advise future authors on how to write their own dystopian young adult novel trilogy.

Trust me, I’m a professional.