Well, damn it, the Rio Olympics are really cutting into my blogging time.

I stayed up most of the night Saturday obsessing about writing and then, right as I was ready to stagger off to bed, realized that the women’s marathon was on in just two hours.

So naturally I stayed up for it. How could I not?

And I have to admit that I have a tad bit of a crush on this guy:

Oddly enough, nothing motivates me to write as much as watching running events. I’ve tried listening to podcasts on writing and while I found many informative, none motivated me.

Yet watching runners strain and give everything they have makes me want to scurry over to my computer, plop my ass in my cushy chair and give it everything that I have.

Go figure.

I need to get my behind in gear, too, because I talked with my agent on Friday and I have until Oct. 15 to rewrite my second novel, the one that I thought was dead in New York, languishing on my editor’s desk (oh, how sad and lonely my novel must be in New York! How uncomfortable it must feel among people wearing designer suits and smart haircuts and shoes with sharp, pointed I-have-authority toes. How lonesome it must be for the muddy, open, moose-congested spaces of Alaska!).

So, I’m watching all of the Olympic running events and stoking up as much inspiration and motivation as I can.

I haven’t been writing much this year. Oh, I’m writing most days but it’s mostly poetry or essays or short stories or freelance assignments. I haven’t plunged inside a novel for a long, long time. The enormity scares me. (My analogy: Longer works + more complex characters = a big fat friggin’ mess.)

Instead of writing novels, I’ve been devouring them. And somehow, during those long hours of readings, I’ve picked up tips on how to fix my own book, noticing how this author paces character development, how that one strings along tension.

So when I sat down and reread my second novel Waiting For My Daughter’s Ghost this weekend, I found myself reading it as a reader, not as the author.

And the flaws jumped out. The inconsistencies waved from the pages. At times, I felt ashamed. I wrote this? I thought.

It was a humbling experience. Yet a helpful one, too. For I have the first chapter outlined and am now grappling with whether to keep it in first-person or change it to third. Both offer their own strange mix of strengthens and weaknesses and really, there is no one answer. Just more and more questions.

Which where I shall leave this post, with the idea of questions. I’ve made myself hungry talking about running and writing and am off to whip up a batch of these sweet potato brownies, aren’t they too decadent and glorious? I found the recipe on Running on Veggies blog, which I recommend for anyone looking for healthy recipes that taste too good to be healthy.