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Hiking Challenge Complete!

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I haven’t posted since March because I’ve been too busy wandering in the woods.

No, seriously. Hubby and I completed our first hiking challenge on Sunday, the goal of which was to complete 20 total hikes in four local regions. It was a fun, often sweaty, and sometimes exhausting journey that introduced us to amazing parks and delicious local cuisine. It’s crazy to think we’ve lived in Western New York for most of our lives and never been to some of these places! I am deeply grateful to Mike, the challenge creator and founder of Outside Chronicles, for creating such a fun way to explore the outdoors!

I’ve always loved hiking. During quarantine, with no soccer or scouts to occupy our weekends, we took to the woods. I’d search around on google maps, find a large green section, and announce that we were going on a mandatory family fun adventure. Then I heard about the Western New York Hiking Challenge, where someone else identified the cool parks and we just had to show up and walk around. For a small fee we would have access to maps, fun facts, and a community of hikers. Also: if we completed the challenge, we’d earn a patch and a sticker.

A win-win-win in my book.

The summer challenge runs from March-November, and hubs and I were so excited that we started a week early. To prove you hiked the trail, a selfie is required at the challenge landmark. We had to redo our first hike later on because we took our selfie in the wrong place (plus technically it was cheating to start a week early). Thankfully, that park was close by. Some of the places were a 45+ minute drive, and our final hike took an hour and a half to get to. So for several hikes, we made a day of it by trying a new restaurant and exploring the nearby town. The planning and preparation for our hiking trips gave me something to look forward to and helped pull me out of the pandemic blues. And it was cool when people told me they’d joined the challenge because of my social media posts, or youngest talked about it with strangers on the trail, encouraging them to participate. We even met up with a small group for a hike and fundraising event at a local brewpub.

Our favorite hike happened early on during our spring break staycation in Ellicottville. We started at Camp Seneca and hiked the North Country Trail to Little Rock City. The elevation took us up past the snow line, then down across several tiny streams before reaching the giant rocks. The boys had a blast exploring the CREVASES! as they called them, and we returned later in the year to just climb around on the rocks. Hubs was excited to finally hike to the end of the Whirlpool trail along the Niagara River Gorge, where we discovered an old train depot. In effort to avoid crowds, we planned a few hikes during the week and had a lovely time in Chestnut Ridge and Zoar Valley.

Here is the complete list of our hikes:
Knox Farm State Park
Eighteen Mile Creek County Park
Little Rock City State Forest
Bond Lake County Park – I did this one without hubby
Reinstein Woods Nature Preserve
Genesee County Park and Forest
Royalton Ravine County Park
Lockport Nature Trails
Whirlpool State Park
Devil’s Hole State Park
Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge
Chestnut Ridge County Park
Golden Hill State Park
Zoar Valley MUA – Valentine Flats
Zoar Valley MUA – Holcomb Pond
Ohiopyle State Park (not part of the challenge; a beautiful park in PA where we hiked on our trip back from dropping our son at camp)
Emery Park (our least favorite – confusing trails, too close to the road, lots of disc golf – but we saw several deer along the way)
College Lodge Forest
Buckhorn – extra hike in a group we’d already finished
Tifft Nature Preserve
Kenneglenn Scenic and Nature Preserve (not part of the challenge, but done with fellow challenge hikers and Mike the founder – a great place for creek hiking!)
Second visit to Little Rock City
Boyce Hill State Forest
Sprague Brook County Park
Letchworth State Park – Finger Lakes Trail

Now that we’ve completed the required trails, we’ll probably hit a few closer ones again to see the changing leaves. The winter challenge starts in December and while I’m not as big a fan of cold weather hiking, I plan to give it a try.

Mama needs to earn her sticker.

I served as official navigator, picture-taker, and caboose during the hikes
the boys pretending to get smooshed at Little Rock City
Me and hubs in our matching WNY Hiking Challenge T-shirts pose for the Whirlpool selfie

Approaching the lockdown anniversary

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March 3, 2020 was a big day for the van clan. Youngest got his braces off, and he celebrated with a bag of microwave popcorn. Plans were in the works for an epic Blue and Gold dinner to commemorate his Webelo Den earning their Arrow of Light awards, and he looked forward to his first year of Boy Scout camp. (Hubs and I were excited to spend that week celebrating our 20th anniversary.) Oldest had earned Life Scout and was elected to serve as Troop Guide, which meant he would help navigate the new class of scouts. He planned to finish his last remaining Eagle required merit badges during summer camp and had begun to toss around ideas for his Eagle project. That night, his artwork was featured in the annual district art show and had been nominated for one of the top pieces. Winners would be honored in a special ceremony. He smiled with pride as he showed us his artwork, a smile I haven’t seen much of in the past 12 months. We’d finally agreed to get him a cell phone, so he would have a way to check in with us during his class trip to Washington DC. We joked about whether or not his chorus teacher would let them sing Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody at the eighth grade chorus concert.

Oldest smiles in front of his winning art piece

You know where this is going. None of that happened. The Blue and Gold dinner – canceled. Washington DC trip – canceled. Eighth grade chorus concert and graduation – canceled. Summer camp – canceled. Anniversary trip – canceled. His artwork was chosen as one of the top pieces, but instead of a reception, we received a letter in the mail. Oldest had already coined a phrase to reflect his newfound apathy: I don’t care. And why should he care? Everything he’d looked forward to was taken away. He slogged through the remaining Eagle merit badges after hours and hours of nagging, and says he has no plans to complete his project. He started freshman year in his pajamas behind a computer screen, where he now spends most of his day.

This past year, there have been a mountain of disappointments and a river of tears (mostly mine). Sorry for the clichés, but this year has sapped a large chunk of my creativity energy. Sure, we’ve been blessed – friends and family have fallen ill, but no one we know has died. (That doesn’t stop me from worrying 24/7.) My husband and I still have our jobs, although I have never felt more stressed. Enrollment declined significantly, budgets were slashed, and the constant back and forth of working from home and going into the office has been an ongoing challenge. Working parents, and working moms especially, have faced nearly impossible tasks this past year. My kids have been learning from home since mid-March, and we are all burnt out, we are all desperate for a return to normalcy. Whatever that even means anymore.

When I think about the events from last March, it is hard to imagine I would be sitting here a year later, still wondering when I would be able to hang out with my friends in a coffee shop, watch my kid sing on stage, celebrate work birthdays in person, see students walk across the quad. Hug my parents without worrying about making them sick. Instead of doing those things, I’m planning for our one year work-from-home-iversary. Trying to keep my teenager from sinking. Pushing forward day after day toward an uncertain future.

It’s exhausting. And I’m tired.

I thought about ending my blog post there, but I can’t. Because, to paraphrase President Snow, the only thing stronger than fear is hope. The past 12 months have been full of fear, disappointment, heartache. I want more than anything for the next 12 months to be full of hope, resiliency, love. We can’t change the world. We can’t singlehandedly fight illness, alleviate depression, create peace. But we can change ourselves. For me, that meant a recommitment to the things I love: reading (something I had trouble doing in the early months of the pandemic), making time to write, practicing yoga daily, dancing. Checking in with friends and family. It hasn’t been easy. Most mornings I argue with myself about getting out of bed and getting on the mat. It’s so much easier to cry, complain, doom-scroll – but all those things leave me empty. It occurred to me a while back, as I sat staring at the blinking cursor of an empty word document, that when we lost everything to lockdown, we lost our joy, we lost our sense of purpose, we lost our muse. Our wells were quickly tapped dry and there was nothing to fill them up. I kept reaching into mine and coming up empty, and based on the high number of social media posts referring to the “pandemic wall” I know I wasn’t alone.

So what do we do? My advice? Start small. Look for joy in unexpected places and hold onto it. Like I tell my boys with some regularity, lower your expectations. Celebrate tiny victories. Make space for grief, but don’t let it swallow you. Remind yourself what it means to be human. I get the feeling we’ll be spending the next several days looking backward, at how this year has changed us. And it has. But we should also look forward. What will you do when the world reopens? What will you never take for granted again? Who will you hold tighter than ever before?

Stay well, my friends. ❤

We’re all in this together (alone)

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Despite my propensity to dance, sing off-key, or challenge strangers to pushup contests in public, I truly am an introvert at heart. I know this because if given the choice between going to a party or snuggling up with a book/cat/cup of tea, I choose the latter. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy hanging out with friends and having fun, but at the end of the night I need to be alone and recharge. Raised in a loud, outgoing, Italian-American family, I often hid in my room during parties, scribbling in my journal, feeling simultaneously content and depressed for missing out on the festivities. Therein lies the conundrum. I like to be alone, but I’m also desperate to feel included. Ah, the dilemma of a socially awkward, attention seeking introvert.

The pandemic has been a blessing and a curse. Okay, mostly a curse. The up side is extra time spent with my family, being able to do my job with a cat on my lap (when we return to the office I may have to bring him with me), and considerably more free time now that everything has been canceled. The down side is, of course, that everything has been canceled. No more activities for the boys means they never leave the house, and now that our area is seeing a rise in cases, hybrid school became remote school once again. Coupled with the colder weather means they truly never leave the house. Ever. Or change out of pajama pants.

I worry, pretty much on a constant basis, that the next few months will make or break us. We survived the initial shock of the pandemic, the phase I like to call, “Fear overload.” I watched daily news briefings, tracked cases and deaths on a spreadsheet, and sanitized everything. I cried in the parking lot of our local grocery store after watching a teenage clerk in full PPE look completely shell-shocked as he wiped down the checkout lane. I worried about getting sick, about my family getting sick, about losing our jobs, about the people who had gotten sick/lost their jobs/lost their family members. It was a downward spiral that landed me face down in my pillow nearly every day.

When things began to improve, both the weather and our numbers, my worry subsided. We took advantage of a soccer-free summer and enjoyed extra time at the lake. I finally started reading again, something I hadn’t been able to do since the pandemic started. But I missed my friends, my co-workers, eating inside restaurants. And in the back of my mind, I knew things would get bad when the weather changed.

It has. Our county is breaking records in daily cases and the hospitals have filled up yet again. My nurse friend assures me that it is better this time around because they know what they are dealing with, but the media and government push out fear like candy. We’re back on lockdown again, not completely, but on the cusp, and with the long, dark, cold winter months still ahead of us. Before? I didn’t know a single person with the virus. Now? Every week someone else in our circle tests positive. Thankfully, they are all surviving, but it feels like the walls of inevitability are closing in, and I’m worried I won’t be able to keep my family safe anymore. Or sane.

How do we stay positive when everything is constantly so bleak? I don’t have the answer. I’m taking each day as it comes, and looking for ways to find joy. I’ve started volunteering at a local cat shelter because it gets me out of the house once a week. (Also, cats!) I try to walk outside when the weather isn’t terrible, but that’s getting more difficult with each dropped degree. I joined our local online Buy Nothing group, a movement that encourages the free exchange of goods among neighbors. It’s helped me declutter a bit and also provides the opportunity for safe social interactions. Last weekend I watched a movie simultaneously with two friends and we chatted along the way via text. It was a tiny shred of normal, and it gave me hope.

The isolation has changed us, or at least it has changed me. I will never take my local coffee shop for granted, ever. Or the library. Or any of the front line workers who face this beast every day. I make a conscious effort to be kind to any human I interact with, because we are all carrying worry and heartache, some far beyond what I can even imagine. What we need now isn’t government control, or mudslinging commentary. We need compassion. Empathy. Patience. We need to unite for the good of humanity. We need to get through this together (alone).

Peace to all my friends, family, followers. Stay safe, and be kind. ❤

Behind the scenes of my second verse novel

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Book journeys are all unique. From plot bunny to manuscript, from query letter to author copies – every book has its own story. So what’s the story behind Listen Up, my verse novel newly released from West 44 Books?

In early 2018, while I anxiously awaited the launch of my debut novel, Second in Command, my editor called for the next round of pitches. A pitch is one sentence that describes the general plot of a book, but in this case, she was looking for a query and first 500 words. Fiction queries, letters of about 250 words designed to give an agent and editor an idea of the who, what, when, where, why of your book, are typically written when a book is complete. Writers often complain about them, but I’m actually one of those weird types who enjoy writing query letters. Maybe it’s all those writing conference sessions, or the satisfaction of being able to sum up the major players and conflict of a book in 250 words or less. Maybe it’s because I once got to hang out and pick the brain of literary agent and query guru Janet Reid, better known as the Query Shark, and she gave my query her stamp of approval. (It may have helped that my friend Dee introduced Janet to sponge candy the day we met.)

Whatever the reason, I wrote a query, sent it to Dee, who helped me clean it up, and wrote my 500 words. Hit submit.

Wait, back up. Where did the idea come from? you ask. My intent at the time was to do a modern retelling of Pump up the Volume, an awesome 90’s movie staring my teen heartthrob, Christian Slater. If you’ve never seen the film, you should watch it because, well, because Christian Slater. With no shirt on. Also it’s a pretty good movie. It’s about a super-shy kid who moves to a new town and uses the radio his parents got him, intended to keep in touch with his old friends, to start an underground radio station. He starts out using it to push boundaries but ends up tackling serious issues and uncovering a plot to remove “bad” students from the school. I knew I couldn’t take on something so huge in 10k words (and wanted my book to be inspired by, not a copy of the movie), so I kept the key elements: shy character, wants to speak out but struggles in real life so finds a way to do it anonymously. In the movie, it’s radio. In my book, he starts a video channel.

So I pitched the book idea in January 2018. Pitched another idea shortly after, about two friends who try to solve the mystery of a missing girl in their neighborhood. Neither were approved. But they weren’t outright rejected either. I started working on the second idea, wrote a few poems, read them to some of my writer friends, who promptly told me they were terrible. Which they were. So I worked on other projects. I wrote several short stories for another imprint, blogged a bit, and changed tenses and major plot lines in my YA historical fiction novel after an unsuccessful round of queries. Forgot all about Listen Up.

Then in October of 2019 my editor wrote to ask if I’d like to write the book. That she’d been thinking about it since I sent the pitch in nearly two years earlier. Oh, and could I write it in a month?

Queue excitement, followed swiftly by panic. Sure! I could write a book in a month. People do that all the time during NaNoWriMo. I made myself a schedule and spent nearly every soccer practice camped out with my laptop. Thankfully, the characters were very cooperative, telling me who they were and what they wanted. The plot was a bit more elusive, and as I approached the end, I realized there was a major hole that needed to be fixed. With a deadline fast approaching, I locked myself in my writing room one weekend and brainstormed until I figured out how to untwist the mess I had made and give the book a proper ending.

Wanna know a secret? That is not easy when your book consists of nothing but poetry. You have to figure out a way to move or rewrite in chunks while keeping the story flowing and the poems intact. When I finished the first draft, I brought it to my husband and asked him to, “Please tell me if this sucks.” He’s a no BS kinda guy, so I knew he’d be honest. And he was. He told me it didn’t suck and helped me fix the parts that were confusing or unclear. I’m deeply thankful for his insight and for my other three beta readers: Adrienne, Alexis, and Carla, who were able to quickly give me notes before I turned it into my editor. And for the random student I met during an instant admit session who answered my questions about Autobody classes. I think his name was Joe. Thank you.

I’m also deeply indebted to my editor, Caitie. Her notes are always kind and helpful, and my favorite part of the process was when I turned in my first draft and she called me a “writing superhero”. Her faith in me has been a huge confidence boost.

Sadly, the journey from acceptance to release day hasn’t been sunshine and rainbows. The pandemic caused a lot of problems in the publishing industry, especially in educational publishing. I originally wrote and planned to publish this post on October 1, but on that day there were no books available to order. I haven’t gotten my author copies yet, and the library rejected the request to carry it because their supplier didn’t have any copies. But my friends, family, and coworkers have been encouraging – sending me texts, pre-ordering the book, letting me read some of the poems at our weekly meeting. And my mom called to say her friends were all excited to get their copies. I’m thankful for all of that, truly.

There is so much I love about writing – I love creating characters and stories, of letting my mind wander into all the what-if’s. I love the way it feels like therapy sometimes, like it’s this free, easy way to work through the garbage in my head. But I mostly love when someone reads something I’ve written and tells me how it made them feel. When a student admits my book is the first he’s ever finished and another sends me the poem she felt inspired to write.

I went into a few classrooms to talk about Second in Command, and I am hopeful that I’ll be able to do that again someday. In the meantime, if I can get my procrastinator’s butt into gear, I’ll put together some video clips of me reading the book and would love to find ways to interact virtually with my readers. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, here are the links to order a copy if you’re so inclined:
West44 Books
Amazon

And if you read the book, please leave a review. Thank you all, for the support. ❤