New Year, New Challenge, New York
Starting a writing project is always the most challenging and least fun part of writing. At least for me. You’ve got to hook your audience in your intro, establish your premise, and then transition into meat of the work without losing any steam. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for the lead, and one that I am always self-conscious of as a writer.
To that end, here goes: this piece is the first in what will be 50 pieces that comprise a personal writing project for 2021. Similar to my goal of running 1,000 miles in 2020 (I crossed that mile marker on the final Sunday of the year), I feel it’s best to make these types of goals public. For accountability, sure, but it affords a certain amount of bragging rights at year’s end when you can proudly announce “I did it!” to anyone willing to listen. Humans are social creatures, and we’d be lying to ourselves if we didn’t hoard pats on the back and long for the approval as others, even as we acknowledge how unhealthy that can be. The perils of being an extrovert, I guess.
And like my goal of running 1,000 miles, this will be an exercise in endurance. I haven’t written with any sort of consistency since the middle of the last decade when I wrote about baseball for NBC Philadelphia, so cranking out a weekly essay will not necessarily be an easy feat. Writer’s block is a real thing, and some days I’m sure I won’t feel like sitting down and knocking out 750 words on about Arkansas.
As for the project itself, it combines two things that I enjoy: woodworking and writing. As mentioned, I’ve got a background in writing that consists of a bunch of started (but not completed) screenplays, a several-year run as a paid baseball blogger, and a stint as an editor for my college newspaper. I’ve had a fondness for writing since an early age, but I didn’t discover my passion for woodworking until more recently, which came about because I wanted to grow my own vegetables. How does one lead to another? Well, life is unpredictable and usually leads us to a destination we didn’t intend. I’ll share that story at a later time, since I’m 400 words into this and haven’t really started.
The project is this: once a week, I am going cut a state out of wood, and then write about that state. Sort of like shop class meets geography. The goal here is to improve my woodworking technique (making a state out of a block of wood requires a great deal of bandsaw work, which can be a tedious and precise process), as well as re-ignite my passion for writing. I figure exercising both those muscles for a few hours a week is a good way to spend my time in 2021. And I might even entertain a few people, so there’s that.
First up: New York! Concrete jungle where dreams are made of, so says Alicia Keys.
By random ordering, The Empire State is first up in this yearlong homework assignment I have given myself, which I reckon is fitting, because it’s the state I’ve probably visited the most outside of my home state of Pennsylvania.
What I know about New York you can fit into a small shopping bag, but I know it’s one of the original 13 colonies, the capital is Albany, and to most people, “New York” means “New York City,” at least colloquially. That’s always been a point of contention with me. “Upstate” New York, which is 99% of the 54,555 square miles of the state, gets saddled with that moniker, whereas The City — all 468 square miles of it — is known as “New York.” That’s like referring to “Castaway” as “that Helen Hunt movie about the plane crash.”
Now to be fair, NYC houses nearly half of all the state’s residents, is the most populous state in the US, is a global commerce hub, is home to countless “Law and Order” spinoffs and has both Broadway *and* the Times Square Bubba Gump’s Shrimp Company. That kind of cultural range is nothing short of amazing, because where else can you spend $600 for tickets to a show and then $14 on a bottle of beer that you drink while watching a guy in an Elmo suit get into a fist fight with another guy in an Elmo suit? Ah, culture.
Fun fact: The origin of New York’s nickname “The Empire State” is unknown, but two theories credit George Washington for coining the phrase. That’s more than a little unsatisfying, so I’ll just pretend that Washington glanced at a map of the region and said something like “This is New York? This entire state?” and then some assistant misheard him and BAM, we’ve got a nickname for the ages.
As for the woodworking, I cut this out of a piece of walnut. New York was a challenging piece, due to a fairly irregular shape (like most states) and several nooks and crannies to account for. I did cheat a little to avoid having to get too detailed (especially around Long Island) so I don’t cut it too thin in spots. That said, I’m happy with how this piece came out. And I’ve still got all my fingers.
Only 49 more to go.
