Ashley is just back from a walk, just ate a bowl of food and had that bowl refilled, just drank from her water bowl, and had that bowl refreshed, just went out on the patio and returned, and just got a greenie as a treat.
So, I assume this posture means, “All is right with the world and I want for nothing.”
Yesterday was a serious-thinking day on my novel, rather than fingers-on-keyboard day. I got zero words, but I figured out who the antagonist is. (I’d thought I had one already, but I’d realized he wasn’t going to work. I needed someone further away, and someone more. . . not more formidable, because the guy I’d been thinking of is plenty formidable, but more. . . Dangerous.
Anyway, after yesterday’s thinking, I got a good bit of writing done today.
It’s nice to be here, because I think I can see several more days of cranking out prose based on what I’ve just figured out, whereas for a couple of days there I was just creeping along, making little tweaks around the edges, because I didn’t know where it was going to go next. Now I do.
“How’s my pupper? Are you puptastic? I bet you are! There’s no pupper puptasticker than you! You’re the puptastickest!”
My brother suggests that I missed the point in my recent post, where I claimed that being depressed about work is nothing new, and that finding work worth doing was the solution.
I beg to differ.
I was not claiming that things are not way worse. Obviously, the way people are hired, managed, and required to do their tasks are way worse than they used to be. Nor am I claiming that finding “work worth doing” will solve the financial or economic problems—it won’t make it easier to pay the rent or put food on the table.
My claim is that it will help the mental health issues of dealing with late-stage capitalism.
Finding, and doing, work that’s worth doing will make everything else about your life better.
It’s why I was such a strong advocate for frugality and simplicity during those years writing at Wise Bread. Maybe you can find a way to earn more, and maybe you can’t, but anybody can find a way to spend less. And if you spend less, you can focus more on the work that’s worth doing, even if it doesn’t pay as much as the the wretched, soul-destroying work that’s ruining the lives of another generation of workers.
“… for workers under 25, mental health is now so poor that they are generally as unhappy as their unemployed counterparts…”
Source: NYT
This may be more widespread, but it’s not new. For example, see my article at Wise Bread from 15 years ago: https://www.wisebread.com/find-work-worth-doing
One of the flaws of my fiction writing is that my heroes tend to be quiet people, eking out a meager existence during hard times. This is largely due to my perspective on the future, which is that hard times are very likely coming, combined with my own cautious nature, projected onto my heroes.
The problem is that quietly eking out a meager existence in the face of hard times doesn’t really make for an exciting story.
What tends to make for an exciting story is a hero trying to achieve great things.
So, for my novel, I’m trying to lean into this idea. As this is not my natural inclination, I hadn’t really laid the groundwork for this in my first few thousand words, but I have now gone back and layered in a tiny bit of backstory that shows the hero as someone who has tried to achieve great things in the past, and as the sort of person who might do so again in the future.
And I think I did it without violating the rule about minimizing rewriting. During a November novel-writing month you want to move forward as fast as possible, leaving any rewriting for after there’s a first draft. Essentially everything I did was adding new scenes between existing scenes that advanced the action while providing a bit of backstory.
The writing isn’t going very fast. I’ve been averaging a bit under 700 words a day, which is a bit less than half of what I’d need to hit 50,000 by the end of the month. Which is okay, because hitting 50,000 words is a goal, not a moral committment. And I’m thinking things will pick up, once the “striving to achieve great things” mojo starts working.
I walk a lot. Because I have a dog, and want to be sure my dog gets the exercise it needs, I take a truly inordinate number of steps per day. (Wait just a moment while I check my Fitbit…) Last week I averaged 14,036 steps per day. The previous week I averaged 17,197 steps per day. Those weeks are quite typical for me; I don’t average much under 15,000 unless I’m sick or the weather’s really bad.
So, when I saw the news recently that walking “3,000 to 5,000 steps per day can help to stave off mental decline,” I’m like, “Okay? Great.” Taking 5,000 to 7,500 steps per day seems to stave off Alzheimer’s disease by around seven years.
I mean, that’s great. Staving off Alzheimer’s disease by 7 years would probably cut the incidence of the disease by close to half (because people would die of something else first).
But really? I mean, yes, my inordinate walking takes a lot of time that most people don’t have. Back when I was working a regular job I’d try to get “enough exercise,” and that generally topped out at an average of a little over 100 minutes per day—and that much only in the summer, and that high only because I’d average in a 3 or 4 hour bike ride over the weekend. Now I probably spend close to 150 minutes per day just walking the dog. I recognize that almost nobody’s got time for that.
And, yes, walking in particular depends on capabilities that not everyone has. Lots of people old enough to worry about Alzheimer’s have bad knees or bad hips or bad feet or bad hearts or bad lungs. Maybe their endurance is very low. Maybe their balance is poor enough that walking is a risk.
But it doesn’t need to be walking. Walking is just easy to measure with a wearable device. Any sort of exercise will do the trick. Lift weights. (They don’t have to be heavy weights, as long as they’re heavy for you.) Ride a bike. Ride a stationary bike. Row. Use a rowing machine. Play almost any sport. Dance the night away.
Related to this, only in terms of how low the bar is set to do an enormous amount of good, a different study looked at whether walks needed to be long in order to provide the benefits, or whether cobbling together a number of shorter walks to add up to the same number of steps was just as good. It turns out longer walks are better. (Risk of being diagnosed with cardiovascular disease within 9.5 years dropped from 13% to around 4–8%.) But the dividing line in the study was that walks of at least 10–15 minutes counted as “long” walks, versus short walks of less then 5 minutes.
If you can walk 5 minutes, I’ll wager you can work up to walking 15 minutes in a very short period of time. And the evidence is now pretty clear that it’s worth doing.
Get some exercise. The bar is pretty low for making a big difference.
Sundays are the day I still manage to do some HEMA training. I used to go three times a week, but had to cut way back after I hurt my elbow. Now it’s just Sundays, because Sunday is the day my group does a sword-in-one-hand class, which is gentler on my elbow. We usually train dussack or rapier.
My plan for today was to get as much writing done in the morning as I could, then go train sword fighting, and then squeeze in a bit more writing in the late afternoon or evening. But, as often happens, things happened. My brother invited me to attend the kick-off meeting for SFWA’s Winter Worlds of Giving event, so that was most of an hour on zoom. Then my usual cocktail hour with my brother and my mom. Then walking the dog. Then an episode of The Diplomat with Jackie. Then another episode of The Diplomat with Jackie. And now I’m just too tired to get any more writing done.
So, it’s a good thing I got in that morning session, which got me 551 words.
Tomorrow I’ll be back at it.
Invited by my brother (SFWA’s board secretary), I just attended the kick-off meeting for SFWA’s Winter Worlds of Giving.
If you’re a writer, and especially if you’re a SFWA member, check out that link! They’re asking writers to make a public statement of their “creative interests, and the broad strokes of what you’ve got on the go.” Doing so will put you in a group of people who are going to be doing some pretty cool stuff over the next three months.
I got in a very good morning writing session today, starting pretty much right after second dog walk. By late morning I’d topped 1200 words. I took a break then and paused to do some on-line chatting with my brother, some morning exercises, and take the dog out for third walk just before lunch.
I stopped at a point where I’m not quite sure what comes next. This is widely considered a bad move, because it makes it harder to get back to writing. Still, sometimes it happens, and it’s worth having a couple of tricks for getting going again.
Here’s one: skip ahead and write a “candy-bar scene.”
A candy-bar scene, if you don’t know, is a scene that you already know is going to be fun to write. A scene where a character does something wonderful, or something wonderful (or wonderfully awful) happens. A scene where a reversal happens that’s both completely unexpected and inevitable. A scene that makes you reinterpret the whole story up to that point.
Besides being fun to write, hopefully a candy-bar scene is also fun to read.
Arguably, your whole book should be nothing but candy bar scenes. In practice that’s hard to do, but it’s certainly something to keep in mind.
Anyway, I had a candy-bar scene in mind as something I could write when I got back to writing this evening. In fact though, I picked up exactly where I left off, adding a good bit to the scene that had petered out on me in the morning session. (I can probably credit thinking during a dog walk for this.) Then I did go on to write the first bit of the candy-bar scene I’d had in mind. But only little bit of it, leaving a nice ragged edge where I know what happens next, all ready to pick up tomorrow.
It’s a nice feeling.
Another nice feeling is that I hit the target word count. (That is, the 1667 words per day I need to average, if I’m going to hit 50,000 words by the end of November.) I’m not actually very fixed on hitting the word count, but I figured I give it a try, at least for a little while.
For the morning writing session I wore my writing vest—the moleskin vest Jackie made me years and years ago, that I took to Clarion with me, and have made a point of wearing when I wanted to crank out some serious words. It worked great.
I didn’t get a photo, but I’ll try to get one later.
This evening I switched to my wool Filson vest, which I’d worn for warmth when I took the dog out for fourth walk, and I got a sort-of picture of me wearing it, sitting with my dog.
It’s a little hard to see in the photo—the green vest looks almost the same color as my grey mock-T—but this is the same vest that Joe Pickett wears in the C.J. Box stories. It is cozy and durable.
