This was the year that Jackie and I finally managed our long-planned  day-hike of the Kal-Haven Trail: 33.4 miles from Kalamazoo to South Haven. It took three years to make the fitness piece and the schedule piece come together close enough to the summer solstice that we could complete the hike in daylight.

That project dominated my movement practice for the year, especially because I was being so careful not to injure myself, out of fear that an otherwise-minor stubbed toe or turned ankle or bruised heel might make the hike impossible, meaning a delay of yet another year.

Another thing that happened is that my taiji teacher asked me to take over teaching his classes. I was already teaching some last year, and since September, I’ve been teaching all of them.

Now at the end of the year, I’ve had another little project: trying to get in 90 minutes of movement every day in December. That started off great: in the first three weeks I only missed 2 days. It rather tapered off in the week of Christmas itself (missed 5 days), but I got back with it this last week to finish the year strong.

I haven’t previously written annual review posts of my movement practice, and it would be pointless to try to create them retroactively. But I did want to trace the key turning points that brought me here. If you’d asked me 8 years ago if I’d be a taiji instructor I’d have dismissed the notion out of hand, and when I’ve tried in the past to remember how I got here, I had trouble remembering. However, I have written plenty of posts on those topics. I’ve used those posts to try to reconstruct my journey from trying to get fit through exercise to simply trying to get plenty of diverse movement.

I’m a bit unsure where to start. I always tried to “get enough exercise,” even before I started thinking through what “enough” would be (and long before I came to think that “exercise” wasn’t the best way to think about it). A few datapoints:

  • I have a running log from 1991, a year in which I lost a good bit of weight and ran enough to be able to complete a 5.5-mile trail race. I hurt my Achilles tendon, and by the time it healed (many months later) I was completely out of shape.
  • I have notes in my Clarion Journal about running in the summer of 2001, and I ran enough in 2003 that some of that fitness carried forward—in 2004 I came into the spring with enough fitness that I was able to complete a 7.1-mile trail race in June.
  • In that same period, I was bicycling a lot—it was something I could do with Jackie, who doesn’t care to run. I found that bicycling to work let me replace my 20-minute commute with a 25-minute bike ride, meaning that I got 50 minutes of aerobic exercise with just an extra 10 minutes per day. Bicycling home was also a great way to decompress at the end of a day at work. In the summer of 2005, Jackie and I spent a couple of months training for, and then rode together, a century ride.

At each of those peaks, I averaged about 100 minutes of exercise per day, which was what I could fit into a week when I had a regular job. (During most of that period, I didn’t tend to count walking as exercise unless I went out for a long hike on trails, an error that I gradually corrected over the next few years.)

I have a rather sad post from April of 2008 in which I lament my failure to take advantage of the extra time I should have had, once I quit working a regular job, because I was spending so much time writing. (I was writing about 5 posts a week for Wise Bread in that period, and also working on a novel.) I resolved to “make exercise–that is, fitness–my number 1 priority.”

In drafting this post, I wrote a long history of my movement practice as documented in my blog here, but I can’t imagine it’s of any interest to anyone but me, so I stuck it off in a text file. Instead, here are the key turning points:

And that brings us up to 2015.

In March I had a practice session with the parkour club at the University. I intended to go back (and still mean to), but haven’t made it yet. This was also around when I first heard about MovNat and natural movement as a thing.

In May I wrote the post that I guess I’ve been groping towards here: Human movement capabilities, talking about my journey from “getting enough exercise” to moving like a wild human.

I expect next year will be a lot like this year. We won’t have a 33.5 mile hike, but I’m sure we’ll have several in the 15–20 mile range. I’ll run. We’ll probably get our bikes out again. I’d like to get back to train with the parkour club again.

Over the winter, I’m planning to work on a few basics.

For the lower body, I want to get to the point where I can comfortably squat—where I can hang out in a squat and do stuff. I want to develop some extra toe flexibility, so I can do the quadrupedal movement thing barefoot.

For the upper body, besides the quadrupedal movement (which turns out to be a really excellent whole-body exercise, as well as being useful), I want to do more hanging. I have no idea how long it will take to get from hanging to pullups, but I’m planning to get it done.

It was interesting to see that my exercise regimen from 2012—the one that prompted me to declare victory—is not actually too different from what I do now. I do five hours of taiji each week, rather than just three. I try to walk 90 minutes every day, rather than 60 minutes just four days a week. I’ve shifted to body-weight exercises instead of weights or machines. (I’ve also gotten a bit lazy about the weights. This winter I’ll step that up.)

For various reasons, my fiction output has been small.

I didn’t finish the novel, which a year ago I thought was nearly done. What happened was that, as my rewrite approached the end, I realized that the end I had was totally wrong for a novel.

The ending in the zeroth draft was full of implications, which can work great in a short story—the reader ends up knowing that things are going to go a certain way, without the story actually walking them through all the scenes to get there.

A novel is different. Those scenes should be there. As as I started to write them, I realized that things would not go as I’d implied they would. So I would have to figure out the new ending, and write it, and then go back and change a whole bunch of stuff that had set up for the ending I’d previously implied so that it instead would set up for the ending I ended up with.

I haven’t given up on any of that stuff, but I haven’t done it yet either.

I’ve played around with several short stories, but only finished one. It got some pretty good comments from the Incognitos, but I didn’t come away with a good plan for finishing it and submitting it to editors.

I should finish it and submit it. It’s clear in my own mind that no simple rewrite would make it a much better story, so I should just fix the few minor things that readers spotted and get it out to markets—they’ll either buy it or they won’t. But I haven’t yet.

I’ve written quite a bit here on my blog. Since the posts are all right here, I won’t bother linking to them, except to say that my story structure article continues to get the most visits by more than an order of magnitude, and that my post Katy Bowman: The Michael Pollan of movement was by far the most visited this year (because Katy shared it on her Facebook page).

I published three articles at Wise Bread:

Only one of  these articles is a flat-out listicle (which almost everything that Wise Bread publishes these days is), so I consider that a win.

I pitched several other pieces that I think would have made great Wise Bread posts. A couple got turned down by the editors, and a couple got send back with the suggestion that I somehow turn it into a listicle, and I declined to write the article along those lines.

It’s my smallest output at Wise Bread since I started writing for them, but that’s okay. I’ve said most of what I have to say on frugality and personal finance.

My income from writing for Wise Bread is down a lot, but has—much to my surprise—been replaced to a considerable extent with money for teaching taiji.

Taiji (and movement in general) have become more important these past few years, to the point that this year I almost changed the title of my annual review post to “Writing and movement in 2015.” Instead, though, I think I should write a “Movement in 2015” post, which might become an annual tradition of its own.

I haven’t published any fiction this year, but I did finish the zeroth draft of a novel.

I hesitated to claim this milestone, holding out for a proper first draft that I can share with a few select first-readers. But the end of the year has arrived and my novel remains (as it has been for several months now) this close to being a first draft. Still—a zeroth draft is something.

We moved. Granting that moving is not writing, and acknowledging that this post is where I review my writing in 2014, I’m still going to mention the fact, because moving takes so much time and effort. And we didn’t just move once. We moved three times: To our summer place, then to our winter palace, and finally to Winfield Village. Because of that, I totally gave myself a pass on productivity for the summer and fall.

However, I officially revoked that pass as of the solstice. I really, really want to get the novel out for people to read, and the only way to do that is to work on it every day. To that end, I’m back to working on it daily—and did in fact work on it every day for the last 10, except that I gave myself Christmas Day off (hat-tip to ol’ Ebenezer).

I’m actually quite confident that I’ll get the novel done (that is, in a proper first-draft state) in fairly short order. Confident enough that I’ve started to do trivial stuff, such as tweaking the formatting. (I’m assuming that most of my first-readers will want an ebook, rather than paper, so I’m fiddling with Scrivener’s ebook generation parameters. When I finish, I want to be able to generate a book right away, and not have to spend three days on ebook configuration to get what I want.)

I did a few other small bits of fiction writing. In particular, I wrote a very short story in Esperanto and submitted it to the UEA Belarta Konkurso. It didn’t win a prize, so I should follow up by submitting it to some Esperanto literary magazine, but I haven’t done that yet.

I wrote a lot less for Wise Bread than I have in past years, but they did publish 6 of my articles:

Very late in the year, that last article got featured on Business Insider as The Simplest Way to Live Simply and Cheaply.

I’m kind of disappointed with my writing in 2013. I wrote less this year than any year since I quit working a regular job.

I don’t have any new fictions sales. Worse, I don’t even have any stories out, which is just dumb, because I’ve got some new stories that have not yet made the rounds.

I was less productive at my non-fiction writing as well, only writing 15 articles for Wise Bread. (Actually, I’ve written two more that have been turned in to Wise Bread, and that I assume will be published in due course.)

There are bright spots. I’ve got a novel-in-progess that continues to appeal. (Unlike previous novel attempts that fell apart after ten or twenty thousand words.) In the first half of the year, I completed two short stories (plus one in Esperanto). As the year drew to a close, I was back at work on my novel, writing every morning. It feels good. (I’ve started a new post about my new writing schedule, that I’ll post once I have a bit more experience with how it’s going.)

Here’s the list of Wise Bread posts for this year. I’m pretty pleased with all of these, even though there aren’t as many as I’d like. (Can you spot where the Wise Bread editors started rewriting all my headlines?)

 

I didn’t sell any new stories in 2012, but I did have two reprint sales:

I’m a bit dissatisfied with my productivity of new fiction—I scarcely finished a story all year, although I worked on several, as well as on a novel. I will apply myself to both with renewed vigor in this new year. (The novel, in particular, although forward progress stalled out some months ago, is still attractive. That’s different from previous novel efforts, where I discovered structural problems that made them seem too flawed to be worth continuing.)

One member of the Incognitos moved away this year. That, together with the fact that none of us was quite as productive as in years past, has meant fewer meetings, especially in the second half of 2012. However, we’ve recently been in touch to work out plans for including the absent member via Skype, so we’re all set once we start getting stories finished again.

On the non-fiction front I did about as well as last year.

I had a guest post at Asta Lander’s Simply Living blog called Choosing Freedom, about the tradeoff of freedom for a high standard of living.

I was interviewed about my thoughts on personal finance and frugal living for both a podcast and a radio program, specifically:

One of my old Wise Bread posts was featured on the Soldierette blog.

I wrote 27 articles for Wise Bread. I’ve bolded a few where I thought I managed to say just what I was trying to say:

I sold one new story in 2011: “Watch Bees” to Asimov’s Science Fiction. It appeared in the August 2011 issue.

“Watch Bees” also gave me my first reprint sale, first foreign sale, and first sale in translation: it should appear in the Russian sf magazine ESLI early in this new year.

A story I sold in 2010 was published in 2011: “Like a Hawk in its Gyre” appeared in the February 2011 issue of Redstone Science Fiction. (They also published an interview with me in the same issue.)

As far as writing new fiction goes, I had mixed results. I finished several first drafts and got them critiqued by the Incognitos, but late in the year I had an unproductive spell, and only one of those critiqued drafts has been transformed into a submission draft that I’m satisfied with. (I have a query out to an editor who had expressed an interest in that story. If he doesn’t want it, I’ll send it off to the regular magazine markets.)

The new year should be more productive, with several stories a short step from being submission-ready, and several new projects waiting to be begun.

I wrote “Four Steps to Managing Personal Debt” for American Public Media Marketplace‘s Makin’ Money blog.

I also wrote 29 articles for Wise Bread. I’ve bolded a few where I thought I managed to say just what I was trying to say:

I sold one story in 2010 (“Like a Hawk in its Gyre” to Redstone), which I’m expecting to appear in early 2011. I’ll post here when it comes out.

The other big fiction-related news is that I got together with some local friends to start the Incognito Writers Group. We’ve been meeting monthly since July, and having a great time.

I sold a group of articles to Amex Currency, a new personal finance website:

I resold my article Bankruptcy is a Good Thing to Gale Publishing, to use in their book Bankruptcy (Introducing Issues With Opposing Viewpoints).

I wrote two guest posts at other blogs:

I wrote 42 articles for Wise Bread. I’ve bolded a few where I thought I managed to say just what I was trying to say:

 

I published one short story in 2009:

My story submission database isn’t really set up to answer the question of how many new stories I wrote this year, but I see three whose first submission to an editor was in 2009.  Hopefully some of those will appear in 2010.

Two articles of mine appeared as guest posts at personal financial blogs:

I wrote 71 posts for Wise Bread.  I’ve bolded a few where I thought I managed to say just what I was trying to say, and commend them to your attention:

One of my Wise Bread posts (Understand Capital Costs) was featured in in US Airways Magazine (October 2009, page 22).