My Body & My Book

100 Days of Fall: 9/11-12/19

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve been circling this post for most of the day.

Since I finished the draft of my novel last Monday, I’ve given myself a week to tend to all the to-do items—big and small—that I’d neglected so I could push the novel over the finish line.

I got my inbox back down near zero.

I saw my doctor.

I did some thinking.

And—after admitting in last week’s post that I hadn’t gone swimming once this summer—I got myself to the pool for a very brief swim. While it was lovely to be in the water again, there’s really nothing quite so humbling as a months-long hiatus from a strenuous cardiovascular activity.

Unless perhaps it’s realizing that the camera you’d set up to keep an eye on the puppy when you’re not in the room has been capturing video clips of you from some decidedly unflattering angles—why it never occurred to me that a camera trained on Shiloh would suddenly be trained on my ass every time I bent down to pet her, I’ll never know, and yet here we are. And there, let me tell you, was my ass.

The thing about turning to food when life gets hard is it’s easy for everyone to pretend it’s not happening. If I were drinking the way I’ve been eating, there’d have likely been an intervention, but no so for food. Instead, there’s me eating my way through a pandemic bookended by the death of two parents.

I suppose there were signs that this was happening—the bad license photo, the creak in my knees, the way I started getting winded walking up a hill that used to be no sweat. But it was easy to ignore a creaky and winded body that seemed to match my creaky and winded heart, particularly when I don’t look at myself in the mirror much. I don’t wear make up and my wavy hair gets a little gel before it gets air dried and largely forgotten about.

But what does any of this have to do with writing?

Nothing and everything, of course.

Writing feels like alchemy between creativity and the imagination, but writing really happens in the brain, the brain is fueled by the body, and—though your mileage may vary—I find I write best when I’m feeling my best.

And I’m not feeling my best just now.

So in this week between finishing my latest draft and starting a revision, I’ve been thinking about how much better the writing might go if I felt just a bit better physically.

One of the things I was thinking about this week was what health means to me, and I brainstormed about the habits I was practicing at moments in my life when I felt the healthiest.

I was meditating.

I was exercising.

I was doing yoga and targeted stretching.

I was practicing gratitude.

And I was eating far more mindfully.

So for my next hundred days, my novel is once again at the top of my priority list—my revision I should say!—but it’s sharing that pedestal with a renewed focus on healthy habits.

As a way to meditate on which habits I want to track, I created a tracker for the fall (below). Each letter represents a different habit, and each of the blocks that make up the letters represents one of the 100 days of fall.¹

I have some other goals this fall that I won’t get into—that’s what the exclamation marks are for!!—but my goals around my body and my book are the two that feel most urgent to share.

And speaking of sharing, I’m going to try a bit of an experiment with the fall version of this 100 day push. Given that such a small (but lovely!) percentage of HIBOU readers were actively invested in sharing, I’m going to relegate The Weekly R.A.P. to a note at the end of my weekly newsletter that includes a link to a chat thread to keep the chatter about goals outside the main feed.

Not sure if it will work, but I won’t know unless I try it.

So how about you?

What goal (or goals) is (or are) top of mind as the summer gives way to fall?²

1. Yes, it did take quite some time to figure out how to distribute the 100 squares in the “A” but the time I spent making it was time I spent meditating on why these habits are important to me, so it was time well spent, I say.

2. In my heart fall starts the minute Labor Day ends. You can cite all the astronomical reasons fall actually starts on the 23rd, but I’ll ignore you.