When I was in high school, I decided that I wanted to learn to draw. Since I’m a person who believes that you can learn just about anything from books, I checked out a copy of Betty Edwards’s book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
During the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I sat down with that book every single day and worked through the exercises. By the end of the summer, I had learned to draw.
The thing about learning to draw is that it’s really about learning how to see. It’s learning about how to flatten the 3D world in your mind so that you can create the illusion of three dimensions on two dimensions.
To me, it felt like an explosive burst of sparkles in my brain, learning how to see in this new way. All of a sudden, I was noticing the tiniest details, shapes, colors. I felt like I was seeing the world for the first time.
Learning how to draw woke up my brain to beauty. It woke up my brain to being present, being slow, and truly noticing the world and the beauty of small things.
Even though I learned to draw, I never identified “artist,” even though making art was incredibly gratifying. I was a writer, not an artist, and drawing was this little thing I did on the side for fun. But I always enjoyed hanging out with artists, and I even married an artist. I met my husband in college, where he was studying sculpture and printmaking. His mother, my mother-in-law, was also an artist. She did clay, crafts, and wonderful botanical art.
When I was in college, I took some classes on art history, and I fell in love with European art and architecture—particularly during the Renaissance, neoclassical, and romantic periods.
When I was lucky enough to study abroad in Prague, I spent the two months before my semester begin backpacking around Europe. In the Louvre in Paris, I remember breaking down into tears at all the wonderful art that I had seen in books.
I loved the aesthetic of the paintings and sculptures in the Musée d’Orsay. My favorite artist of all was Auguste Rodin, because it’s so beautiful how the figures in his sculptures seem to be pulling themselves out of the rock. I fell in love in the Rodin museum. I loved Rodin’s “The Kiss.” It is one of my favorite sculptures. I had drawn “The Kiss” in high school in my art class.
In Italy, I read The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone and I delighted in the art of Michelangelo. He’s my favorite Renaissance artist. “The Pieta” brought me to tears.
I loved the detail and the brightness of colors in the Sistine Chapel. I loved how his sculptures seemed to come alive, and how the colors in his paintings were so vibrant. There’s a lot about his art that seems to elevate the spirit.
Once I got to Prague, I was like, Whoa, this looks just like Paris, but with far fewer tourists! Indeed, some of the same architects designed both cities. I absolutely loved the architecture of the neoclassical and romantic era in cities, particularly in the art nouveau style. As people moved toward cities, they brought with them the beauty of the natural world. Their plazas celebrated nature spirits, like mermaids, gargoyles, and fairies. Their wallpaper had floral designs. The stone and iron work was carved to look like flowers and leaves. Everywhere I turned, there was beauty. I drank it in. I fell in love with Prague. If given the chance, I would absolutely love to live there again.
Once I graduated from college, I rarely drew. There is this weird thing about the arts in America where if it isn’t monetized, it’s not seen as worth doing. I graduated just in time for the Great Recession, and my anxiety over not being able to pay my bills was so huge that it left little space for doing things just for fun.
In any case, my latent drawing ability was forgotten and unused for about 15 years. Until this year.
Earlier this year, when I had finished the manuscript for What We Talk About When We Talk About the Apocalypse, I gave it to my family and editors to read. My mom said, “What if you did some drawings before each of the stories?” My mind lit up with the possibilities.
So in February, I opened up my sketchbook once again, and began drawing illustrations. I thought about each of my stories and tried to come up with an image that would most represent the mood and content. How delightful it was to draw again! These illustrations will be included in the print and ebook versions of my book. Here is a preview.
Illustration for “Angel Man” by E.S.O. MartinIllustration for “The Awakening” by E.S.O. MartinIllustration for “The Inheritance” by E. S. O. MartinIllustration for “Prince of Birds” by E. S. O. MartinIllustration for “The Tell-Tale Cough” by E. S. O. MartinIllustration for “What We Talk About When We Talk About The Apocalypse” by E. S. O. Martin
If you like what you see, you might consider signing up for my newsletter. Newsletter subscribers get access to book deals, essays, music playlists and other awesome content. My illustrated short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About The Apocalypse will be available for purchase by the end of 2023.
I have social media accounts, but I’m pretty much never on them. At most, I log on once or twice a year. The interactions on these sites don’t feel very deep to me. I’d much rather meet my friends face to face, and go on a long walk together so we could truly catch up on each other’s lives. Social media posts are shallow and external, when what really makes me feel connected to people is the deep and internal.
Last year, I decided to wean myself off from doomscrolling the news as much as possible because my mental health was starting to suffer. This year I’ve also been experimenting with going on a news blackout. This interview on Hidden Brain with Steven Pinker, titled “Beyond Doomscrolling” captures the fallacy of the news: in a time when humans are at their most peaceful and cooperative, the news is a glowing, screaming screen, inches away from your face that scours the globe looking for the worst bits possible. News sites purposefully ignore the good in humanity in order to throw you into a state of fear and anxiety, which makes you more reactive and more willing to click on whatever ads are floating next to their doomsday headlines.
A book I read this year with my son was Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter. I know cynics like to make fun of Pollyanna for being naïve or overly cheerful. But I loved that book. I thought, If there was ever a personality from history or literature that I wanted to emulate, it would be Pollyanna. I loved the Glad Game, where you purposefully look for things in your life to feel glad about. It’s a lot like those [gratitude journals] that happiness psychologists recommend to rewire people’s brains for happiness. Pollyanna even goes so far as reframing challenging and uncomfortable things as opportunities for personal growth.
I think that’s why I love reading so much—especially reading fiction. These last two years have been tremendous reading years for me. Last year I read 166 books. To date, I’ve read 140 books this year.
What’s wonderful about reading is that you get to have these wonderful, deep interactions with someone. Fiction stories, in particular, often involve a character struggling through a horrible experience in a compressed period of time. But where fiction differs from life is that these characters are often on the lookout for how they can learn and grow from these terrible experiences. The character on the last page is often wiser than who they were on page one.
I love this. I love being reminded of the human capacity for change, and that sometimes the sweetest fruits can spring from the rockiest soil. This is inspirational to me.
And it’s something I always try to include in my own stories.
These last two years I’ve been mostly focused on short stories because those are an even tighter form of characters forced into a crucible of change. Short stories are more challenging than novels, in some ways, because it’s a lot harder to “stick the landing” on a believable moment of character transformation in 2 pages than in 200 pages.
Whereas an epiphany at the end of a novel often feels like a nice coffee after a long, luxurious three-course meal, an epiphany at the end of a short story usually feels like the floor dropping out from beneath you. Totally different feeling.
For you literary nerds out there, the title is a spin on Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and Nathan Englander’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.” These are relationship stories.
My stories are also relationship stories. Couple relationships, friendships, neighbors, parents and children, and humans and animals. These are stories where a character is forced to re-evaluate what they thought they knew about themselves, their relationships with others, and their place in the universe. That’s what I aspired to do.
My stories often involve characters interacting with our current world, but I also play with genres a bit. I have stories with angels, stories with ghosts, stories with vampires, and stories about how technology is shifting our reality.
I hope to publish this collection by the end of the year. While you wait, you can read “Prove It,” which was published by Club Chicxulub online. You can also hear me read the story. They did a fantastic job setting a soundtrack as background to the stories. I highly recommend you check out my story and the rest of their literary magazine. They did a great job.
A few months ago I was reading on my computer, when suddenly there was a blind spot in the center of my vision. It was about the size of a dime, and all the letters within that circle disappeared. I tried closing one eye, then the other, and moving my eyes around. I could see the letters on either side of this dime-sized blankness, but within the circle, the letters were just gone.
I stopped working, figuring I just needed a good night’s sleep.
But the problem was still there the next morning—albeit slightly better. Now the blind spot was the size of a pea instead of a dime. Should I ignore it and wait for it to get better? Or should I call the doctor?
I looked up my symptoms on WebMD and freaked myself out with a self-diagnosis of a retinal tear, which can lead to permanent blindness if not treated within 24-hours. So I called the advice nurse at the hospital.
“When you look in the mirror and smile, are both sides of your face moving equally?”
“Yeah.” My face? What the heck? It’s my eyes that are the problem, not my face!
“That’s good. Come down to the emergency room so we can figure out what’s going on,” the nurse said. “And make sure you have someone else drive you.”
By the time I got to the emergency room and was seen by a doctor, the problem with my eyes had resolved itself and I could see normally again. Just like a car that stops its weird clinking the moment you pull into the mechanic.
The doctors examined my eyes. Nothing wrong with them. Not a retinal tear, it turned out. They asked lots of questions. They had me do a CT scan. They took about a pint of blood. They consulted with all my other doctors and they came back with this: “We think you might’ve had a transient ischemic attack—a mini-stroke. We’d like you to spend the night so we can monitor you and run more tests. Call your family to let them know.”
By this time, my heart was pounding a billion beats a minute. A STROKE?!?!?!? But I’m only thirty-six! I’m too young to have a stroke! It’s just a little eye problem. But it’s gone now! YOU’VE GOT THE WRONG WOMAN!!! Let me out of here! This has to be some kind of mistake!
For those of you wanting a refresher on stroke symptoms, a good acronym to remember is BE FAST:
Balance—Sudden balance or coordination changes
Eyes—Sudden vision loss or double vision (I guess this was me)
Face—Facial droop or asymmetry
Arms—Sudden arm numbness or weakness
Speech—Difficulty speaking or unable to speak clearly
Time—Make note of the time the symptoms started and call 9-1-1
The difference between mini-strokes (TIAs) and regular strokes is that TIAs involve a temporary blockage of a blood vessel in your brain. They often clear up before any permanent damage occurs. (That was me.) However, TIAs can be a warning sign that a real stroke is just around the corner, so it’s imperative to seek treatment right away.
I called my husband and told him the news. I was going to have spend the night in the hospital.
Again.
And this time, it would be in the middle of a pandemic.
Getting ready for an ambulance ride to get a MRI.
Taking Stock of My Health History
This was not my first time spending the night in the hospital.
In 2019, I was hospitalized for Vasculitis henoch schonlein purpura, also known as IgA vasculitis. If left untreated, vasculitis HSP can cause kidney failure. It’s usually triggered by a respiratory virus that causes your immune system to run amok and start attacking your own blood vessels, like a cascade failure in an over-heated nuclear reactor.
(Sound familiar? This is part of why I have been self-isolating super-hard during this pandemic. The early versions of covid were causing people’s blood to thicken, and their blood vessels exploded like sausages left in the microwave too long.)
While doing all the tests for vasculitis in 2019, my doctors discovered I was also pre-diabetic. And anemic. And Vitamin D deficient. This one-two punch in 2019 absolutely shook my sense of self. Previous to this, I had considered myself to be exceptionally healthy.
The pre-diabetes was especially a surprise. Type 2 diabetes is usually found in people who are overweight and older. I was 34 years old, at the time, and had a BMI of 23, which is considered healthy. I don’t smoke. I don’t drink soda. I rarely drink alcohol. I don’t eat sweets that often. What’s going on?!
“You went from zero to hero,” my rheumatologist said. “Congratulations.”
Thankfully, my vasculitis was treated early enough that I made a full recovery, and I’ve been in remission ever since.
To treat the pre-diabetes, my GP recommended some nutrition classes.
At the first class, a fellow pre-diabetic woman (who was overweight and in her 70s) looked me up and down and said, “What are you doing here?”
“The margin for error is smaller in some people than in others,” I said.
The first class was called “Pre-diabetes and Me,” and it was not very encouraging. Basically, the gist was: Eat this way and you’ll still get diabetes…but maybe you won’t go blind and get your feet amputated as quickly as someone who slams donuts soaked in melted ice cream every day.
The second nutrition class I took was called “Plant-based nutrition.” It was a lot more optimistic: Eat this way and you can reverse diabetes, heart disease, and many other inflammatory diseases.
Heck yeah! Sign me up for the veggie platter!
I did a lot of research and in May 2019, I transitioned to an oil-free, whole-foods vegan diet with the help of Forks Over Knives. My blood sugar dropped to where I was no longer pre-diabetic. (Cured!) My total cholesterol dropped from 180 mg/dL to 117 mg/dL. My inflammation markers were all back to normal. I had plenty of energy. I felt great. (I still take supplements for iron, Vitamin D, and B12—as prescribed by my doctor.)
Fast-forward to 2021 and there I was, hospitalized again, feeling like the rug had been pulled out from under me. What the heck? Where had I gone wrong?
The Diagnosis
My doctors did every test they could think of to figure out what caused my TIA. Pretty much everything was normal. They couldn’t find any blood clots or damage anywhere. My blood pressure was 120/70. My glucose average was 95 mg/dL. My weight was healthy, with a BMI of 22.8.
I went home with a 30-day heart monitor, and after an echocardiogram they finally found the culprit. It turns out I had a congenital heart defect called a patent foramen ovale (PFO), which is a small hole between two chambers of my heart.
Most babies and newborns have this hole. It usually closes by adulthood, but about one in four adults still has a PFO. Usually a PFO doesn’t cause any problems, but sometimes tiny pieces of plaque can get through that hole and cause a TIA or stroke. PFOs are found in about about 55% of young people (people younger than 60) who had a TIA or stroke with no known cause. (Fun fact: PFOs are also often found in people who have problems with low blood oxygen, and in people who have migraines with auras.)
It’s normal to have tiny bits of plaque in your blood, but they usually get broken up as they knock around in your heart and get diverted to your lungs first before they go to your brain and the rest of your body. But because I had this hole in my heart, a tiny piece of plaque must’ve slipped through the hole and gone directly to my brain, causing the TIA and temporary blindness. It’s a good thing my LDL cholesterol was already pretty low (Thank you vegan diet!) because otherwise I might’ve had a real stroke… one where I might’ve been paralyzed, or even killed. According to stroke.org, strokes are the fifth leading cause of death, and a leading cause of disability in the United States. Yikes!
I felt like I’d survived a car accident and walked away with barely a scratch. I’d been lucky this time. But what if there was another Final Destination car (i.e. chunk of blood-plaque) out there with my name on it? Would I be so lucky next time?
There was some discussion with my doctors about whether I’d have to be on statins for the rest of my life, or need heart surgery to close the PFO. A whole panel of doctors met to discuss my case. They concluded that since all my other health markers were good enough, I didn’t need medication or surgery unless I had a second neurological event. They gave me a short list of activities to avoid (scuba diving, hiking in high altitudes, running marathons, and Valsalva-maneuver breathing), but they said I could go back to my normal life.
The only thing they said I should improve to lessen my chance of having another TIA or stroke was to exercise to shift my cholesterol numbers around.
My HDL (good cholesterol) was 46 mg/dL: it should be above 60 mg/dL. This can be raised with exercise.
According to Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn in Reversing Heart Disease, having an LDL below 80 mg/dL is usually considered stroke-proof… But I guess that’s if you don’t have a hole in your heart. Because of the vasculitis, TIA, and PFO, the doctors said they wanted my LDL to be even lower than your average bear. Below 50 mg/dL. Ideally as close to 40 mg/dL as I could get it.
The out-patient doctor put it this way: “Whatever diet you’re on, keep doing what your doing. Your main assignment is to add in the exercise. LDL is like plaque clogging your internal pipes; HDL is like Drain-O. If you increase your HDL, it will lower your LDL.”
What I heard was: Exercise or DIE!
My New Favorite Hobby!
It turns out that having a normal weight and looking cute in a bathing suit isn’t necessarily an indicator of good health. After being hospitalized twice now, and finding out I have a hole in my heart, I basically feel like my body is out to get me. I’ve got ghosts in my blood. I’d better whip them into shape before it’s too late.
Now is the time to embark on my new hobby: a lifelong quest to make myself as stroke-proof, heart disease proof, and diabetes-proof as I can. My family needs me to survive, and I still have things I want to do in this life.
Because I’m a major research-nerd, I thought I’d share some books I’ve read, and the things I’ve learned in the last six months of my fitness journey.
What Are My Goals?
Yes, I have specific weight, body-fat, and cardiovascular fitness goals. These have been informed by various studies and meta-analyses I’ve read about what body composition seems to have the lowest all-cause mortality.
(Answer key: While a BMI between 18.5-24 is considered healthy, the optimal weight for cardiovascular health for women seems to be a narrower range of a BMI between 18.5-21.9—although women who have a lot of muscle mass might weigh more while still having a healthy cardiovascular system. My goal is a BMI between 20.0-20.5because it has the lowest risk for both ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke. My body fat goal is to keep it between 15%-24%, but ideally around 20%. I want my VO2 Max to stay above 40. I’d love to be able to run a 7 or 8-minute mile again. And I’d love to be able to do pull-ups someday.)
But if we zoom out a bit, my primary goal is just to live a good life. I want to stay healthy as long as I can—both for myself and for my family. I am committed to doing whatever activities are required to maintain this corporeal meat-suit as long as I can. I recommend this Dr. John Campbell video on the different components of good health, and Dana Linn Bailey’s Five Things to Know Before You Start Your Fitness Journey.
It helps to have some wonderful role models on how to age well:
Role model #1: When I was in college, I had this boss who got herself a personal trainer for her 50th birthday. “It’s either this or drink a bottle of wine by myself every night until I die,” she said. She started working out on her lunch break and after work.
Sometimes I’d join her on her lunch time routines. She was in way better shape than me! The first 5k race I ever ran was with her, and she left me in the dust!
Within a year, she started training for triathlons. I looked her up on Facebook recently. She is in her 60s and still does bike races. She looks great!
Role model #2: Many years ago, I went to a natural bodybuilding competition to support my friend, Alex. One competitor was a man in his late 70s. This was the fittest old man I’d ever seen in my life. He looked as if he’d been chiseled from granite. His muscles were HUGE and his skin was firm and tight. The only thing that was wrinkled was his face. I didn’t know 70 could look like that! This guy wasn’t old and broken. He looked and moved like was still in his prime. Is this what happens when you strength train?
Role model #3: My grandmother, Irena. She is 81 years old and does yoga and walks almost every day. A few years ago she had hip surgery, which is can sometimes be a death-sentence for women her age. However, because she was so strong, flexible, and resilient before the surgery, she could recover faster and more fully after the surgery.
Here are some other women who made an impression on me:
70-year-old power-lifter Mary Duffy (who started lifting when she was 59)
81-year-old bodybuilder Ernestine Shepherd (who started lifting at age 56)
95-year-old Olga Kotelko (who started her track and field career at age 77)
100-year-old power lifter Edith Murway-Traina of Tampa Bay, who is in the 2022 Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest competitive female power lifter ever (she started at age 91)
101-year-old Tao Porchon-Lynn who was the world’s oldest yoga instructor
Abbye “Pudgy” Stockton who was known as the Queen of Muscle Beach back in the 1930s and 1940s
And this video series absolutely blew my mind, watching women lift more weight than I ever thought possible. It’s the Brute Showdown between Olympic weightlifter Mattie Rogers, CrossFit games athlete Brooke Ence, bodybuilder and Ms. Olympia Dana Linn Bailey, and power lifter Maddy Forberg. I love this video of their max lifts so much I’ve watched it about ten times. If you ever need help moving a refrigerator, these are the women to call!
What kinds of exercise are best?
Okay…back to the land of mortals.
I came across a nice acronym in Margaret Webb’s book Older, Faster, Stronger for the variety of exercises a person should be doing to age well:
(Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor! I’m just a regular Jane Shmoe. Before you change your exercise routine, see your doctors for their advice!)
F. A. C. E. Your Future:
Flexibility—making sure you have the spine, hip-hinge, and leg flexibility to do basic tasks. Like tying your shoes, bending down to pick up something from the floor, or bending down to hug a child or a pet. These activities don’t seem that extreme…until you can’t do them anymore.
Aerobic—Everything in your body needs blood and oxygen, so good cardiovascular health is critical to staying alive. Cardiovascular health is also good for neurological health because the dilating blood vessels and increased oxygen and blood flow to the brain clears out the cobwebs, so to speak.
Carrying a Load—muscular strength, which has a major impact on quality of life as we age. After age 35, people tend to lose about a pound of muscle every year (that’s 10 pounds in 10 years!) unless they are actively working to keep it. Maintaining muscle mass and strength lowers risk of death from all causes, and even a little bit goes a long way.
Equilibrium—balance. This isn’t one I’d ever considered before, but apparently people’s ability to keep their balance degrades if they don’t consciously work to maintain it, thus resulting in those scary stories of old women falling, breaking a hip, and then dying shortly after.
Here are some other important components of health that should not be neglected: Sleep, Nutrition, Preventative Medicine, Stress Management, and Social Health.
Flexibility and Balance
We use tying a shoe as a metric of flexibility and physical performance. Most people our age don’t think of tying a shoe as a physical performance. And yet when you would start to lose those things, I think you would have a radically different view.
My GP said that one thing he sees making the biggest impact on people as they age is flexibility and balance. Yoga strengthens up both.
My favorite yoga book is Stretch and Surrender by Annalisa Cunningham. This book was written for people in addiction recovery, but I’ve been using this yoga book since I was about fifteen years old and I still feel like I gain something from it every time I use it. It has mindfulness mantras to say with each move. It’s a wonderful yoga book for beginners, for people recovering from injury, or for people doing yoga at home. My husband and I do yoga multiple times a week using this book.
Strength Training
I got curious about strength training after watching this video with Peter Attia and reading this article about how muscle mass can reduce a person’s chance of developing diabetes because it basically acts as short-term storage for glucose, thus protecting your liver and other organs. Bigger muscles, more glucose storage. (Check out this Washington Post article, “Cardio isn’t enough. For a healthy heart, add resistance training.”)
Once a pre-diabetic, always a pre-diabetic, right? I’ll take whatever edge I can get in reducing my chance of developing that awful disease.
Since August 2021, I’ve started strength training at home using HER Body Solutions, which is a service owned by my friend, Alex Golodriga (formerly Alex Navarro). Alex is a multiple award-winning contestant in Ms. Fitness USA, Fitness Universe, World Beauty Fitness and Fashion, and Bikini competitions. She is a former wrestler and gymnast, and also a mom. She is a beautiful person inside and out, and I am so grateful to her for the personal training videos and home workouts she runs through HER Body Solutions.
I’m an absolute novice in strength training, but Alex’s videos make it really accessible. Her app keeps track of the weights and reps, and I love I can re-watch the videos as many times as I need to, to make sure I’m using proper technique. The routines change every month, so it keeps the exercises both interesting and difficult.
Abbye Stockton, professional strongwoman, Muscle Beach, during the 1940s
Maybe I’m kinda stupid for missing the obvious here, but until I started lifting weights seven months ago, it had never occurred to me that “being strong” was a physical feeling. When most women talk about being strong, they usually mean emotionally strong. (For some reason, I thought weight lifting just made you poofy.)
It’s hard to convey how profoundly ignorant I was about strength training. I thought it was a guy’s thing. I thought it was purely cosmetic and that body building competitions were like the male equivalent of beauty contests. I thought everyone had a natural set-point of strength and there wasn’t much you could do about it. And I’d seen lean ballerinas and gymnasts perform incredible feats of strength and agility. It simply never occurred to me that muscle size had anything to do with anything, or why you would want it.
It wasn’t until I started being able to snatch a heavy bag of books off the floor like it was nothing that the epiphany finally hit me: Oh! Being strong means I can lift heavy things. And it doesn’t feel hard anymore. Duh.
I feel as if I’m developing a new superpower. Suddenly, it makes a lot more sense to me why all those swole bros at the gym act the way they do. Every time I’m able to increase the weights or the reps I feel like strutting around the house like a rooster, crowing “You see that? I did that! Somebody get me a pickle jar to open!“
And the time commitment isn’t that much (just 3 hours a week!) compared with all the incredible gifts strength training is giving me outside those workout hours. Almost every day I find my body moving in ways it has never moved before. My balance is better. My legs are stronger. My back is stronger. My arms are stronger. I feel as if my body is going through an upgrade and all of the sudden there are all these awesome new features I never had before. I can’t imagine ever going back to the way I used to be.
Another benefit of strength training: Vanity. I look AMAZING! I’ve always been pretty confident about my body, but suddenly I’m looking for opportunities to wear sleeveless shirts and check myself out in the mirror. DAMN, girl! Look at YOU! You look like Wonder Woman!
Super proud of my baby muscles!
My arms and shoulders are more defined, and my hips and legs are tight and perky. The skin all over my body is more firm. I can especially see it around my waist. Wow! There are some muscles in there!
I’m also much more aware of my posture and moving in a way that supports my back. It’s clear to me now why strength training is so critical to aging well. Those groceries aren’t going to carry themselves from the car to my house!
For anyone who wants to learn more about strong women throughout history, I highly recommend Haley Shapley’s book Strong Like Her. I learned about so many incredible female athletes. It’s easy to forget how new and revolutionary it is for women to do sports and train our bodies. Exercise and physical fitness are an act of feminism—and it’s important to never forget how tenuous these gains are. Reading Haley Shapley’s book has completely changed the way I see muscle on women. The book has incredible photographs of female athletes, from ballerinas, to para-Olympians, to strong women.
Aren’t you afraid of getting bulky?
No. First, a pound of muscle takes up less volume than a pound of fat, so even if I weigh the same I will actually look leaner.
Second, what’s wrong with having muscles, anyway? Women’s bodies are powerful and malleable, and I think we should celebrate all the incredible things we can do.
Right now, I’m still at the stage of my strength training where I’m hitting a new personal record basically every time I lift weights. I’m sure I’ll hit a plateau at some point, but for right now, I’m absolutely thrilled every time I can do more than I did the previous week. I’m already doing more with my body than I ever thought I was capable of. Why would I handicap myself to be smaller or weaker when I could be so much more? The limiting factor for me is how much I can safely lift with a PFO—not the female-body-police and their limited idea of “feminine” looks like. I believe I owe it to myself, my family, my community, and to the next generation to strive to be as healthy as possible.
It’s especially important for me to build mas many neural networks between my brain and my muscles as I can. My history with TIAs means that I am at a higher risk for stroke than the general population. God forbid I ever have a stroke, but if I do have a stroke someday, my hope is that it would be easier to reconnect those wires if they are already laid down, rather than having to grow all new neural-networks from scratch.
I’m basing this, in part, on what happened to Dirk Vleiks, who was a competitive triathlete and at the top of his game when he experienced a hemorrhagic stroke at age 32 as a result of an undiagnosed tumor in his brain. He nearly died. He had to re-learn how to eat, how to talk, how to walk. He had to start from square-one in re-learning everything, which is the title of his memoir, Square One: Returning to Life and Competitive Running After My Devastating Stroke. While he never recovered 100 percent, his original physical fitness was probably a huge part of why he didn’t die, why he could recover enough to live a functional life with his wife and children, and begin racing again.
Strength should be an attribute of all humanity. It’s not a gift that belongs solely to the male of the species.
Jan Todd, the first woman to deadlift 400 pounds.
[…] putting a limit on muscularity is like telling a female skier that she can only ski so fast […]
There seems to be evidence that resistance training is actually good for your joints, so long as you warm up, progress slowly, and use good form.
I’m still young and I haven’t been training for very long yet, but so far I’m pleasantly surprised at how good my joints feel. My knees and hips are noticeably springier than they used to be. I’ve suffered from periodic bouts of wrist tendonitis since I was in my late teens, but since I’ve started resistance training I’ve noticed that my wrists are less inflamed and the pain has gone away. Maybe it’s a coincidence?
“What about protein?!?!“ I hear you say. “Vegans can’t build muscle!”
Plants have protein. Not as much as in meat, but you actually don’t need as much protein as you think you do. For anyone who is concerned about not getting enough protein on a plant-based diet, I highly recommend watching The Game Changers, which is a documentary about some of the many plant-based elite athletes around right now—and there are so many.
For starters, just check out strongman Patrik Baboumian who is a world record holder in strength competitions, and Kendrick Farris who is the Olympic weightlifting world record holder—going vegan didn’t seem to make reduce their gains any.
Even Arnold Schwarzenegger is on a plant-based diet. Last I looked, the governator is still looking pretty swole for a 74-year-old.
Here are the resources on strength training that I’ve found helpful:
Since I have both a vascular disease and a heart defect, getting this one right is really important to me.
Through strength training and my regular daily activities (i.e. walking the dog around the block, jumping on the trampoline and riding bikes with my kid), I’m already meeting the American Heart Association’s guideline of getting 150 minutes of aerobic activity a week.
However, as Dr. Michael Gregor points out at NutritionFacts.org and in his book How Not to Diet, this isn’t anywhere near the ideal dose of for keeping a healthy cardiovascular system. From reading many studies, meta-analyses, and this Wikipedia article on preventing heart disease and heart failure, the ideal dose seems to be around 450 MET minutes of exercise per week, or approximately 7.5 MET hours per week. (MET means “metabolic equivalent of task.” For example, 30 minutes of a vigorous exercise, like running, might equal the same MET as 60 minutes of light exercise, like walking.) This works out to between 60-80 MET minutes per day, 3-6 times per week, depending on how hard I’m working. I have my Garmin watch set to calculate this automatically.
There are lots of ways to get aerobic exercise, and the key seems to be to choosing something that can be done consistently.
I love walking and running, so those are going to be my focus.
Walking is an excellent way to maintain cardiovascular health. It’s good for losing weight, it’s gentle on the joints, and it’s good for building a strong base of aerobic health. Walking has always been there for me. Stressed? Go for a walk. Bored? Go for a walk. Fidgety? Go for a walk. Part of the reason I love owning a dog is there is always a ready excuse to go for a walk.
But I’ve always wanted to be a runner. I love running. Even in high school P.E., whenever we’d have to run a lap around the field, I’d bound away like a Labrador through tall grass. On lunch breaks, I’d run a mile around the track just for fun. In college, I once ran a sub-7-minute mile. I love the feeling of sprinting barefoot on the beach, like I’ve got wings on my ankles and I’m barely touching the ground. I’ve never been a consistent runner, though, and that’s something I’d like to change.
Now that my life depends on keeping my heart healthy and my BMI and cholesterol low, I feel like the time has arrived for me to figure out this running thing. According to this article by UC Health, running might be “the perfect antidote to a congenital heart defect” in some cases. (So long as the patient has gotten guidance from their doctor.)
But I can’t just go from zero to running an hour a day—that’s a recipe for getting an injury. For the last six months, I’ve been walking for 60 minutes, three or four times per week. My goal has been to lose weight, build a stronger aerobic base, and get my muscles, bones, and joints in shape before I start a running program.
In February 2022, I started the NHS Couch-to-5K program, and eventually I hope to work up to running 50 minutes, three times per week. I’ve done C25K many times and I highly recommend it. (Except for the bad advice in the second episode to run with a heel-strike gait. Most studies seem to show that forefoot running is better at preventing injury… which makes sense since every running animal, from horses to cheetahs, runs on their forefoot.)
Running is a high-impact, vigorous activity and comes with its own risks, as cardiologist James O’Keefe explains in this TEDx video about the link between extreme endurance athletes (marathoners and ultra-marathoners) and atrial fibrillation. He explains that there is a sweet-spot for running, which seems to be between 10-15 miles per week, at a speed slower than 8 miles per hour… ideally a leisurely 10-mile per hour jog.
A friend of mine, fellow writer and runner Neroli Lacey, kindly sent me this video about Slow Jogging, which can be a lot gentler on your joints.
The general idea behind heart rate training is that 80% of your weekly runs should be at a light, leisurely pace, keeping your heart rate between 50%-77% of your maximum heart rate. The remaining 20% of your runs would be high-intensity-interval training where you sprint for short periods of time, with your heart rate between 90%-100% your maximum.
In order to keep track of what my heart is doing, I do all my workouts while wearing a Polar heart monitor, which syncs to my Garmin watch. I have the different zones programed into my Garmin so that it alerts me whenever I run too fast. I’ve found the external input of the heart monitor and the watch to be absolutely necessary to help me pace myself. Because running slowly feels really freaking slow…like, it barely even feels like running. Without the watch constantly telling me to slow down, I know I’d go too hard, too fast and burn out.
My running goals are pretty modest. I’m not planning on being competitive or breaking any speed or distance records. Maybe I’ll eventually participate in some short or middle-distance races socially, but my top reason for running is to take care of my heart. Being healthy and being competitive in a sport are not the same thing.
I’d eventually like to run 15 miles per week, split between three running sessions. This seems to be a nice modest amount that most people can run without getting a stress injury. Twelve of these miles would be at a nice slow jog, and the 3 miles would be part of some sort of interval training via sprints around the track, hills, or fartleks. It’s probably going to take me another six months of training to get up to this maintenance-level goal. My current jogging pace is 18-minutes per mile with me keeping my heart rate between 60%-75% of max. This is almost slower than my walking pace, so I have plenty of room to improve before my “slow” jogs are at a 10-minute-mile pace.
Because of my PFO, I have to breathe continuously throughout each of my strength exercises. If I held my breath while straining to pull a weight, the pressure could build in my chest and flip my PFO open. This means my strength routine doubles as an aerobic routine as well. I wear my Polar heart monitor while I’m doing strength exercises to make sure I stay in the aerobic zone.
This is my current exercise routine: Personally, it’s easier for me to maintain a habit if I’m doing it every single day than if I’m only doing it a few times per week. I’ve set aside 60-80 minutes every day for exercise. I prefer to exercise first thing in the morning. (I even sleep in my workout gear to ensure it happens.) I usually do 10-20 minutes of yoga as a cool-down after running, or as a warm-up before my strength training days. On my running days, I walk for 5-10 minutes before and after as a warm-up and cool-down.
Monday: Running day 1
Tuesday: Strength day 1
Wednesday: Running day 2
Thursday: Strength day 2
Friday: Running day 3 (eventually, part of day 3 will include a HIIT session)
Saturday: Strength day 3 (optional, if I feel the need to have two rest-days in a row)
Sunday: Rest day. Maybe some light stretching or a walk if I’m up for it.
Rest and recovery days are an important part of my training routine. I know I have a tendency to overdo things, so I plan rest days ahead of time to make sure they happen. I also schedule a full week off every 6-12 weeks to prevent overtraining.
One of the most depressing things I’ve learned is that fat acts like a savings account, but fitness does not. All those hours I spent as a high school athlete, twenty years ago, don’t count for beans now that I’m in my mid-thirties. A person can take 3-6 consecutive weeks off from training without losing too much muscle mass or aerobic capacity. But after about two months, those hard-won gains start to evaporate. So, I can’t bank my exercise. The magic only works if I’m actively doing it.
According to my calendar, I spent about 7-10 hours a week exercising (which includes rest periods between sets, and the time it takes to set up and put away my gear). Yes, it’s a lot, but according to the graph in this NIH article, the upper limit on the benefits of exercise seems to be 40-75 hours per week, and I’m well below that limit. That being said, the margin for error is smaller for me than for most people, so I’m keeping a very close eye on my energy levels. I’d rather go slow and steady than risk burning out, or getting an injury, or triggering a vasculitis relapse. My number one goal is to keep the ghosts in my blood in check—not to break any world records.
Even though I’ve only been keeping this routine for the past seven months, I already feel like it has enhanced my life in so many ways. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been in my life. Every week I’m surprising myself by doing things I never thought I could do. I love how my body looks, and how capable I feel, and I would much rather spend 10 hours a week exercising and getting strong than have to take medication or get heart surgery. And when I think about my family, it’s a simple choice. I’m willing to do whatever it takes to ensure I stay healthy and in good working order for as long as possible so I can take care of my family.
NHS Couch to 5K—podcast with music to help go from inactive to running 30 continuous minutes. Once I complete the 9-week program, I usually add 2 minutes to each of my runs each week until I get up to my desired maintenance level.
Zombies, Run!—podcast with a zombie story running in the background to get you sprinting.
Tales from Another Mother Runner, edited by Dimity McDowell and Sarah Bowen Shea—Essays by mothers who have taken up running. The essay I connected to the most was the essay titled “Running for My Life” by Nicole Knepper in which she talks about how she watched family member after family member die of preventable metabolic disease, and how painful those losses were and that she doesn’t want to put her children through that loss. She wanted to take care of her own body the way she takes care of her children’s bodies. She wanted to be a good role model for her children, both so that she could have a longer, healthier life herself and inspire her children to live a good life. This essay resonated with me because I, too, am running to save my own life so that I can be there for my son as he grows up. Another Mother Runner also has a podcast.
Run Like a Girl: How Strong Women Make Happy Lives by Mina Samuels—It hooked me from the first two sentences: “This book is about women, sports, and happiness. How the confidence women build in sports translates into the rest of their lives.”
&Mother—While female athletes have broken a lot of barriers in participating in sports, there is still a lot of prejudice experienced by female athletes who are mothers. I highly recommend reading the New York Times opinion article by Alysia Montano “Nike Told Me to Dream Crazy Until I Wanted A Baby.” I love &Mother’s Instagram feed, which has many inspiring photos and videos of female athletes who are training and mothering at the same time.
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, And the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen by Christopher MacDougall—Like any good raconteur, MacDougall has written a tall tale full of larger-than-life characters. It’s a thoroughly entertaining book. The things MacDougall says about overly cushioned shoes causing a lot of running injuries made sense to me. While the science is still out on barefoot running, the consensus seems to be that landing on your forefoot (as opposed to landing on your heel) seems to be best for avoiding injury.
Running for Mortals: A Commonsense Plan for Changing Your Life With Running by John Bingham and Jenny Hadfield—A forgiving and humorous book of encouragement for beginning runners. I especially liked the chapters where they talk about the different emotional experience a beginning runner has to the activity. That anyone can start a hobby, but getting past third week can be hard. And that the energy and improvements a person gets in their running routine during the first three months differs from the stable maintenance point they often reach after three years. It was a helpful metaphor for me.
Eat & Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness by Scott Jurek—Ultramarathon runner Scott Jurek talks about how his vegan diet has been a critical part of how he has broken so many world records and participated in so many ultramarathon races. If Jurek can run hundreds of miles on a vegan diet, then it stands to reason that I should have no problem running a modest 15 miles a week on a vegan diet. No big deal.
Runner’s World Run Less, Run Faster: Become a Faster, Stronger Runner with the Revolutionary 3-Run-A-Week Training Program by Bill Pierce, Scott Murr, and Ray Moss—This book is about training for marathons and half-marathons by doing HIIT sessions, running three times a week, and by giving your joints a rest by cross training with some other low-impact aerobic activity like rowing, cycling, or swimming. As Margaret Webb points out in Older, Faster, Stronger, running is a specialized activity that only trains some muscles while ignoring others; it makes your body weak in all the ways it doesn’t make you strong. Therefore, cross training is essential for being able to run long-term and to maintaining a healthy body. While I don’t plan on running a marathon, I may consider doing a half-marathon someday and this is probably the training program I would use in order to exercise my cardiovascular system without over-straining my muscular-skeletal system. In some ways, I’m already training this way by alternating strength days with running days.
The quickest way to screw up your health is by not getting enough sleep. Sleep is essential for so many parts of our health, including mental health, our immune systems, and our metabolism.
While I’ll never know for sure, I think part of why I got vasculitis was because at that time in my life I was operating with a lot of stress on very little sleep. I was trying to do too many things and waking up at 4 a.m. every day to get stuff done seemed like a good idea at the time. I learned my lesson the hard way. I caught an upper respiratory infection. My body wasn’t strong enough to fight it off. A trip-wire went off in my body that caused my immune system to over-heat and start attacking my blood vessels. If I hadn’t been chronically sleep-deprived, would my body have overheated like that?
When I was in the hospital for vasculitis, my attending doctor had asked me what I do when I’m tired. “I stomp on that feeling and keep going,” I’d said.
“Wrong answer,” she said. “You’re supposed to slow down and rest.”
Seems obvious in retrospect.
Matthew Walker’s book changed the way I thought about sleep, from being an annoyance to being the foundation to protecting my health. If I have to choose between exercising and sleep, I choose sleep because that’s where I’ll get the biggest benefit. Sleep went from being at the bottom of my list to being at the top.
Nutrition
After my auto-immune debacle in 2019, I readI Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Lifeby Ed Yong, which gave me a better idea of what a huge impact the bacteria in our guts play in managing our immune systems. Our microbiomes are like an extra organ that we acquire after we are born. One important caveat: if you don’t feed them what they like, they will eat you. It turns out that healthy gut-bacteria likes to eat the most is fiber.
As I mentioned earlier, I use the Forks Over Knives meal planner for my oil-free vegan cooking. I highly recommend the Forks Over Knives meal planner because it takes the mental labor out of what to shop for and how to cook something that’s both tasty and healthy. I also love the weekend food prep section that they added because it makes the weekday cooking much easier. The app costs about $120 a year, but I’ve found that the app pays for itself because a) the whole foods we buy are cheaper than processed foods, b) there is less food wasted, c) the food is so delicious we aren’t eating out or eating prepared foods anymore, d) eating healthy is way cheaper than medical bills!Diabetes costs patients $9,000-$16,000 and cardiovascular disease costs patients about $18,000 a year in medical bills. Look at all the money I’m saving by not being sick!
If you have a vegan in your life or if you want to learn more about plant-based nutrition, here are some additional resources. Consult with your doctor before making any major lifestyle changes.
• This 30-minute Science Vs. episode on veganism tackles some of the basic questions people have about veganism, in terms of health and the environment. Questions like “Do you need milk for strong bones?” and “What about B12 and iron?” etc. (For the record, animals do not make B12. B12 is made by bacteriathat lives in healthy soil and water. Animals have only acted as the middle-men in humans getting at that B12. Since the animals most people eat nowadays are factory-farmed, those animals are getting B12 supplements as part of their feed. Eating meat is no guarantee that a person has sufficient B12, and many people who eat meat are also low in B12 and need to take supplements. Personal note: I take a daily multivitamin, as well as B12, iron, and vitamin D, as prescribed by my doctor. I also get my blood checked every 6-12 months to ensure my blood chemistry levels are in a healthy range.)
Forks Over Knives (documentary)— This documentary was recommended by Kaiser’s plant-based nutrition class. My husband, son, and I all watched it together, and it convinced us to learn more.
Game Changers (documentary)—I think much of people’s reluctance to veganism has to do with the machismo around meat eating. “Steak. It’s what a Man eats!” This documentary by ultimate fighting champion James Wilks talks about the health, recovery, and training advantages plant-based food can give athletes. The documentary features many of the strongest, most macho, elite athletes in the world—athletes who also are vegan.
The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted by Colin T. Campbell PhD and Thomas M. Campbell II, M.D.—This book convinced me and my family to go plant-based. I still laugh when I remember the all-caps text my husband sent me when he was listening to The China Study audiobook: “ICE-CREAM GIVES YOU ASS CANCER?!?!?” That was all he needed to know to be convinced. (We now get our ice cream fix by making “nice cream,” which is frozen bananas, soy milk, peanut butter, and other flavors, blended in a food processor to a creamy texture.)
Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition by Colin T. Campbell PhD, and Howard Jacobson PhD—This talks about how many diet books are missing the forest for the trees, in terms of the basic principles of eating healthily.
How Not to Die by Michael Gregor, M.D.—Nutritional advice that will help you manage or keep you from getting heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, and many of our other leading causes of death.
How Not to Dietby Michael Gregor, M. D.—Nutrition and exercise advice on maintaining healthy weight through a plant-based diet.
NutritionFacts.org by Michael Gregor, M.D.—Whenever I have a random question about nutrition, like “What about gluten?” or “What’s the deal with ketogenic diets?” I’ll look them up on NutritionFacts.org where there is a very helpful meta-analysis of what the science says.
Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease by Caldwell B. Esselstyn, M.D.—Heart disease is the number one cause of death in western countries. According to the CDC, “One person dies every 36 seconds in the United States from cardiovascular disease. About 659,000 people in the United States die from heart disease each year—that’s 1 in every 4 deaths.” Dr. Esselstyn is a cardiac surgeon who ran a lifestyle an intervention study with several patients who were basically knocking on death’s door with their heart disease. By switching his patients to a plant-based, low-fat diet, he could reverse their heart disease.
Dr. Neal Barnard’s Program for Reversing Diabetes by Neal Barnard, M.D.— According to the CDC, “37.3 million US adults have diabetes, and 1 in 5 of them don’t know they have it. Diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in the United States. Diabetes is the No. 1 cause of kidney failure, lower-limb amputations, and adult blindness. In the last 20 years, the number of adults diagnosed with diabetes has more than doubled.” As we’ve seen with this latest pandemic, diabetes was one of the most significant co-morbidities for people who caught covid-19. There are two types of diabetes. About 5-10% of people with diabetes have type 1, and they need to take insulin daily to survive. About 90-95% of people with diabetes have type 2 diabetes, which is caused by diet and lifestyle choices.
In the United States, every 17 seconds someone is diagnosed with diabetes, and every day 230 Americans with diabetes will suffer an amputation. Throughout the world, it is estimated that every 30 seconds a leg is amputated. And 85% of these amputations were the result of a diabetic foot ulcer.
According to Neal Barnard, switching to a low-fat, whole foods plant-based diet can help reverse type 2 diabetes, and it can help people with type 1 diabetes manage their insulin levels better.
Breaking the Food Seduction by Neal Barnard, M.D.—Dr. Barnard discusses the serotonin and dopamine pleasure cycles that hijack our brains when we eat sugar, cheese, chocolate, and meat. He talks about brain chemistry and the withdrawal people experience when switching to healthier food.
Power Foods for the Brain by Neal Barnard, M.D.—Dr. Barnard discusses what he’s learned about how food impacts our brains as we age, and how eating low-fat plant-based foods may help prevent and postpone Alzheimer’s and dementia.
The Forks Over Knives Plan: A 4-Week Meal-by-Meal Makeover by Alona Pulde M.D., Matthew Lederman M.D.—I found this book to be incredibly helpful in transitioning to a plant-based diet. This book basically goes week-by-week with assignments, such as going through your pantry with a list of ingredients to watch out for. It recommends switching one meal a week to being plant-based, so as to give your gut time to adjust. I also learned that to feel full on a plant-based diet, I have to eat a greater volume of food; I have to eat more frequently, and I have to eat at least one legume-heavy dish (lunch time burritos!) in order to feel satisfied. It also gave really helpful cooking tips, like how to do weekend prep with all of our grains and legumes, and to ensure the freezer is always full of healthy home-made meals, which makes it really easy to not have to cook something from scratch every time I’m hungry.
Forks Over Knives Family by Alona Pulde M.D., Matthew Lederman M.D.—Providing plant-based food for your kids at home is easy, but how do you teach your kids about healthy food choices when every playdate, birthday party, vacation, and school-event surrounds your child with junk food? Basically, try to model healthy eating as best you can, and hope your kids continue to make healthy choices once they’re grown, but expect some level of rebellion and experimentation. I have some personal experience with this. I was vegetarian for most of my childhood. For me, “comfort food” was vegetable soups and the veggie tofu and lentil dishes my mom would make. Because my flavor-palate was already used to things like tofu, Bragg’s liquid aminos, and nutritional yeast, it made it really easy for me to switch to being vegan as an adult. Eating plant-based wasn’t alien to me, and one gift I want to give my son is a taste for healthy foods, and the knowledge of how to shop and cook healthy food.
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer—This meditation on food, culture, and factory farming definitely sold me on veganism for ethical reasons, even though that wasn’t my initial reason for going vegan.
Dominion (documentary)—A film about how we treat animals. It’s pretty gruesome. Don’t watch with children.
Preventative Medicine
It’s easier to maintain good health than it is to get it back once it’s gone. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Truly. Let me illustrate with a story from my family about two people who both had skin cancer.
My mother had melanoma when she was in her mid-thirties. She lived because she got the mole removed before the cancer spread.
My father had a slow-moving skin cancer that was diagnosed when he was in his fifties. But he didn’t believe in western medicine, so he refused to go to the doctor to get it removed when it was nice and small. Instead of going to the doctor, he spent every nickel he had on half-baked herbal cures, homeopathy, and “energy healing.” The cancer spread throughout his entire body, gave him heart failure, and caused a stroke that left him with diminished mobility for two full years before he finally died. And this was after twenty-five years of suffering with an open, weeping wound that spread like a fungus throughout his entire body and smelled like rotting flesh.
All because he was too scared to spend three minutes under a scalpel.
I don’t know about you, but I think I would’ve preferred to get that sucker removed nice and early when it was the size of a freckle.
This shows the power of prevention, early diagnosis, and early intervention.
Every year on my birthday, I get a full bumper-to-bumper check-up. I get my labs done. I get my freckles checked. I get my eyes checked. I have an OB/GYN exam. I get my teeth cleaned at the dentist (this happens every 6 months). I make sure I’m up-to-date on all my shots—including the covid-vaccine and flu vaccines.
Making the appointment for my birthday makes it easier to remember.
Vaccines? I love ‘em!
I collect vaccines like other people collect Pokemon. Chickenpox? Vaccinated! Shingles? Vaccinated! HPV? Vaccinated! Tetanus? Vaccinated! Polio? Vaccinated! Ebola? Gimme a vaccine! Dengue fever? Gimme gimme gimme! Flu shot? I get a new one every August! Covid vaccine? I get the latest model as soon as it’s available!
If it were possible to vaccinate against vasculitis, diabetes, or heart disease, I’d be first in line to get vaccinated for those diseases too. Until then, I’ll do my best the old-fashioned way by getting adequate sleep, eating plants, exercising, managing my stress, and hoping for the best.
Stress Management
Stress comes primarily not just from what happens to us but, more important, how we react to what happens to us. How we react is a function of our lifestyle and our beliefs. In short, even when we can’t change what’s going on in our lives, we have a lot more choice about how we react to it than we might have believed.
Everyone says meditation, mindfulness, and breathing exercises are helpful for all kinds of things, from stress management to increase resiliency to lowering inflammation to making you smarter, or whatever.
I have to admit: I have a lot of resistance to this one. I know meditation is supposed to be good for me, but the moment I sit down and try it my mind is filled with a zillion other things I’d rather be doing. A huge part of my reluctance comes from watching my dad and all of his buddies spend hours (Years! Decades! Wallowing in self-absorption!) meditating…and still make stupid decisions that caused harm to themselves and others. (Who knows? Maybe all that meditating helped them be better versions of themselves than they would’ve been without it?)
But I believe people when they say meditation changed their lives for the better. I aspire to learn more about this eventually, just…not right now. There are only so many new skills I can learn at any one time, and right now I’m working on getting my body into shape. I’ll get around to this one, eventually. Promise.
In the meantime, here are my preferred ways of managing stress:
I give myself permission to experience pleasure, without the guilt—This might be a weird one to start the list with, but it’s actually really important. I sometimes get so caught up in meeting my goals or being productive that I forget to just let myself be happy and have leisure time, without having to feel guilt or apologize or explain myself. I have to remind myself that it’s okay to just enjoy myself, without multitasking or trying to fill every scrap of time with “homework.”
Spending time with family and friends—I’m very blessed to have so many wonderful, loving people in my life. Spending time with them almost always brightens my day.
Journaling—I’ve written in a journal daily since I was eleven years old. Spending 10-45 minutes doing a freewrite every day just makes me feel like I’ve cleared the gunk out of my mind so that I can face the day with more patience, attention, and equanimity. The past few years, I’ve been gratitude journaling as well. Here’s a neat Kurzgesagt video which talks about gratitude journaling being an antidote to dissatisfaction.
Reading—Either for escape or to understand things better, reading is one of my favorite things. I’ve been combining exercising with reading by listening to lots of audiobooks as well.
Listening to music—I especially like listening to happy music when things are difficult. Back when I was pregnant, listening to music and humming along helped me control the nausea. There’s something magical about how music can change everything about how I’m feeling. Dance music is my ultimate stress antidote. Check out what I’m listening to here.
Social Health
The pandemic has put a spotlight on isolation and loneliness. Some of us have spent the past two years alone, like in Cast Away. Some of us have spent every waking moment of the past two years working, schooling, exercising, and dining-in with our families or roommates and are starving for a little more alone time.
Let’s just take a moment to acknowledge that the last couple of years have been totally nuts, and none of our people-skills are what they were before this pandemic started. Many of us have experienced loss. We’re grieving. We’ve been afraid. We’ve faced hostility or indifference from people we thought were on our team. Families have become estranged. Lines were drawn in the sand. Everyone’s lives were put on hold. The world changed. We changed. Our expectations changed.
And now we are all emerging from our respective bunkers and having to share oxygen with each other again. How do we do this?
On the theme of friendships and relationships, here are a bunch of books and podcasts on the topic that are on my reading and listening list. Maybe some of these will help you too?
On How to Make Friends, Keep Friends, and Navigate Friendship Changes
Undergoing any major life change—like getting married, or having a child, or going into recovery, or getting divorced, or switching careers, or financial changes, or starting a fitness routine—can shake up the people in your life. Change can be threatening. Starting a new diet or exercise routine can have a surprising impact on friendships, and sometimes the people who you thought would be most supportive will withdraw, or even turn hostile and try to sabotage your goals.
I think it’s important to try to bring people along with you. To explain why you need to make this change and why it’s important to you. (I guess this blog post is my attempt to do just that. To explain what I’m doing and why.) But friendships are voluntary relationships and just because someone was friends with you when you were one type of person doesn’t mean you will jibe the same when when you turn into a different kind of person. Some friendships may end. New friendships might begin—maybe within your new community of people who have shared interests. And some special friendship will rise to the occasion, and the friendship will evolve in surprising and wonderful ways.
I’ve been really lucky in how supportive my husband has been of my health goals. He changed his diet with me. He has spent hours listening to me talk and process my feelings about my health—our health. He read some of the same books I read. He gave me his weights and showed me how to use them. He started doing yoga with me. He isn’t a runner, but he frequently asks me how my runs went. He makes us breakfast while I shower after my workout. I feel so lucky to have him as my cheerleader, and I really feel how proud he is of me and the progress I’ve made.
Tedx Talks (YouTube) Shasta Nelson: “Frientimacy: The Three Requirements for All Healthy Friendships”—Nelson talks about how we are saturated with many shallow social connections, when what we crave is more intimacy in our friendships. She talks about some of these same concepts in her book Frientimacy: How to Deepen Friendships for Lifelong Health.
Tedx Talks (YouTube) Brene Brown: “The Power of Vulnerability”—How the courage to be vulnerable strengthens our health and our relationships.
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Won’t Stop Talking (book) by Susan Cane—There is this joke: “The way introverts make friends is by being adopted by an extrovert.” This book helped me make peace with the fact that I’m not the sort of person who is going to throw big dinner parties or be comfortable making small-talk with strangers, but I am the sort of person who loves hanging out one-on-one or with a small group of friends.
Invisibilia (podcast) They created a “Friendship Season” with six episodes on different friendships. “A Friendly Ghost Story” is about how friends sometimes break up by fading out of each other’s lives. “Nun of Us Are Friends” is about what happens when the choice part of friendships are removed. “International Friend of Mystery” is about the frienemy relationship. “Poop Friends” is about the kinds of friendship where you talk about the most intimate matters. “Friends, With Benefits” is about the messiness that can occur with sexual friendships. “Therapy, With Friends” is about friendship relationship counseling.
Vox (blog) “The Modern Family”—is an essay about found families replacing the traditional family amid estrangement and distance.
Forgive for Good (book) by Fred Luskin—Many years ago I attended a workshop with Fred Luskin, who is a forgiveness researcher from Stanford. It’s hard to go through life without at least one experience of having someone doing you wrong. This is a book about how to deal with those feelings and how to move on.
On Female Friendships
Anne and Diane: Bosom Friends Forever
Friendships Don’t Just Happen!: The Guide to Creating a Meaningful Circle of Friends (book) by Shasta Nelson—Once we leave school, it can become more challenging to make a circle of friends. In this book, Shasta Nelson talks about the different circles of friends we need to feel fulfilled, and how to maintain, let go of, and increase intimacy.
Harper’s Bazar (magazine article) “Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden”—Lonely men are asking their female romantic partners to fulfill all of their emotional needs…and women are suffering because of it.
The New Yorker (podcast) “Dave Eggers reads ‘Bullfighting’ by Roddy Doyle.”—A delightful short story about four men who have a long-standing friendship that they have maintained through many phases in their lives.
Thanks for reading this super long blog post about all the health stuff I’ve been going through. I don’t plan on writing a whole lot about my health, other than maybe a quick update now and again. But if you’d like to be updated, feel free to sign up for my newsletter so that you can be notified about my latest blog posts. As a thank you gift, I’ll send you a short story.
Pandemic Playlist 4: Delticron Strikes Back! is made up of the music my friends and I listened to between August 2021 and February 2022, when we were all dealing with, not one but TWO new variants.
This playlist is for adults.
As is this essay by Wendy Molyneux at McSweeny’s, which I think sums up how many of us feel as we close out the second full pandemic year.
If you’re looking for something good to read, here’s a list of my favorite books that I read this year.
Realistic Fiction
The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade—Amadeo Padilla is a thirty-three year old layabout who is hoping to turn his life around by taking on the role of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. But when his fifteen year old pregnant daughter turns up on his doorstep, his imaginary redemption story turns into a real one as he helps his daughter adjust to parenthood, and he helps his mother deal with a terminal illness. While the premise of this book sounds like a downer, there were so many bright moments of insight and humor and resilience that I thought this was one of the best books I read last year.
The Risk of Us by Rachel Howard—When a middle-aged couple adopts an eight year old foster girl, they find themselves tested in unexpected ways.
Motherhood by Sheila Heti—In this autobiographical novel, Sheila Heti examines what is lost when women chose motherhood over their artistic pursuits.
The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray—This is a multi-generational story of siblings raising each other, and the power of family in overcoming personal suffering.
Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson—This haunting young adult novel is about Lia and Cassie, two friends bound by a twisted and competitive friendship to be the skinniest girls in school. But when Cassie dies, Lia is haunted by her friend’s ghost as she, too, must decide whether to join her dead friend, or choose life and recovery.
Vessels by L. L. Rose—When retiree Olivero Russo buys some clay pots from a yard sale and bakes bread in them, the taste of the bread awakens a sensual pleasure in life he hadn’t experienced since he was a boy. This is a delightful story written by a friend of mine. It’s available for free for people who sign up for her newsletter.
Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson—A fatal heat wave sweeps across the globe, killing many in a wet-bulb effect. A political agency based in Switzerland, called “The Ministry of the Future,” takes it upon itself to shift economic engines that have caused global warming toward a new economic system based on environmental restoration, economic equality, and sustainability.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia—The Yellow Wallpaper meets Wuthering Heights in Mexico. This spooky story of a haunted house in the Mexican highlands will satisfy anyone who loves gothic haunted houses, feisty heroines, intergenerational insanity, and masterful writing.
How Long ‘Till Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin—I’ve been a fan of N. K. Jemisin’s work ever since I heard her short story “Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints in the City Beneath the Still Waters” on Podcastle back in 2011. This short story collection gathers some of the early work of one of the best minds working in sci-fi/fantasy today.
Minecraft: The Island by Max Brooks—This is a tie-in horror novel based in the Minecraft video game world. I’m not a Minecraft player, but I thought this book was an excellent and entertaining introduction to what this whole Minecraft universe is all about. In case you missed it, the author is MAX BROOKS! The guy who wrote World War Z. I highly recommend the audiobook, which is narrated by Jack Black.
Mystery
A Spark of Light by Jodi Picoult—Jodi Picoult is a fantastic issues writer. In A Spark of Light she takes on the issue of abortion and women’s reproductive rights with compassion, humanity, and nuance.
Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty—When the matriarch of a tennis family disappears, the siblings take sides on whether or not they think their father has something to do with her disappearance.
Historical Fiction
Restraint by Anne Hawley—The passionate and forbidden M/M romance between a Viscount and a painter, set in Victorian England.
Warrior and Weaver by K. S. Barton—Astrid and Bjorn come from rival Viking tribes whose hatred runs deep. When these star-crossed lovers are forced into an arranged marriage in order to bring peace to their two tribes, they must each decide whether their desires to protect the living is stronger than their desires to avenge their dead.
Memoir
Theft by Finding: Diaries, Volume One by David Sedaris—Humor writer David Sedaris collects his edited diaries from 1977 (before he was famous) to 2002. I highly recommend the audiobook version, as David Sedaris reads his own work.
All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung—Nicole Chung is a Korean American, raised by white adopted parents in an isolated, and mostly white, area in Oregon. As she grows to adulthood and is on the cusp of motherhood herself, she goes on a quest to reconnect with her biological family and re-examine her identity as an adoptee and as a Korean American.
And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready by Meaghan O’Connell—In this humorous and heartbreaking memoir, Meaghan O’Connell unpacks her and her fiancé’s experiences of becoming parents in their late twenties, when most of their NYC peers were still single and fancy-free. This wonderful book is great for new parents, and for anyone who enjoyed the parenting podcast “The Longest Shortest Time.”
Women’s Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home by Megan K. Stack—Megan K. Stack is an award-winning journalist who managed her “work-life-balance” by living the colonial ex-pat life in Beijing and India. In this memoir, Stack turns her sharp and unflinching journalistic eye towards the ethics of white entitlement feminism…starting with her own conflicted relationship with the housekeepers, cooks, and nannies she employed (all of whom were also working mothers) in order to keep her own career afloat.
Motherhood So White: A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America by Nefertiti Austin—Say the words “mother” and “adoption” and what mostly comes to mind in America is the image of a married white woman. In this memoir, Nefertiti Austin discusses her experience as a single, adoptive, black mother living in a society that mostly behaves as if she didn’t exist. She also describes the love and overwhelmingly positive experience she had as the adoptive mother of two foster children. A wonderful book. Highly recommend.
The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Non-Binary Parenthood by Krys Malcolm Belc—Krys Belc discusses his experience as a man going through pregnancy and childbirth.
Empty by Susan Burton—Susan Burton’s memoir about her anorexia reads like a passionate Dear John letter to her conflicted relationship with food and her body.
Reserve the Right by Yume Kim—I’m not normally into poetry, but I absolutely loved this collection by my friend Yume Kim because each one feels like a powerful story.
Older, Faster, Stronger: What Women Runners Can Teach Us All About Living Younger, Longer by Margaret Webb—Margaret Webb is a writer and marathon-runner who sets out on a quest to get in the best shape of her life, as a woman in her sixties. This book was an incredible resource on female athleticism, and on what it takes to age well.
Strong Like Her: A Celebration of Rule Breakers, History Makers, and Unstoppable Athletes by Haley Shapley—This is a historical survey of female athletes throughout time. From the first woman to swim the English Channel to the Great Sandwina to Babe Didrikson Zaharias, one of the greatest all-around athletes of all time. This book was inspiring and totally enlightening because I’d never heard of most of these women. Strong Like Her is a hidden history of female athletes, and the role they play in securing physical agency for all women. I highly recommend the hardback or paperback versions because of all the incredible photographs by Sophy Holland of modern female athletes.
Women Warriors: An Unexpected History by Pamela D. Toler—A hidden history of warrior women throughout time. I’d never heard of most of these warriors.
Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition by T. Colin Campbell, PhD with Howard Jacobson, PhD—In this follow-up to The China Study, T. Colin Campbell writes about how most of the discussion of nutrition with it’s obsession with micronutrients, ignores the big picture importance of whole foods and the whole diet…much to our physical peril.
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate by Peter Wohlleben—Before reading this book, I looked at trees like they were all the same. After reading this book, I started seeing the trees as individuals, who sleep and communicate and live in family groups on a timescale much longer than my lifetime. This books has totally changed the way I see nature. I also recommend the children’s book version, as it’s very engaging for kids and adults alike: Can You Hear the Trees Talking?: Discover the Hidden Life of the Forest.
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When I was pregnant during the last year of my MFA program, there was a fellow writer who came up to me, looked down at my belly, and sneered, “I could never be a mother. I don’t want anything in my life that would compete with my writing career.”
“If you don’t want kids, don’t have kids,” I told her. “Not wanting them is reason enough not to have them. Every child should grow up feeling wanted and cherished. But being a writer has nothing to do with it.”
Most of the people I know who don’t want kids came to that decision either because of circumstance or after years of soul searching. These people are generous and community-oriented and have very rich friendships, and they are often mentors or part-time caregivers of other people’s kids or elders. They just don’t want kids of their own. I respect and honor their decision and I think society should applaud them for their self-knowledge.
However, this writer-acquaintance of mine was clearly implying that because I was pregnant, I had no brain and I would never produce anything as a writer ever again.
Say what?! What a bunch of malarkey!
I’ve never bought into the idea that a person had to choose between being a writer or being a parent. I can think of a whole list of authors who had children and still managed to write book after book. J.K. Rowling, Nora Roberts, Jodi Picoult, Anne Lamott, Roald Dahl, Ayelete Waldeman, Michael Chabon, Kim Stanley Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Elizabeth Strout, Jennifer Weiner, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Charles Dickens, George Sand, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., John Updike, Pat Conroy, Liane Moriarty, George Saunders, Maya Angelou, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Roddy Doyle, Eloisa James, Diablo Cody, Ali Wong—and these are just the super famous ones I can think of off the top of my head. There are plenty other authors who write for a living and still manage to pick up their child from school on time. There even an interview series called Writer Mother Monster, that is dedicated to showing that being an author and being a parent is not a binary choice.
You do not have to choose between being a parent and being an author. It is possible to do both, if that’s what you want.
However, making the time and space to write while caring for small kids at home does require a greater level of structure, self-discipline, focus, and organization. I wrote two novels before becoming a parent, and two novels after becoming a parent. Those first three books I wrote were not publishable—but the fourth one was. That book is titled, Candid Family Portrait, and it is a love story about a couple dealing with the changes in their marriage after having a child as they try to figure out how to pursue their dreams in a world that has a very narrow view of how a family should be. I wrote the book during the years when my son was 3-6 years old and published it during a pandemic. It took organization but it was possible.
In case there are other parents (or prospective parents, or writers with busy lives) out there who want to write, here are some tips for getting your first draft written.
First, understand the difference between fast and slow work strategies
A few years ago, economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote a book titled Thinking, Fast and Slow about two modes of thinking. System 1 is fast, instinctual and emotional. System 2 is slow, deliberate, and logical.
I haven’t read this book yet, but just from reading the back cover I’m pretty sure the same applies to creativity—or at least my experience of my creativity.
Fast creativity is those flashes of energy that have you running for your notebook so you can jot down an idea before it escapes. Slow creativity is the meticulous, detail-oriented trudging kind where you spend hours trying to fit a square peg into a round hole until finally, it fits. Fast creativity is a dance floor on a Saturday night; slow creativity is church on Sunday. Fast creativity thrives on distraction and chaos; slow creativity demands focus and order. Fast creativity is inspiration; slow creativity is perspiration.
Radiolab has a couple of lovely podcast episodes about creativity. The first one is titled “Me, Myself, and Muse” and includes an interview with Elizabeth Gilbert before the publication of her book, Big Magic. “Me, Myself, and Muse,” has a bunch of wonderful anecdotes of what fast creativity feels like and how a person can make space for it (and set limits on it) in their lives.
The second great Radiolab podcast on creativity is called “Radiolab Presents: TJ & Dave,” which is an interview with two improv artists, TJ Jagodowksi and David Pasquesi, who have an act where they walk on stage with no notes and no scene and just perform based on whatever comes to them in the moment. Every single night is different. The way they think of themselves is as conduits, where stories just arrive and they get to share space with them. They have a film-version of one of their shows titled Trust Us, This is All Made Up. This shows that creativity doesn’t have to be tortured or constantly revised, but you do have to be mentally present for it.
You are going to need both kinds of creativity to finish a project, but your ability to access the slow kind is probably going to depend on childcare, at some point. (Although there are plenty of workarounds if you don’t have access to childcare.) Just know that ahead of time and plan your work accordingly.
For me, fast creativity is best for getting ideas and writing first drafts, and it has been relatively easy for me to fold this type of creativity into my daily life. Slow-creativity is often about planning, rewriting, and editing, and it’s easiest for me to access that analytical part of my brain when I have large, predictable uninterrupted chunks of time. During the times in my life when childcare wasn’t available, I would get that quiet time during the couple hours in the morning when I was the first person awake in the house.
Here are some other tips on harnessing fast creativity.
Have a dedicated app on your phone where you capture ideas to be processed later. Dropbox, Evernote, Scrivener, OneNote, Apple Notes, and Google Drive are good ones because they sync between your phone and your laptop. Don’t make it too complicated for yourself. Just choose one and stick with it.
I have multiple Scrivener projects synced over Dropbox between my phone and my laptop. Each book or story idea gets its own project. One Scrivener project is just for random, unattached ideas that aren’t ready to be worked on yet: I call this my “Story Idea Factory.”
Laptops and tablets are light enough now that you could probably always keep one in your bag. It’s good to always have your project at hand in whatever room you’re in, so that you can rush over to write a sentence down as it occurs to you. I’ve written many scenes, a sentence at a time, with my laptop open in the kitchen or living room.
Analog notebooks are great too. Author Piers Anthony would handwrite his books in a notebook so that even if he were stuck waiting in the dentist’s office for 10 minutes, he could use that time to write the next paragraph or the next idea. One of the interesting things about writing longhand is that it forces your brain to think and build a story sequentially, one sentence at a time, which can be a bit like narrating a movie in your head, slowed down to one-third speed.
Paper notebooks do not need to be charged. They are not connected to the Internet or social media. They won’t beep at you or distract you with a calendar notification. Notebooks are quiet, simple, and always waiting. Other famous authors who have handwritten their first drafts are John Irving, Elmore Leonard, Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, and, of course, all the great authors of the pre-typewriter world: Charles Dickens, Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronte, Shakespeare, etc.
I also think children see you differently when you’re writing in a notebook or reading a paper book, rather than staring at your phone or a laptop. People complain about how much screen time modern children have, but I think children’s screen time is dwarfed by adult’s screen time—especially if you’re counting work and recreation. Having your children see you unplug is important. It makes your advice more credible so that conversations around technology are less of a “do as I say, not as I do” kind of thing.
For outlining or quickly jotting down ideas, I like using index cards. I get the spiral-bound kind that acts like a tiny notebook so that I don’t have any loose cards floating around and I like how the cover keeps my ideas private until I’m ready to organize them. When I’m ready to work on an idea, I can pull the cards out and sort them to see which ideas connect. I often use index cards when I’m writing an outline.
Author James Scott Bell also talks about using index cards in his writing book Plot & Structure.
David Sedaris keeps two notebooks: a small one that he always carries with him to jot down details and dialog throughout his day, and a larger journal that he uses to turn those scraps into scenes and essays. Once he has something with potential, then he moves onto a typewriter or a computer.
Pro tip: If you’re handwriting your first draft, I recommend:
using notebooks where you can pull out the pages
only writing on one side of the page
starting a new scene or chapter on a new page.
This way when it comes to editing, you can pull whole chapters out, staple them together, and re-order whole chunks of your book on the floor before you transcribe it. The reason it’s important to only write on one side of the page is in case you need to snip a scene or paragraph out of one chapter and tape it into another chapter.
Pro tip: For people who like handwriting, you might want to keep your notes, grocery list, to-do list, or journal in another notebook. Or, a neat trick is to flip your notebook upside down and write from the backside. When the front-side and back-side meet, it’s time to get a new notebook.
There’s nothing more annoying than coming up with a brilliant idea, and then forgetting where you put it, or worse—losing it. Try to clean-as-you-go by immediately putting the note in a place where you know you will find it again—even if it’s just a shoebox where you know you keep your ideas.
Your future self (your slow-creativity self) will thank you.
I keep my index card ideas in a specially-built for 3×5 cards. I have dividers for various categories, like “Dialogue,” “Anecdotes,” “Love story ideas,” “Horror story ideas,” “Favorite quotes,” “Non-fiction essay ideas,” etc. A large project, like a novel, gets its own box.
Keep your current project at the front of your mind by thinking about it first thing in the morning, and right before bed.
One of the tips I’ve found helpful was from Monica Leonelle’s book The Eight Minute Habit, which recommends spending the first eight minutes of your day—before you even get out of bed—working on your book. Dorothea Brande recommends a similar process in her classic book Becoming a Writer. There is something magical about spending the first moments of your morning thinking about your story. This practice can unlock huge amounts of creativity throughout your day.
The way I think it is that my creativity is like a winter lake that is liquid at night when I am asleep, but from the moment I wake, it begins to ice over. It’s easiest for me to break through the ice early in the morning, when I’m still relaxed and dreamy, rather than waiting later in the day for when the ice has thickened and hardened.
Also, the more days that pass between writing sessions, the harder it is for me to break through the ice and get into the flow.
In practice, I either keep a notebook beside my bed, or I have my current project synced to the iOS version of Scrivener on my phone so that when I wake up in the morning I can spend the first few minutes of my morning working on my book, rather than checking email or the news.
I recommend the Hidden Brain episode, “Creatures of Habit,” for people trying to establish a daily habit.
Set daily or weekly quotas to get your zero-draft (messy first draft) written.
A page-count quota, a word-count quota, or a time-quota.
Lots of people swear by the 250-words a day quota, which is about 1 page a day. If you write a page every single day, by the end of the year you’ll have 365-pages worth of material.
I gained a lot from being part of the Magic Spreadsheet Facebook community, which recommends 250-words, or 25-minutes a day. They created a spreadsheet that gamified daily writing so that you get points for consistency, rather than hitting high word-count numbers. The spreadsheet also has a leader-board, in case you feel like being competitive. I’m not part of the official Facebook/Google Spreadsheet group anymore, but I do keep my own private tally on my calendar. I’ve written something or “checked the box” on a writing task daily for over 1,500 consecutive days. (I learned about Magic Spreadsheet from this Mur Lafferty podcast, “At Long Last, The Magic Spreadsheet” and “The Magic Spreadsheet Returns!“.)
Accountability is a great motivator for consistency. For a while, my brother and I were playing a game with each other where I would email him my writing (or editing) for the day, and he would email me a summary of the music he composed. If either of us missed a day, we’d have to pay the other $5.
I’ve also had nice consistency from meeting friends regularly at a cafe (during pre-pandemic times) or daily over zoom. Author Anne Hawley shared her story with The Writing Room about how setting up daily writing sprints with some of her colleagues has really helped maintain consistency and motivation.
James Scott Bell likes to start his morning with a “Nifty-350” words, which he then tries to double later on in the day. He also recommends having a weekly quota, rather than a daily one, because it’s more flexible.
Elizabeth Strout would give herself a quota of 3 handwritten pages of fiction, or 3 hours spent editing. Three pages a day is also recommended by Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way morning pages practice. (Incidentally, Julia Cameron also wrote a book titled, The Artist’s Way for Parents.) I think three pages a day is probably a comfortable amount for most people to handwrite without giving themselves carpel tunnel. Higher daily word counts require more physical stamina, at which point it’s good to switch to dictation to protect your body from a repetitive stress injury.
Ray Bradbury’s quota was 1,000 words a day, or 4 pages. (Or, I’ve also heard him talk about writing a first draft of a story on Monday, the second draft on Tuesday, the third draft on Wednesday, etc. And then he’d mail it on the following Monday and go home and start a new story.)
NaNoWriMo’s quota is about 1,600 words a day, or 7 pages.
Stephen King’s quota is 2,000 words a day, or 8 pages.
Piers Anthony’s quota was 3,000 words a day, or 12 handwritten pages.
Romance writer Bella Andre would write 5,000 words a day, or 20 pages.
Science fiction and fantasy author Rachel Aaron has written a book about how she went from writing 2,000 words a day to 10,000-words a day. (Note: Rachel Aaron is also a parent.)
Some people prefer to count scenes or chapters, instead of words.
Some people prefer counting hours or “pomodoros” instead of words.
For some people, two hours a day in the chair is a solid day’s work, whether they wrote one sentence or 10 pages.
Pro tip: Write multiple times per day.
Pro tip: Rather than constantly keeping track of word counts, you can use Scrivener’s Writing History function to track your writing word counts. For people handwriting, you can just start your writing day by writing the date in the margins.
Personally, I’ve found that it’s better to have a really small quota that I know I can achieve and surpass no matter how my day is going. Mary Robinette Kowal wrote wonderful essay on having three sentences as her quota for a while because “Sometimes Writer’s Block is Really Depression.”
I like Monica Leonelle’s A-B-C method, which I read about in her book book The Eight-Minute Habit. Plan A is your ideal work day. For me, Plan A is a fully written scene that was written, edited, and is complete. (Truthfully, I almost never have Plan A days.) Plan B is your most-likely workday. For me, Plan B is part of a scene, or an outline for a scene, or an editing task, or any measurable bit of forward progress. Plan C is your “Catastrophe Plan” for what you do when your life is chaos, or you’re on vacation, and you just want to check-the-box for the day. For me, my Plan C is 15-minutes re-reading a section of the work and doing light edits, or 15-minutes freewriting trying to get myself unstuck, or planning my next scene.
Plan C days may not look like much, but they are better than nothing. I know that if I stir the pot a tiny bit each day, it’s way easier for me to eventually get back into doing Plan B and Plan A level work than if I did nothing and tried to revive a cold dish. I try to get my Plan C writing done, first thing in the morning before I get out of bed. Then, later in the day, I may plan out another writing session or two to do more.
Be like Andy Dufresne from Shawshank Redemption: just keep scratching at that tunnel and you’ll eventually bust through.
Daily quotas are not the right choice for everybody. For some people, their work schedules, family obligations, or mental chemistry doesn’t work with rigidly trying to work every single day, and trying to force themselves into being daily writers just sends them into spirals of depression or physical breakdown. In Joanna Penn’s books, The Healthy Writer and The Relaxed Author, she writes about how for the sake of your sanity and your body it’s sometimes best to just follow your life’s rhythms. Your health and your relationships are more important than some dumb quota.
Some people have long commutes and can only write on weekends, so they give themselves a weekly quota. Some people only write in November-December for NaNoWriMo and spend the rest of the year editing that NaNoWriMo novel into a publishable manuscript. Ian Flemming famously wrote his James Bond novels during his summer vacations and wouldn’t write anything else during the rest of the year.
Some writers are marathoners, and some writers are sprinters. It’s okay to make peace with how you work best. It’s important to adjust your writing practice so that it fits your actual life rather than pining for some fantasy life where you have no job, no bills, no relationship obligations, and a squadron of servants cooking your food and cleaning your house for you.
Pro tip: Whether you’re handwriting or typing, you will get stuck. Don’t panic, it happens to everybody. You can still meet your day’s word-count quota by freewriting about the problem. You keep your hand or your fingers moving as you do a focused meditation, trying to write your way through the problem. Whenever I get stuck, nine times out of ten, this exercise helps me figure out a solution and get back to writing the scene. Sometimes the fastest way to get back on the road is by pulling over to a rest stop and get your bearings. This can still count toward your word count goal, but mark it in some way, either by putting brackets around it, or by changing the font color, so that when you’re editing you can find these sections easily and delete them, or move them to a separate document. Peter Elbow, author of Writing Without Teachers and Writing with Power, talks about how these writing digressions are sometimes critical to evolution in your thinking so that your finished piece of writing is deeper and more considered than if you’d just stuck to first-level creativity.
Pro tip: Have an outline or a reverse-outline. These are two versions of the same thing. An outline (for planners) is when you plan out your big moments before you write the draft. A reverse-outline (for “pantsers”) is when you write a draft and then have a separate sheet of paper where you summarize the main event of what you just wrote into one sentence. In either case, the point of this exercise is to help you zoom out of the sentence-level writing to get a sense of the big picture and the direction the story is going. Roy Peter Clark, in his book Writing Tools, calls this “climbing up and down the ladder of abstraction.” Dean Wesley Smith also describes this reverse-outline technique in his book on discovery writing, Writing into the Dark: How to Write a Novel Without an Outline.
Pro tip: Don’t lose the flow of writing your first draft by researching every little detail on the Internet. Rather than pausing in your story to look up a street name or car model or what type of tree grows in Florida, just write your question or guess in brackets and move on with the scene. Fixing those small details is a good warm-up or editing activity to do later.
Pro tip: Use a sand timer. I learned about this technique from science-fiction writer, Mary Robinette Kowal. Like her, I have one that’s 15 minutes, because I know that the hardest part of my writing is usually within the first fifteen minutes. I sit down to write, and all of a sudden I have to pee, or look up something on the Internet, or get a glass of water. Usually if I am just in one place for 15 minutes, I’ll get into the flow my desire to run away from my desk goes away. The benefit of a sand timer, as opposed to something that makes noise, is that it is silent and once I enter the flow of my writing it won’t beep and distract me. For my first writing sprint, I am not allowed to follow any of those urges until the sand timer is up. Thirst can wait 15 minutes. Go to the bathroom before you start the sand timer. ;-)
The sand timer is an especially helpful negotiation tool for writing around toddlers and teaching them patience. Small children don’t understand time, but they do understand a physical sand timer where sand from the top has to get down to the bottom. Sand timers can be used for quiet time, or teaching kids how to take turns, or helping them build a daily reading habit. You can say to a kid, “While the sand timer is going, it’s my turn to work. When the sand timer is up, then it is your turn again and we can play.” The sand timers are great.
Most phones have built-in speech-to-text, or you can subscribe to a dedicated app like DragonAnywhere or Descript.
Dictation is great for when your hands are busy, but you have a bit of quiet…like when you’re folding laundry while the kids are napping, or when you’re taking a walk while the kids are in a stroller.
The high words-per-hour of dictation means you can accomplish a lot more in a short amount of time than you could handwriting or typing. For example, you can dictate a 1,500-word scene in about half an hour, whereas that same scene might take 3 hours if you were typing it.
If you want to read more about dictation, I recommend the following resources:
Joanna Penn’s website has a great overview about dictation.
There is a learning curve to dictation (just as there was a learning curve to learning cursive, or learning how to type). It can feel awkward at first to speak the punctuation phrases, but after a while, it will feel normal. You can practice using speech-to-text software by reading aloud from a favorite book, or as a way to transcribe something you’ve handwritten. (I still like to read-aloud a scene from a favorite book as a vocal warm-up before I start my own dictation session.)
From there, you can start capturing notes and eventually dictating first drafts.
My favorite way to dictate a scene is to write an outline ahead of time and then go on an exercise walk for 20-40 minutes, speaking the scene aloud. Sometimes I like using Christopher Downing’s loop-method of performing the scene in 2-minute, 5-minute, and 20-minute versions.
For extra credit, I’d do the “one out,” “one back” technique where I’d dictate one scene on my out-going walk, and then turn around and dictate a second scene on my walk back home.
(Note: As of 2021, Dragon Naturally Speaking only transcribes MP3 recordings in their Windows version of the software. Their Mac version was discontinued a few years ago. Mac/iPhone users can use their DragonAnywhere app, but this only works if you have an internet connection, which kind of defeats the purpose of going on a walk-and-talk. I haven’t used Descript yet, but I believe they can transcribe MP3s. Or, you can use whatever speech-to-text software your phone comes with.)
One of my favorite parts of dictation is that it can turn into improv-acting, where you can move around and can take on the voices and physical mannerisms of the different characters in your story.
Dictation has some downsides, though. Here are some of the hard lessons I’ve learned around dictation:
I prefer to dictate when I’m alone, but I’m rarely alone—The process of getting into character and walking around the living room doing voices is so embarrassing that I prefer to have zero witnesses. This isn’t really feasible during a pandemic when we are working, homeschooling, and always hanging out together. The way I’ve gotten around this is to dictate either early in the morning when my family is still asleep, or while I’m outside walking the dog.
The high word count and ease of creating first drafts has made me spoiled—Writers can get overly attached and superstitious about their favorite pen, or their favorite typewriter…and when their favorite tool isn’t available they can become blocked. For me, I got this way around dictation. I’ve fallen into the trap of thinking, “If I can’t write 3,000 words in one hour…why bother?” The best tool for the job is the one that has me practicing my craft consistently, diligently. My most important writing tool is my brain, not my phone, dummy!
I shouldn’t don’t edit as I dictate—the whole beauty of dictation is that is only for first-draft work. Trying to fix dictation errors while dictating will just cause the software to glitch, the phone to crash, and then to lose everything. I’ve found it’s best to work in two separate phases: the dictation phase, and the clean-up/editing phase. I have found that whatever time I spent dictating a scene will probably be the same for editing that scene. If a scene took me 30 minutes to dictate than it will probably take me 30-60 minutes to edit into a polished draft.
It’s better to “do another take” than it is to try to edit a scene that didn’t work—Sometimes the messy first draft really is too messy to bother editing. When that’s the case, it’s better and faster to just create a new outline and dictate the scene over from scratch.
“If a short story doesn’t pour smooth from the start, then it never will.”
John Updike
“The essence of editing is easy come easy go. Unless you can really say to yourself, ‘What the hell. There’s plenty more where that came from, let’s throw it away,’ you can’t really edit. You have to be a big spender, not a tight-ass.”
Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers
I shouldn’t wait too long between dictation and editing sessions.—Don’t dictate a whole book and think to yourself, “Right. Now I have a first draft and all I have to do is edit it!” I did that and it was a huge mistake! I dictated a 100,000 word “book” in 30 days and then spent 2.5 years trying to edit that monster into a novel. It was terrible. I should’ve abandoned those 100,000 words and re-dictated the book over from the beginning with an entirely new outline (this is ultimately what I did, and what became Candid Family Portrait). Sunk cost fallacy is a bitch. (For more on when to quit and when to stick, I recommend reading The Dip by Seth Godin.)
When I wrote Candid Family Portrait, there were large sections of it that were dictated. I learned my lesson to keep my writing/editing loops short. I’d outline a chapter, dictate it, then edit it. Only when the chapter was finished would I allow myself to work on the next chapter.
My dictation scene-editing process is now this:
Copy the dictated words into Scrivener
Check my Story Grid Spreadsheet to fill out the five commandments based on what I might’ve learned from my dictation session (I keep this in the Metadata of my Scrivener file)
Separate each chunk of text into labeled beats explaining the tone/purpose of the beat (“stranger knocks at the door,” “ring around the Rosie,” “first kiss,” “running from love,” etc.)
Highlight each beat and do a front-to-back edit/rewrite/clean-up of the scene so that it flows and there are no dictation errors
Read it through. Delete my beat-labels. Highlight any names, places, or timeline details in case they need to be changed later.
Fill in the entirety of my Story Grid spreadsheet metadata. Change the label to “First draft done.”
I use the “Custom metadata” section of Scrivener to set up my Story Grid spreadsheet questions.
At this point, my first drafts are pretty clean because each scene goes through 3-9 cycles of editing before I consider it a professional first draft. My criteria for a working-first-draft scene is that it has all five commandments in it, there are no dictation errors or sentence fragments, it moves the story forward, it reads like its own mini-story, and I wouldn’t feel totally embarrassed if someone read it as-is.
Stay tuned for a future blog post on Slow Creativity strategies for parents.
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