I have leveled up in Pilates. There’s an exercise called ‘the Teaser’, which, at the beginning level, consists of lying on your back with your legs at a 45 degree angle, feet against a wall. You elevate your feet slightly so they’re no longer against the wall, and then, using your stomach muscles only–ie, without throwing your head and shoulders forward for momentum, which is the tricky part–you roll up until you’re sitting on your bottom and have brought your arms into parallel with your legs:
It’s startlingly hard, by far the most difficult of the beginner-level exercises I’ve been doing, and until Tuesday I’d never actually been able to pull myself up onto my tailbone. I could get the small of my back a little ways off the floor, but I couldn’t get up to the full V. Now I can! Level up!
It doesn’t mean I’m starting on the intermediate stuff, though (although I’m doing a number of the exercises at the intermediate level). I think what I’ll start doing is going through this routine twice when I do it. After a month of that I’ll probably be able to manage more of the intermediate exercises (of which there are twice as many).
First of all, I’m very sorry about the shoulder/arm/wrist/hand pain thing. My wife had two surgeries on her elbows, sort of a cyber tennis elbow thing if you can believe it! Repetitive stress injuries seem to abound around computers. I get shoulder pains myself from too much typing time at the keyboard. You’ve been very frank about the financial side of your writing, and I wonderhow large an impact a 6 month recovery period would have on you? I grok the schedule you have set yourself, especially given all the projects you seem to have in the air at the same time. Could you even take 6 months off and keep your sanity?!? :) Methinks you are they type of person that needs the stimulation and ability to express your imagination! On a technical note, have you ever tried Dragon Dictate? It is speech recognition software that converts your speech into text. Certainly not 100% perfect, but kinda sorta. It might be enough to give your joints and tends a break! (P(pun intended!)
I have no idea if I could actually take six months off, mentally. I’d assume that if not, it was because my brain recovered sooner than that… :)
Financially…well, for example: if I could really pour it on over the next 3 months and finish *both* the books I still have due this year, I could take the remainder of the year off without any financial hit. That’s the only way, practically speaking, that I could accomplish such a thing in the next 12 months. Following that, well, next year I only have one book due so far, but if that doesn’t change, yeah, financial implications. So it’d be a balancing act, and of course force-writing 2 books in 3 months wouldn’t really be all that good for my brain. Clearly I need to hit the NYT Bestseller list, or win the lottery. :)
I think writing with Dragon Dictate or other speech-recognition software would be such a very different process that it would take months to get anything like enough accustomed to it to make it work, and that’s nevermind the ramp-up time of simply accustomizing the software to my speech. I don’t really consider it an option right now.
Yeah, that was what I discovered very quickly when I was given Dragon Dictate to try. I found my process was too much mental and finger driven to talk it out, and hearing the mistakes the program made! OMG! I totaly lost any flow as I had to g back and fix each one right then, if not sooner! *GRIN* I never did get it working well enough and just left it idle.