Today’s café is all exposed brickwork, Ben Lee on the stereo, and hipsters who look like extras in an Edwin Sharp and the Magnetic Zero’s video clip. We may be one bearable cup of coffee away from finding my regular writing spot on the way to the office.
Interesting side-note: one of the first things I said to my partner, after taking the BWF job, is “I’m not fit enough to do this job at the moment.” I’m waddling around with about 15 extra covid kilos, with no real cardio in my life beyond the occasional walk to the post-office. At the same time, running events is physically gruelling—you don’t need to be a marathon runner or gym buff, but you spend a lot of time on your feet and deal with a lot of different things at once. The cortisol build-up in your system is intense, and the physical fatigue is real.
I’ve made the mistake of running one event while deep in couch potato mode, and it was painful enough that I never want to do it again.
(My coffee just arrived—it’s above average. And the music has been a series of great songs, with a side of the totally-not-my-jam John Butler Trio, but I can probably forgive that choice so long as it’s not endemic on a day-to-day level)
Normally, by the time I’m running event, I’m walking an hour and a half a day to get my cardio up and paying at least some attention to what I eat. And when I got home from work yesterday, it turns out my fears were well-founded: a full day at the office had sapped my energy to the point where I ate dinner, played with the cat for a few minutes, and crawled into bed.
Which is… not going to fit with the rough plan I need to follow if I want to keep all things Brian Jar, PhD, and writing running smoothly.
I think Jeff VanderMeer was the first person to really advocate looking after your health to keep your writing running smoothly (in the rather spectacular BookLife, which every writer should probably read at least once). I was pretty good at it for a while, but the last three years basically kicked around those habits, despite my best intention to get back to walking and thinking a little harder about food.
So a big part of the new routine is fitting daily walking into the schedule, usually in the form of a fifty-minute walk from the office to home (pro-tip from my health blogging days: healthy habits that build on existing routines are much easier to follow than “go to the gym, lard ass”).
Today, my aching legs and fuzzy head are gnawing on another piece of advice: build the well before you need the water. I’m paying a toll for ignoring that right now.
And yet, I’m not sure I would have dug the well if it wasn’t for this push. Water may be fundamental, but you can adopt some really shitty approaches to hydration when you feel like you don’t have the spoons (or the necessity) to engage the time-consuming-but-sensible choice.
