August 5 – On Writing & Exercise

In his keynote speech at the end of the Saturday session of the Writer’s Digest Annual Conference, mystery writer Harlan Coben quoted Dorothy Parker, who said among other things, “I hate writing. I love having written.” He also quoted Cher, but that’s besides the point. I love writing, have a problem with finishing, but it makes me love the having written part even more so. This will now explain why I missed the weekend blog post altogether. I was a first time attendee at this most wonderful conference. It’s not my first writers’ conference by any means, but it was the best, hands down. Not all the sessions I sat through were hits, but even those were not too bad. The keynotes were entertaining and inspiring. Harlan Coben was hilarious, and I do love to laugh. He was sandwiched between Dani Shapiro on Friday, whose tale of becoming a published author was fascinating, and quite different from Kimberla Lawson Roby’s closing keynote address in which she told of trying unsuccessfully to end a successful book series over the objections of her readers.

One of the session speakers mentioned writers getting their best ideas in the shower, and my mind’s jaw dropped. I do that. And it’s awfully inconvenient. I could keep a pad and pen in the bathroom, as I am a pen and paper kind of gal, but water is water and made all the worse by my being left-handed, and there’s no getting around having my best ideas looking like nothing more than a big blop on a page. There was one class on blogging – Blog Your Way to a Book Deal, which was interesting but not why I’m doing this, even though my play’s next final revision is coming along, and I have two stories and the plots of three others in the erotic murder mystery compilation I started (don’t ask why, it just came kind of naturally to me), and will probably, hopefully do some self-promotion here one day. But I’m just blogging because I love to write, because I love music, and because I have found that the exercise routine is not just physically beneficial, it’s mentally beneficial as well, and is like meditation in motion that’s unfortunately too often negated by the five days of the week I spend at the office. I just wish I had thought of this much, much sooner.

So, I didn’t exercise either this past weekend, unless you count the numerous stairs I climbed in the subway, rather than taking the escalator, and the stairs up and down for one and two half days, from the mezzanine to the second floor of the hotel that hosted the conference. I do. And speaking of exercise, I have found out that the floor exercise in which I have excelled from two sets of twelve repetitions to two sets of 30-72 repetitions (a repetition in my world is one elbow to one knee) is called cycling cross crunches. Impressive sounding, isn’t it? Anyway, the conference was a distraction from the music and exercise and memories project and I am just getting back into it. We still have more Fleetwood Mac to go and I apologize for the delay. But it was worth it. It was such a positive energy and I just love being around writers. And Btw – I can now write and exercise at the same time, though it may not be legible to anyone but me, and sometimes not even then.