Get Up and Move

Rebecca Carey Lyles

I’m sitting in a chair as I write this, but I shouldn’t be. Why? Because a recent Swedish study concluded we need to move every few minutes to maintain our health. So, I just stood up, touched my toes five times and did a couple lunges. Now, I’m back at it. ☺

The Swedish study, combined with others, found that lack of movement is harmful to our health. Dr. Peter Katzmarzyk of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University, says, “Sitting is a risk factor, not a disease. It's comparable to obesity, and it's almost to the level of smoking.” Dr. Joseph Mercola of mercola.com writes: “Mounting research suggests that even if you exercise regularly, you might still succumb to the ill effects of too much sitting.” What are those ill effects? Heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, stroke, shortened lifespan... Shortened lifespan? Yikes!

For years, we’ve been told regular exercise leads to improved health. If you’re like me, you’re thinking, I exercise every day for at least half an hour. Isn’t that enough? Evidently not—because, as the authors of the Swedish study point out, no matter how vigorously we exercise, that burst of exertion only involves a tiny portion of our 24-hour day. Dr. Mercola explains the problem by quoting David Dunstan of the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia. He says the lack of muscle contraction caused by sitting decreases blood flow throughout our bodies, thereby “reducing the efficiency of biological processes.”

I hate to say this, but housekeeping is good for us, as are washing cars, raking leaves, mowing lawns and tending gardens. Your house may be spotless, like mine (just joking…), and your hubby mows the lawn; plus, he takes the car to the carwash. What can we do around the house (or the office) to move our muscles?

Dr. Mercola sets an online timer to ring every 15 minutes. He takes a 30-60 second standing break and may do stretches or squats or posture exercises. If your house or building has stairs, you could run up and down a couple times and do some calf stretches—or heel stretches on one stair. Those with wood or tile floors might slide or skip around the house (or the office, if you’re daring).

Sweep your front porch. Do jumping jacks on your deck. Set your laptop or tablet on a counter and work while standing. Use a door frame to stretch arm and shoulder muscles. Yoga moves and isometric exercises are also great options. Even standing and rolling your head from side to side can be beneficial.

In nonmedical terminology from a nonmedical person, I think the idea is to keep our blood flowing. Remember, writers’ brains crave fresh blood as much as our muscles do. Stand up, stretch, march in place, sit down and write!

SOURCES

http://www.ajc.com/news/lifestyles/health/sitting-too-much-may-shorten-lifespan/nQW8b/

http://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitness/archive/2013/12/13/sitting-standing-up.aspx

http://uber-facts.com/2012/02/22/every-hour-of-television-you-watch-shortens-life-by-22-minutes/

http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2013/10/08/bjsports-2012-092038.abstract?sid=521f8371-5bde-4946-9207-f1c5d78ce6df

http://phys.org/news199011576.html

About Becky:

Rebecca Carey Lyles grew up in Wyoming, the setting for her Kate Neilson novels. She currently lives in Idaho, where she serves as an editor and a mentor for aspiring authors and as a coach for women transitioning from prison to life on “the outside.” Her most recent book, Winds of Freedom, is the sequel to the award-winning first novel in the Kate Neilson series, Winds of Wyoming. She recently served as an editor and contributor for a short-story collection titled Passageways, which is scheduled to release next month.

About Winds of Freedom:

Winter storms blast across the Whispering Pines Guest Ranch, and a cold wind blows through Kate Neilson’s soul. Despite her pain, Kate’s well-being takes a backseat to the needs of loved ones: her best friend, who’s been ensnared by evil; her failing great-aunt, whose dementia care keeps Kate guessing; and Laura and Mike Duncan, whose ranch and livelihood are threatened by a land-grabbing neighbor.

Connect with Becky:

http://www.beckylyles.com

beckylyles@beckylyles.com

Facebook: Rebecca Carey Lyles

  or Becky Carey Lyles

Twitter: @BeckyLyles

Stringing Pearls, Sipping Tea, Peppermints and Jungle Gardenia

By JoAnn Durgin

As much as writing fiction is a driving passion at this stage of my life, I adore the opportunity to occasionally write about my “real life.”

Of course, many of my experiences have eventually found their way into a book. As such, I believe they lend a certain depth of realism that resonates with the reader. Both good and bad, bittersweet or joyous, my unique memories have shaped me into the woman I am today. I’d like to share with you some memories of my Granny, my Dad’s mother. I am independent like Granny. My daughter, Chelsea, resembles her physically and I can see my grandmother in my daughter’s smile. Granny taught me to be strong in the face of adversity and follow my dreams. I like to think I inherited some of her creativity and sense of humor, as well as her positivity and optimism.

When I was three, my parents divorced—a still rather uncommon event at that time. As she tells it, my mom was tired of my Dad’s “ridiculous dreams,” including his elaborate plans to build a bomb shelter in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis and his proclivity to chain smoke cigarettes. In some ways, I’m not sure he knew how to be a father. But in the quiet ways, he showed us he loved us by building things with his hands, including an elaborate dollhouse for me, complete with working electricity and chandeliers hand-beaded by Granny.

After they divorced, Daddy picked up my older brother and me on alternate weekends and he’d take us to visit Granny (with whom he lived at the time) a few miles away. She lived in an old but well-maintained two-story white house on Utica Pike, a narrow, two-lane road and homes with long, gravel driveways and sweeping front yards dotted with large weeping willow and gorgeous mimosa trees. We’d bake apple pies with fruit we picked in the backyard, string pearls, sip iced tea on the screened-in summer porch. My brother and I played with some of the same toys that belonged to my dad and his two brothers—antique toy soldiers probably worth a small fortune today. We listened to her stories of our grandfather’s and father’s respective stints in the Army and heard many a tale about the great flood of ’37 (the “big one” that destroyed their favorite puppet show theatre). Stories of when the Ohio River froze over and they could slip and slide from Indiana to Kentucky. Tales of the Happy Hunting Grounds, her term for Heaven. Granny smelled of peppermints and Jungle Gardenia. She wore handknitted dresses she made with her increasingly arthritic hands. And she had a stole made from a real fox—head included—that scared us to death.

Some of my sweetest memories are sitting in her front yard, cheering on the Belle of Louisville steamboat as it raced Cincinnati’s Delta Queen on the Ohio River in late April, a week or two before the Kentucky Derby each year. When I was seven, Granny took me to the National Doll Club Convention, held in Louisville that year. I’ll admit I was embarrassed to be dressed up like a doll. Even had a write-up in the local newspaper, “Living Doll Attends Doll Show” featuring a photo of me in the dress she made and my doll with a matching outfit. I’ll never forget the pride in Granny’s voice as she introduced me to her doll club collector friends and bragged about how talented and special I was. She believed in me, and I’ll never forget that.

By this time, Daddy had remarried and, for various reasons, there was a period of time when we didn’t see him—or Granny—as much. Before I knew it, I’d graduated from high school and then college and moved to Dallas, independent and ready to greet the world and make my mark. I saw Granny every time I came home for the holidays and she was spunky and active as ever although she’d finally moved into a retirement center. She was born for a place like that. When she started painting in her 70s or thereabouts, she called herself a “Grandma Moses wannabe.” Granny lived the type of life all of us would wish—rich and full with laughter, faith, family and friends. She had a heart attack at 82, and the Lord kept her around long enough to gather her three boys beside her to tell them she loved them before she made the leap into the Happy Hunting Grounds and onto the next adventure.

Yes, Granny had a very strong influence on the woman I am today, the mother I am today and yes, the writer I am today. If you’ve read my debut novel, Awakening, you might recognize my heroine Lexa’s grandmother, Nana, down to the details of stringing pearls and sipping tea on the summer porch. And yes, even a mention of the Happy Hunting Grounds. She taught me that—with the Lord’s help—I could do whatever I wanted. Dream big. And so I did.

I trust you have a “Granny” in your life, whether in cherished memories or beside you to hold your hand and help you see the best in people and life’s situations, both good and bad.

Sleep well, Granny. I love you dearly, and I’ll see you again one day.

Blessings, friends. Matthew 5:16

JoAnn lives with her husband, Jim, and three children in her native southern (stress that part) Indiana. She's a full-time estate administration paralegal by day and contemporary Christian romance author by night. Daydreams, the fourth in her popular Lewis Legacy Series, just released from Torn Veil Books. Meet Me Under the Mistletoe, a Christmas novella from Pelican Group/White Rose Publishers, released in late 2012, as well as Please, a short fiction piece in I Choose You, an anthology of love stories released in late 2012 from Oak Tara Publishers. She'd love to hear from you via her website at www.joanndurgin.com or on Facebook at her Author JoAnn Durgin page.
Note: This was originally published on Christine Lindsay's blog on March 4, 2013.

YOUCH, My Aching Fingers!

By David Crabtree

Baseball, basketball, hockey, piano, guitar, woodworking, wrenching on airplanes, all the other stuff you do with your hands, and finally age. I figured out why my fingers ache after working on the computer for a few hours. I now take salmon oil supplements, Glucosamine, Chondroitin, and MSM to help the old joints, and it seems to be working. Or is it the fact that I'm not actually typing as much as I used to. The bulk of my daily keyboarding, which is not an Olympic sport for some reason, had been during my afternoon writing time. My usual routine would be to review the previous days typing, clearing obvious errors, and then set off, not tickling the keyboard, but coming very close to assaulting it.

I remember the day as if it was, oh, back in 2010, when I first saw the ad for Dragon Naturally Speaking. I checked it out, saved my pennies, and ordered it. It has been one of the best things I have ever done for my writing. Yes, there is a learning curve, but there always is with anything new. This curve is rather short. Installation is easy and there are a few basic commands that you need to know. The most important thing is learning to speak distinctly. Having been trained at broadcasting school gave me a bit of an edge, but the old adage “use it or lose it” applies to announcers as well as singers. Once you train the program to recognize the way you speak, you will learn to “talk” the words that are in your head rather than write them. Describing a room or the weather becomes much easier without the mechanics of typing. It will seem odd at first to speak punctuation, or have to provide an instruction to start a new sentence but “new line,” “open quote”, and “undo” will soon become second nature and roll off your tongue as easily as the title to your favorite song.

Now for the disclaimer. No voice recognition software will ever totally replace your connection to a keyboard of some kind. At least not in my lifetime. I find editing much faster with the mouse and keyboard when it comes to correcting minor problems or even adding new thoughts. But while editing I have the program active, and my microphone ready just in case I want to add a larger thought. There are also quirks. For example, if you are telling about a sailor that is getting some “new line” you get….a new line on your page. You cannot say “new rope” because there is no rope on a ship. So there are some things to get used to, and to laugh about.

Whatever we can do to make our passion to write more enjoyable, we should seek out. I liked my ole’ Smith Corona portable typewriter, but I wouldn’t think of using it to write with when so many better options are available. I can speak into my phone or my tape recorder when I have an idea or a scene that comes to mind when I’m out and about, then download those recordings directly to text. There are just so many ways for us to write and I sometimes wonder what is on the horizon.

David

I am the youngest of three sons and was born in upstate New York. My mother, an immigrant whose family escaped from Germany in the mid-1930s, became a registered nurse. My father, a Mainer and noted architect, moved to the young family to a suburban town outside of Boston, Massachusetts. While taking night classes at Boston University in order to get into their School of Communications  I was advised that my draft number was about to come up. So, including a year in Vietnam, I spent 10 years in the Air Force before going to work for a number of commercial airlines in the production and materials management areas. Later, as the airline business waned, I moved into technical writing. Currently I work as a consultant in the security field and write. I have been married for over 40 years and have one married daughter.

Writing seems to have been a part of my life. From an early age, I would make up stories or write songs, but rarely keep them. The urge finally got to me and I have actively written since the early 70s. I also have been a writer and editor on numerous organizational publications, newsletters and technical manuals. “Destiny and Decision” was my first full-length novel written for publication and is the first in the “Wands of Merlin” series.  I also expound on some daily topics at www.dkcrabtree.wordpress.com

I enjoy a wide variety of leisure activities including riding my motorcycle, leather work, and photography. Some of my photographs can be seen in the Gallery section of my website www.dcrabtree.com or at my blog www.krabtree.blogspot.com  

Books by David K. Crabtree currently available in print or Kindle.

My Back Pages

 by Jim Carey

As I sit here, trying to write this article, my mind wanders to the process that brought me to this point. I have a published novel that I am learning how to market and a second novel in the works. People are now referring to me as an author and a writer. I find it all a bit surreal, especially when people ask me to sign a copy of my book.

My writing career had a less than auspicious beginning start. It began during my junior year in high school when I enrolled in a creative writing class. I took this class partly because it sounded like fun, but mostly because I thought it would be easy. That was my criteria for picking electives back then. Being easy was the best reason I could think of for taking most classes. Unfortunately, I quickly learned that writing is not always fun and it is definitely not easy. Back then I had one rule I followed diligently and that was “why do it today when it can be put off until tomorrow?” As I’m sure you can guess, following that rule often got me into some trouble.

My performance in that creative writing class was rather lack luster until we were given the assignment of writing an original poem. My situation quickly went from indifferent to awful. Being true to my rule, I waited until homeroom on the day it was due to begin writing my masterpiece. As I sat there watching the minutes tick by, panic began to set in. Creative writing was my first period class, so homeroom period was my only chance to get it done. Nothing was coming to me until I looked out the window and found my inspiration. I finished my poem in less than ten minutes and entitled it “Green, Green Grass”.

Feeling quite satisfied with my effort, I turned it in on time and then completely put it out of my mind. Three days later I walked into my writing class and saw that my poem was on the “overhead projector” (you remember those, right?). I sat down, knowing that there was no way this was good to turn out well for me. Once class began, our teacher began going over my poem. It quickly became apparent that there was not one thing right about my poem and lots of things very wrong. Soon the whole class was laughing and I was trying to disappear under my desk in embarrassment. I’m sure it wasn’t hard for everyone to figure out who the guilty party was.

I’ll give you that the teacher could probably have been a bit more diplomatic in her approach to my poem, but in her defense everything she said about it was true. For example, the poem was about thirty words long and twenty of them were the word “green”. What I got out of all that was that I had written the worst poem ever and I swore that I’d never write anything creative again.

I held onto that belief until my early forties when I began to feel an ever growing need to express myself creatively. I tried a few drawing and painting classes, but the results of those attempts were not good for my ego. Having been born tone deaf, I also knew music was not an option. I felt as if I’d hit a brick wall.

Just when I was ready to retire from the creative life for the second time, I began having very vivid dreams. I resisted them for a time, but they kept reoccurring and I began to sense that I was supposed to write these dreams down. One morning I did just that and I haven’t stopped since. My first attempts were rough and almost unreadable, but I kept at it and my writing has improved. This process continues to work for me to this day - so much so that I often feel much more comfortable referring to myself as a storyteller than as a writer. What an interesting time in life this has become and I am very thankful for the experience.

To close, I’d like to quote a line from a Grateful Dead song: My friends,” What a long strange trip its been”.

 ECHOES FROM HOME

Set in the time period of the Civil war, this historically edited novel follows a young man named Joshua Miller who, along with his best friend Monte, decides to show loyalty to the South by joining the Morgan County Scouts, a small cavalry unit based out of Alabama. Certain that the boys of the Confederacy would beat the Yanks and be back home in no time, Joshua leaves behind his mother, his beloved fiancée Missy Sue, and his boyhood dog named Blue to seek  the adventure and glories of war. As this coming of age story unfolds, the readers follow the characters through both the human and the soldier’s perspectives of the main battles of the Western theater of the Civil War. Letters sent between Joshua and Missy Sue at first share excitement and anticipation and then ultimately the disillusionment, heartache and true horrors of this time in American history. As the war dragged on and the imagined glorified life of adventure turned into the harsh realities of war, the boys became conflicted with the very concept of what exactly they were fighting for. What started out as a grand adventure became a series of very powerful lessons in hardship and courage, love and loss.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Echoes from Home is the first novel published by author Jim Carey. A social worker, then a chiropractor by training, writing has been a passion for Jim for the past twenty years. Jim describes himself as a story teller.  His interest in the Civil War started early. After seeing Jimmy Stewart’s movie Shenandoah at the age of six, Jim became fascinated with the Civil War. As the years passed, playing with toy soldiers became part of his past, but his interest with the Civil War continued. For years Jim planned to one day write a book that would be a typical civil war story filled with names and places, battles, dates and divisions, but shortly after the writing began, the character of Joshua Miller started to fully develop and he began to realize that the Civil War was to be the backdrop for the life story of this young man and his friends as they journeyed through these powerful events in American history. Jim’s next project will be a collection of short stories based on the Civil War, tentatively entitled The High Price of Freedom.