Greetings, writers—
I’m writing this post while walking on my treadmill desk, which I bought a few years ago under the mistaken impression that it would change my life. Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (a great book), swore by her treadmill desk somewhere (maybe a Facebook post?) and my friend April Henry, author of many excellent bestselling YA mysteries, loves hers too, although she also loves Brazilian jujitsu (which is “wrestling + choking + joint locks,” apparently) and is often covered in bruises so idk how much we should trust her; anyway, I bought one (used) and was really into it for a good portion of 2019.
But I was working on two books at the same time that year, and raising tweens and teaching and all of that, and after a while, walking while writing started to gross me out. I felt like the message this practice was sending me (or that I was sending myself, I suppose) was that one ought to work and exercise at the same time, because that was True Productivity, and that if one sat on a couch to edit a chapter, one was truly a lazy sloth.
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