Morning Pages for the Writer

If one thing is vital to a writer's day, it is the morning pages. It helps absolutely. Whether you call it Morning Pages, or Novel Diary, it jump starts a writer's day. In the morning when you haven't primed yourself up yet, and you are groggy from sleep, you need this.

I've been practicing writing the Morning Pages, and it has worked wonders. I get more easily and quickly attuned to a writer's mindset. I get focused in what I need to do during the day. I can make a link with the previous day's work, and then continue from there.

Just as a journal can be useful to any person, these pages are useful to a writer. I am a living proof. They are even more needed after a weekend, when I don't write, to go back to the working mode. I forget my work during the weekend, which I devote to my family. So, getting back to work on Monday is a bit tough.

I have to orient myself to the stream of thought. I have to pick up from where I'd left. The novel's complexity comes back when I delve deep into myself, and that I can do when I write my pages.

Sleepless in Santa Barbara

It's been more than a year now. Sleep has not been coming to me as it used to. The day I landed in LA and rode the car home, jet lag engulfed me. It stayed with me a long time, more than the normal 15 days. Almost after a month my body had adjusted to the new biological clock.

But sleep has not become regular, even after that. I'm more active during nighttime here, which used to be my daytime earlier. And I feel sleepy and lethargic during daytime, which used to be my nighttime there.

Now another factor had added to it. Tons and tons of endless dreams. Such complicated dreams. That would have been okay, if I had forgotten about them when I woke up. But I remember these dreams, much of them, with all the intricate twists and turns. Like watching a movie, I see dreams every night.

The result is that I wake up unrested, and sleepy. Getting up from bed is tough, and the morning is a torture. I've reached such a point that now I have to do something about it. Get good quality sleep. At some point in time, I used to sleep so soundly, and now, I don't. this is unbelievable to me.

I'm taking various steps so that I get better sleep. Like making my room as dark as I can, eating food much before going to bed, taking a warm shower in late evening, quietening the mind to give a cue to sleep, developing sleep rituals...

Hope I get a good night's sleep tonight, tomorrow, and every night.

Yes, it is about Food!

The last few weeks had been an intense probing into my diet, routine, exercise, my sleep pattern, bicycling, yoga. But first and foremost, about cutting down calories. I've been gaining weight, and the first thing I wanted to do was to get back to normal range, which would be 105 pounds.

That my current weight in 130 lb and BMI 24 has done little to elevate my mood about my situation. No one needs to point me out that I needed to do it in earnest. That it should be a war effort, that I really needed to motivate myself to eat less, and that if I wanted to avoid a pre-diabetic state, I must buck up to work hard.

And so here I am, maintaining a food diary diligently. For every piece of cake, breakfast cereal, every morsel of rice, every glass of juice, I have entered the calorie values against them on a page of my notebook.

I can hardly see any difference in me since I started this activity, and I am about to lose enthusiasm. Eating less has not lowered my weight fast and drastically, I way I want. It has been extremely slow. It has taken me weeks to lower 3 lbs. Is that good enough? When would I get to 105 lb? That goal seems very far away.