Something bad tends to happen when you write a book, at least to me.  I write part time in the evenings after my girls go to bed, which means I usually get in between 2 and 3 hours before realizing that I’ve stayed up too late.  So sleep deprivation is certainly one consequence of writing, but something else is even worse.

It took me about five months to write my first book Breakthrough, and about four months to write the second, called Amid the Shadows.  Then of course the editing and refining process takes about another month, which incidentally always reminds me what an angel my wife is.  So let’s call it five or six months of non-stop, part time writing per book, with lack of sleep plaguing you throughout.  The bigger problem for me though, is lack of exercise.

Now please don’t confuse what I mean here, I do not mean lack of movement.  I do have a day job and family so I’m not “Velcroed” to the chair.  But unless he or she is suffering from writer’s block, writers are always eager to get the next chapter or scene down on paper (so to speak).  This means that exercise, or in my case running, tends to take a back seat in the schedule.  And if you are an adult, you’ve probably already started to question why we seem to lose endurance so much faster than we did when we were younger.  Be that as it may, five or six months of writing, and sporadic exercise at best, tends to leave me feeling an awful lot like…I don’t know, a slug.

So while my beta readers have told me that Amid the Shadows has an amazing story line, I’m now left with a much bigger task ahead of me, getting back in shape.  And we all know how much fun that is.  The bottom line here is…I think I know how Jabba the Hutt got that way.