This is my current writing station at home. If you’ll notice, there’s a big grey ball instead of a desk chair. It’s the same at work, where I webmaster all day long.

Writing is such a sedate job that its actually dangerous to your health. If you, like me, get so wrapped up in what you’re doing that you constantly discover you’d been sitting still for four hours straight, all that sitting can end up shortening your life. If you don’t believe me, Google it.

After several false starts, I have finally made myself replace my big comfy desk chairs with big inflated exercise balls. I did this both at home and at work. Now instead of just sitting like a lump, typing (or more likely, staring at the screen) I bounce around to music. I chair dance. I wiggle around. I lift my legs up and try to balance.

End result, I’m constantly moving, constantly using my core muscles, and after only a few weeks I feel stronger, I can do more sit-ups, I can walk farther without tiring, and during my physical a few days ago my doctor said I was in much better health than the last time she’d seen me.

It’s not replacing actual exercise, but it’s making me feel much more able and willing to go get actual exercise.

I don’t mean this to be all preachy and s**t, I just wanted to share something that’s working for me, in case it will help someone else as well.

Yep, that’s about it.

How, exactly, does one go about stumbling across a large list of pangrams? Why, by not looking where one’s going, of course. Walking while texting is a good example. Bam! Face first right into a giant page of pangrams you didn’t even know was there.

Or, actually, here:  Pangrams – with thanks to David Lemon & Elzo Smid

My favorites:

“Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim.” (The shortest.)

“The five boxing wizards jump quickly.”

“Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.”

“Many-wived Jack laughs at probes of sex quiz.”

“Exquisite farm wench gives body jolt to prize stinker.”

…and of course the one we all know: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

Say again? Words that have no translation By Jane Nethercote

My favorite: Wabi sabi – an “old fashioned Japanese word that is the basis of their aesthetics meaning the subtle beauty of nature, the profound in the ordinary, and the aesthetics of imperfection.”

The aesthetics of imperfection? I like the sound of that! The the idea that there is such a thing makes me feel much better about myself.

It’s okay for your characters not to know the motives behind space aliens. After all, they’re aliens. Space aliens are the ultimate boogeyman for the modern age because they probably do exist somewhere. I’m not saying they actually visit us, but they are possible, as in, not pure fantasy.

"Thank God space aliens haven't figured out distributed systems!"

So, Hollywood, if space aliens invade, and there’s no way for us to talk to them, and we have no idea why they’re here, then that’s all we have to know. You can leave it at that. “We have no freaking clue.”

In reality if something like “Battle: Los Angeles” actually happened, we wouldn’t know and wouldn’t really care. All we’d have to know is that we need to kill them before they can kill us. In JJ Abram’s “Cloverfield” (which in itself was not a perfect movie) no motives were explained nor did anyone know where the alien monster came from. And that’s okay, because there would have been no way to know. Smart as we humans are, there’s infinitely more things in this Universe that we don’t know, than what we know.

Again, turning to “Battle: Los Angeles,” the makers of this movie felt it imperative that they offer some explanation as to why the aliens are invading Earth. But they had no freaking clue, because they didn’t really care — they just wanted to show Marines fighting space aliens. So they made something up and, like usual for Hollywood, it made no sense at all.

The aliens were here for our water. Why? Because they use it for fuel. What?! Really? Well, okay, I’ll buy that. But why fight a heavily armed indigenous species who have nuclear weapons, deep in a gravity well, for something that is freely available all across the cosmos? Their explanation: Because no where else in the known universe is water in liquid form.

What?! Excuse me? For one, that claim is preposterous, but even if you grant that … do these aliens not know how to heat things? You have unlimited water ice in space, which would take infinitely less energy to heat into liquid form that it would take lifting liquid water out of a huge gravity well such as Earth. What sort of stupid backward alien race are these? If they’re that dumb, how did they achieve spaceflight, let alone interstellar flight? And, while I’m ranting, I might as well throw in that any alien civilization that doesn’t understand you should build in redundant distributed control systems in your high tech craft, and onboard AI in your drones, they would not be attacking Earth for any reason whatsoever — they’d be less sophisticated than us Humans, who already have such things, and yet we don’t have interstellar spaceflight.

So, bottom line, Hollywood — just leave it at, “I don’t know!” The aliens are attacking, and your characters say, “Why?!” and they finally conclude, “There’s no way to ever know. Let’s just defend ourselves.”

The one really smart thing they did in “Battle: Los Angeles” is they showed the characters risking their lives to learn enough about the aliens to figure out how to kill them. That is all the grunts wanted to know, and at that point it was all they needed to know. And really, Hollywood, unless you have some brilliant, realistic, scientist-approved idea for alien motives, you should leave it at that.

So, why would aliens want to invade Earth? H.G. Wells laid it all out very realistically over a hundred years ago: prime real estate.

Nothing else I’ve ever heard of makes sense.

I’m getting much better at culling. Oddly I’ve learned it via editing an entirely different format: audio. I record and edit two podcasts now, one about the joy of absinthe and the other about zombies and wonderfully bad sci-fi. I think I’ve developed a pretty good ear, cutting what isn’t necessary, probably because of the rules of writing: make every word count. But what’s made me a better audio editor is crossing back over and making me an even better story editor.

I think the ah-hah I’m trying to promote here is one of cross-development. I know in the corporate world, it’s a good thing to get your feet wet in different parts of the business so that you can bring your experience and POV to a different set of circumstances.

Same thing seems to also work in creative endeavors.

If you’re a writer, have you ever tried your hand at editing audio or video? I know my friend Melanie does … I need to ask her about that.

For me, however, there’s a side effect … and I wonder if I share it with other writers out there: After forcing myself to crank out over 50,000 words in one month, for quite a while afterwards I have no desire to write. At all.

I don’t work on manuscripts only in November. I work on them all year around. It’s what I do. Except now … I need a vacation from my manuscripts.

I seem to remember this happens every time, and every November I seem to forget and jump in again. I’m pretty sure, in fact, that I’ve written on this same subject before. I’ll have to go back and check after I hit publish.

I would love to take a writing vacation. I would love to give up writing fiction altogether. Imagine that! All that free time to do mindless things, like play video games all night long (which I did last night), or get caught up on all that TV I never watched. Sometimes I really wish I could do that.

Alas, it’s never going to happen. I’ve been working on these stories for so long, thinking about the characters, collecting traits, plots, and ideas, that I can’t stop. It’s a compulsion. Fortunately for me it’s something I usually enjoy — I do it for me.

But for the next few weeks at least I’m going to take a vacation.

On my Windows machines I use a wonderful program called WordWeb to do the same thing, though a bit less robust, by highlighting a word and hitting Ctrl-Alt-W

I’m bookmarking this here mainly so that I can go back and listen to the whole thing. Some of the topics discussed:

• Whether the new world of publishing is scary or not
• The clear, well-lit path that publishing has been taking for more than a decade
• How lack of scarcity has changed publishing forever
• The new role of publishing in the online world
• How not to wait to be picked
• How Seth’s Domino Project deals with unsolicited requests from authors
• How the Domino Project planned to transform everything about publishing
• How he eliminated cover images, shortened books, eliminated advances, and what he learned
• Whether collectible editions of books work well
• Spreading ideas through books, and how paid works vs. free
• The growing problem of people hating reading
• Whether you should publish how-to or cookbooks at all
• What types of books will sell well in the new landscape
• The problem of getting selected by the masses in the vast sea of millions of published books
• Why you don’t need that many followers/friends as an author
• Why the willingness to fail is so important, with so many options available to authors
• A future where everything that happens is your fault — and whether that’s good or bad
• The horror stories of Pulitzer Prize winning authors
• Amazon’s vastly important information about readers
• Deciding to publish your best ideas on your blog vs. your book
• Why Seth doesn’t have comments on his blog
• Giving up the goal of having everyone in the world like your stuff
• The cycle of productivity, and having nothing next