A Brilliant Writing/Wellness Hack

Facebook post written by Zibby Owens that's too good not to share:

I accidentally discovered a time-saving, brilliant, writing and wellness hack today. I woke up in desperate need of exercise (my body — oy!), but I’d told myself that the time was blocked off for novel writing. I even had it scheduled in my calendar. If I took half an hour to walk, I’d lose all that precious time! And maybe even my deadline.

I laced up anyway. What to do on the walk? Maybe I would just *think* about my novel. I could plot out the next scenes and rework the ending. 
But then I decided to open the voice memos app on my phone. What if I just *talked* about the book as if I were chatting with my editor? I could brainstorm out loud. Why not? 

For 50 minutes, I walked and talked. Sometimes entire minutes would go by with just my huffing and puffing. Other times I would say a sentence and get chills, knowing it had unlocked something important in the narrative. I spoke quietly right into the phone. And I still made time to ask a woman I passed where she’d bought her beautiful, flowery, figure-forgiving dress. (Amazon. Go figure.)

When I got home, I thought: “Wouldn’t it be amazing if I could get this instantly transcribed so I could cut and paste my thoughts right into my manuscript?”

But wait, I reminded myself. Everything already exists! I Googled and found a site called Rev.com which promised instant transcription with the first 40 minutes free. I uploaded the file and literally three minutes later, I had a Word document with 2,000 words on my laptop as if I’d been sitting in bed typing the whole time. 

And yet I’d walked! I’d moved my aging, too-soft body for 50 minutes when ordinarily I would’ve been sitting! I had something tangible for my time. And it only cost $1.50.

So now this is my thing. I might not be able to completely conquer my “menopause middle,” but I can get through the messy middle of my book. Moving on all fronts. 

#transcription #walk #wellness #writing

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