It’s September and I just finished my last half marathon for the year. It was a gorgeous Saturday morning, cool at the start, hot at the end, no wind. I got to run through the Lethbridge river valley as the cottonwood trees are all transforming into their fall colors. I trained pretty hard for this one, and though I didn’t quite make the time I’d been hoping for, it was a nice conclusion to my running season.

Daily writing prompt

How often do you walk or run?

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Training for a half marathon is a beast. Particularly if you’ve got a body that’s build more for life as a medical physicist/writer. But this year I decided to get back into long distance running.

You make progress in long distance running through consistency. It’s not so much the urge to get out and run fast, but you improve by showing up. My running schedule over the summer included a moderate run on Tuesday evenings (5 – 10 km), a tempo run on Thursdays (5 km), and then progressive distances on the weekends. I started at about 10 km in the beginning and built up to 21 km, then tapered back for race days. I ran on vacation. I ran hills. I ran in the rain.

Writing a novel is a lot like that. You make progress by showing up with consistency. A typical science fiction novel is about 80,000 words long. They can vary of course, but I find that’s a reasonable ballpark for me to aim for. During National Novel Writing Month it takes me about 2 hours of solid writing to meet the daily goal of 1667. So by some quick math, that’s about 96 hours of focused writing, just to produce a first draft. And only about half of that even makes it into the final book!

Writing is a marathon in and of itself.

Daily writing prompt

What is your career plan?

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What do you want to be when you grow up?

Kids have this question thrown at them all the time, all the way through school and even after. We tell them they can be anything they want to be, and then present it like it’s a single choice, like you can pick your career out of a catalogue and once that choice is made, your life is set out for you.

If you’ve ever read through a university calendar or website, you know what I mean. If you choose to study physics… you’re on your way to becoming a physicist. If you choose medicine… you get to be a doctor. If you don’t study anything beyond high school (and take on the debt that comes with it)… you’ll be working menial jobs for the rest of your life.

But here’s what no one tells you…

You don’t choose a career.

You build a career.

An education is not a career. When you finish your high school education, the choices that you make aren’t necessarily choices about a career. You choose an educational direction. And of course that’s going to influence your career options. But your education is simply laying a foundation. It can be critically important, but it doesn’t determine what the final house is going to look like.

Anecdotally, I remember a survey of members of the Physics Forums, several years ago that asked whether people ended up where they thought they would be when they entered university. Only a very, very low number found this was true. More than one person mentioned they were working in a field that didn’t even exist when they started! I for one had no idea what medical physics was when I first started my undergraduate studies. I mean… why would anyone want to study how radiation interacts with people when you can study black holes?

So many people feel guilty when the path they’re on isn’t working out. They feel like they’ve failed because they took a wrong turn. And while it’s true, you can’t go back to being 18 again and make different decisions, it’s important to be aware of, and fight against sunken cost effects. If you’re on a career path that’s not working, you can change directions.

And often the sunken cost isn’t quite as sunk as you might think.

As you build your career, the knowledge that you pick up and the skills that you develop are rarely exclusive to a single vocation. My grandfather loved telling a story about how, when he was in high school, he took all these typing classes and then once he got out into the workforce he went for years never using that skill. But then in the late 70s or so, the company he worked for went digital. Everything went computerized and the employees were laid off left right and center. Except… those who could type (and figure out the computer system).

A career is built brick by brick, based on the opportunities one has at the time. It’s the result of a gradual accumulations of many choices over time. And some serendipity.

Daily writing prompt

Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?

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Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

– Marie Curie

Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to with the Nobel Prize twice, and the first person to win in two different fields. She was a true pioneer of modern physics and chemistry.

I find this particular quote inspiring because it underscores the relationship between ignorance and fear. Said another way, people tend to fear what they don’t understand. But it’s not left at that. I find it inspirational because it’s also a call toward learning and education. We are not doomed to live in fear, particularly now, because we live in a time with unprecedented access to information.

Daily writing prompt

What’s the most fun way to exercise?

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I used to hate running.

I was never fast as a kid. I liked sports like judo, where the outcome of a match wasn’t entirely based on one’s physical prowess. Strategy, technique, the ability to think quickly all played a part in the sport. But running was competitive and almost always a foregone conclusion… the fastest kid would win the race… and it was the same guys all the time.

I once trained hard for a 1600 m (1 mile) race. I was about eight on nine years old. I got up early in the morning and mapped out a route around the block and figured out how many laps I needed for the full 1600 m. I ran that route religiously. It seemed like I did it for months (although to be fair, it was probably every morning for a week–minus Saturday–you know… cartoons). When it came time for the race I came in last. And the same kid who won every other race won that one too.

Fast forward to later in life. My wife started running with her friends at work. She entered a half marathon. Like a loving husband, I watched from the comfort of my camp chair. She and her friends passed and did awesome. But then, I watched as other came in… people that were older than me, heavier, struggling to make it to the finish line. And there I was sitting with a large Slurpee in hand. The point, I realized as we all cheered them in, wasn’t to win, but to do it.

The best exercise is the exercise you do, and even better the exercise you do consistently. And of the biggest keys to consistency is making sure you enjoy it.

When I was focused on the outcome, it was almost impossible to enjoy. If you have ten people in a race, and you’re all or roughly equal physical fitness, the chances of winning are only one in ten, much less so if you’re not the fittest.

But in the words of Baz Luhrmann, the race is long, and in the end it’s only with yourself.

I started running after watching that half-marathon, and I’ve been a runner ever since. I’m still not that fast, but what changed was a mental shift. Running became like a personal meditation… get outside, get the heart rate up, and for the time that I’m out there nothing else really matters… I just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

In a lot of ways, writing is like that too. Just keep putting words down. Eventually you get to the finish line, and in the end, that’s what really matters.

Daily writing prompt

What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like?

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I write for an hour each morning. Or at least, I try.

In my house, that’s the quiet time. The kids are still asleep. I have a chance to focus. I slip downstairs, open up a document and get some words down.

Okay, admittedly there’s some distractions there to fight off… checking email, my website, some social media. But when I’m really focusing on my writing, like during NaNoWriMo, I have a simple rule: write 100 words first.

It’s amazing how often that works. The words don’t have to be good. They don’t even really have to make sense. But I find getting about 100 words into a story is often enough to climb over that intellectual hurdle, that action potential that I need to clear in order to reach that immersive writing state sometimes referred to as flow.

The other major part of my morning routine? Honey Bunches of Oats (with Almonds).

Daily writing prompt

Who was your most influential teacher? Why?

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I’ve had a lot of great teachers in my life, and I owe a great deal to all of them.

One of the most influential was a teacher that not too many other students liked. He was a curmudgeon of a man with a short grey brush cut and muscular forearms that looked like they were built for strangling students. I’ll call him Mr. Z. The other students in my classes had other names for him… mostly inappropriate. Now that I’m older, I can see that the guy was a hangover from the sixties. Not the Singing Sixties either. (We had other teachers like that.) It was more like the sixties of NASA director Gene Krantz during the Apollo 13 mission… “failure is not an option.”

At the time, my high school has three streams for kids. Basic, General, and Advanced. Advanced was for those kids who were most likely to go on to university, and somehow I ended up in that advanced stream. At the time I had no idea I was going to go on to become a physicist. Going into grade nine I was a relatively average kid in terms of intellectual horsepower. Sure space was cool, but I also wanted to be a private investigator. My parents subtly nudged me, suggesting I try the advanced route and if it was too challenging, I could always drop down.

Mr. Z dropped a challenge on day one.

Science wasn’t just another subject to him. It was the subject. Science was how the world worked. And if we wanted to really make big contributions to the world… become engineers, doctors, scientists, leaders… we had a responsibility to understand the world the best way that we could.

Nothing ever came easy in his class. He took off marks for seemingly trivial things. He assigned (what felt like) mountains of homework. And there were frequent quizzes. I had to come to class prepared… every day.

There were times when I would rather have had a different teacher, someone easier, nicer, someone who might let us slack off just a little.

A lot of people found the guy intimidating. But he laid out the world as he honestly saw it. Not everyone was going to become a movie star. The best way to do anything was to understand as much about it as you possibly could. And as challenging as he could be, for some reason his teaching style resonated with me.

Mr. Z set the bar and I pushed myself to meet it.