Thursday Thirteen: Exercises to Prevent Carpal Tunnel

As writers, we tend to spend a lot of time in front of the computer. As a computer scientist, my time in front of the computer is magnified, because it’s my livelihood and my hobby. Over the past year-and-a-half, I’ve come to regret that sort of dedication to the machine, as I’ve suffered back injuries, and continued leg pain if I don’t stretch and move away from the computer regularly. And I’m not even 25, yet! This is a good thing, however. I’ve rediscovered the joy of writing in a paper journal (I hope to post some of my scribbles soon), reconnected with yoga, learned t’ai chi, and I am a much happier person all-around.

So here are the thirteen exercises and bits of information to keep in mind. Please print this list and do try the exercises yourself. I’d sincerely not wish my own back/wrist troubles on my worst enemy.

1. To start out, most forearm/wrist pain comes from tightness in the neck and lower back. So if you start to feel shooting pains of any sort, step away from the computer and start moving around.
2. Make sure to stretch SLOWLY, maintain proper posture, and always return to the natural face-forward position between each stretch. Rolling your head around is bad for you because you’re actually popping your tendons and muscles over your joints, which can lead to tenderness and eventually swollen bursas.
3. Braces should only be used when you are feeling actual pain, because a brace will actually weaken your muscle. The brace does the work your muscles should be doing, so when you rely on that you might be prolonging the problem.
4. Touch your chin to your chest/collar bone. Hold. This one is the hardest for me because I like to hunch my shoulders. Don’t hunch your shoulders! Keep them relaxed and dropped, breathe deeply, hold by counting to ten, and then raise your chin and look forward. Then sigh, because you’ve just released some upper-back/neck strain and it feels oh-so-nice.
5. Try to touch your ear to your shoulder. You can use your opposite hand to help pull your head over, as long as you aren’t forcing anything. Hold. Return to the natural face-forward position and do same to the other side.
6. Touch your chin to your shoulder. Hold (or count to five/ten). Return to the natural face-forward position before doing the same to the other shoulder. You should start to feel pressure release in your neck, and possibly your back if you’re very tight.
7. Put your arms out perpendicular to the sides of your body. Raise your hands at the wrist so your fingers point toward the ceiling, hold. Drop your hands at the wrist so your fingers point to the floor, hold.
8. Do thumb stretches. This loosens your forearm and hand muscles.
9. Clench and unclench your fingers, ten times to get the blood rushing.
10. Sit in a chair with your feet flat on the floor. Now s-l-o-w-l-y fold forward until your chest touches your knees. If you can’t bend that far forward, go as low as you can, making sure to keep your shoulders down, your limbs relaxed, and no sensations of pain. Count to five. S-l-o-w-l-y sit upright. Did I mention to go slowly? This is very important because you can hurt your back if you do this move quickly.
11. Hold your hands up as if you’re being robbed (try to keep them just before your shoulders, palms facing forward). Hunch your shoulders as high as you can, keeping your hands in front of your shoulders. Do this slowly, ten times.
12. Now do the same as # 11, except pull your shoulders back rather than up, keeping your elbows down. These two exercises strengthen your upper back muscles which support your neck.
13. Stretch your hamstrings and hips, which support your lower back muscles, by crossing your right foot in front of your left and bending as slowly as you can at the waist. Try to touch the floor. Support as much of your weight on your right foot; you should feel the stretch in your left hip. Hold, and as you feel your muscle relax, try to get half an inch closer to touching the floor. If you can’t, no big deal. Slowly stand up, switch your legs so your left foot is in front of your right, and bend again. This is my favorite stretch because it targets about four different muscle groups. I always feel better after this one.

How do you battle the hazards of being a butt-in-chair writer? Do you take walks? Jog? Play with the kids? Or do you try things like yoga and t’ai chi (my new favorite pasttimes)? I’m always looking for new ways to stay healthy, so leave a comment with your suggestions!

* Inspired by my comments at The Good Girls Kill for Money Club.
** I’m not a doctor. If you’re feeling actual pain, please get help. Don’t forget that pain is our body telling us we’re doing something wrong!

Want to be Showcased on Worderella Writes?

Do you have information about how to write, edit, or publish?

Do you have favorite blogs that you read that I haven’t showcased?

Is there a genre you write that I haven’t discussed?

I’m looking for guest bloggers to spice up Worderella Writes. At the end of your post, feel free to advertise your own website/blog, especially if it has to do with the craft of writing, or the progress of your own work.

Contact me at my website or comment to this post with your ideas and I’ll respond to let you know the details.

Things to keep in mind: I try to keep my posts around 600 words. There needs to be a general writing, reading, research, history, or romance theme. I don’t post anything vulgar so don’t bother if that’s what you’re planning to do.

Relating to my Characters: Penmanship and Fountain Pens

I envy my own characters even though they live in my head and therefore, are technically me anyway. Why the envy? They have distinctive penmanship and can wield a fountain pen with a flourish. I silently wail against the loss of the importance of penmanship in the real world, and especially the loss of my own penmanship, due to the efficiency of computers and e-mail, and the rising cost of snail mail. Or rather, I wail against the fact that I had no real patience to excel at penmanship in the first place. I could blame this on the now-now-now of today’s culture, but I won’t. I love to get mail, so I should write more of it, which should encourage more people to send me mail in the first place.

Sometimes I think that the historical fiction part of me is entirely at odds with the computer scientist part. For instance, despite my obsession with efficiency, I would love to write in a scrawling hand that visibly defines my personality. I want to take the time to create evidence of my handwriting that, years later, my children and grandchildren can gawk over and infer that I was a determined woman given to fanciful thoughts… or something sentimental like that.

So I decided the other day to buy a fountain pen set and train myself to write the way my characters do. I did some research about fountain pens and found that today, if you want a nice fountain pen, it will cost you at least fifty American dollars. And that technology has advanced the pen so that you can actually buy them in a disposable format, the way you would buy a Pilot rollerball pen. (I, of course, bought the disposable kind. And I love them!)

However, I couldn’t stop there with the modern fountain pen; I had to go back to first fountain pen thanks to my thirst for irrelevant knowledge. Sadly, there is a discrepancy between how old the fountain pen is. Some claim the oldest known was created by a Frenchman in 1702, whereas other resources say Egyptian caliphs commissioned the first one in the 10th Century, and still others say there were experimentations as early as the 1st Century.

The fountain pen that we know today, where a capillary feed regulates the ink flow, was first patented in 1884 by Lewis Waterman. He invented this capillary feed after his new, extravagant pen leaked all over an important contract that he subsequently lost to a competing broker. Funny how desperation and irritation are the true mothers of invention.

Today, there are multiple ways for filling the ink cartridge of a fountain pen. There is the traditional way of filling it with an eyedropper, and then there are button, lever, coin, and click mechanisms which alter the internal pressure of the pen, allowing it to “suck up” the ink. In the 1950s, pre-filled replaceable cartridges became all the rage because they were easy to insert and cheap to buy…but the invention of the ballpoint pen overshadowed the improvement and I don’t think the fountain pen has gotten over the shock yet.

Even though modern fountain pens are expensive compared to ballpoint pens, there is still a valid use for them in the pen market. For instance, many arthritis/carpal tunnel sufferers feel it’s easier to write with a fountain pen because of the effortless ink flow and large diameter of the pen (to allow for cartridge size). There is a larger variety of colors in comparison to the ballpoint pen. And then there’s the snob factor: There’s something classic, regal, and elegant about writing with a fountain pen. People respect a person who writes with a fountain pen because it’s assumed to be a harder instrument to write with.

…Or maybe that’s just what I like to think people are thinking about me when they see me writing with my fountain pens.

*Information compiled from Wikipedia, About.com: fountain pens, and About.com: Lewis Waterman.
*Fountain pen nib image found at Wikimedia Commons, cartoon found at Cartoon Stock.

From the Notebook: All About Lovers

In the fall I read many wonderful texts from American Lit (circa 1820 – 1860), especially some great things by feminist writers of the time. To celebrate the coming of Valentine’s Day, here is Fanny Fern’s hilarious satire of lovers and love.

For a little bit of background, Fanny Fern was the pen-name of Sarah Willis Parton, a woman writing in the 1850s onward. Sarah began her writing career because her second marriage was a bust (the first made her a widow, she left the second, presumably because he was abusive), and neither her family nor her in-laws wanted to support her or her children. (To be fair, it wasn’t their fault that she couldn’t keep a husband… and… I’m being completely sarcastic.) Unable to support her girls, she sent her eldest to live with family, and began writing.

Sarah’s best work comes out in the short narrative, often in her articles written for local newspapers. She had a huge following, both men and women, and had a healthy dose of critics who thought she was much too assertive and aggressive of a writer to be a true woman. She had a great sense of humor about it all, as exampled in one of her articles where she describes going to the theatre only to watch a more glamorous woman be pointed out as “that writer, Fanny Fern.”

Sarah wrote both sentimentally and sarcastically, (read Ruth Hall for a great example of both), but I’m providing a sample of one of her more satirical works. The following article advises young women to test their young men with little annoyances, just to see how they might fare in marriage.

All About Lovers

Nothing like the old-fashioned long “engagements,” say we. Then you have a chance to find out something about a young man before marriage. Now-a-days matrimony follows so close upon the heels of “an offer,” that it is no wonder our young people have a deal of sad thinking to do afterward. There are a thousand little things in daily intercourse of my duration, which are constantly resolving themselves into test of character; slight they may be, but very significant.

Some forlorn old lady must have an escort home of a cold evening; she walks slow, and tells the same story many times: see how your lover comports himself under this. He is asked to read aloud in some home circle, some book he has already perused in private, or some one in which he is not at all interested: watch him then. Notice, also, if he invariably takes the most comfortable chair in the room, “never thinking” to offer it to a person who may enter till he or she is already seated. Invite him to carve for you at the table. Give him a letter to drop in the post-office, and find out if it ever leaves that grave–his pocket. Open and read his favorite favorite newspaper before he gets a chance to do so. Mislay his cigar-case. Lose his cane. Sit accidentally on his new beaver [hat]. Praise another man’s coat or cravat. Differ from him in a favorite opinion. Put a spoonful of gravy on his meat instead of his potatoes.

Ah, you may laugh! But just try him in these ways, and see how he will wear; for it is not the great things of life over which we mortals stumble. A rock we walk around; a mountain we cross: it is the unobserved, unexpected, unlooked-for little sticks and pebbles which cause us to halt on life’s journey.

New York Ledger July 30, 1859

When I first read this list of annoyances, I couldn’t help but laugh, but Fanny Fern is completely right. For all her satire, she gives excellent advice for anyone in a relationship or about to start a new one. We “stumbling mortals” never seem to pay attention to the little things, but I know it’s the build-up of the little things that make me just explode sometimes. So to those of you reading this blog, if the significant person in your life starts to really annoy you, take a second look. They might be doing it on purpose.

2007 Reading Stats

Admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery, right? Well, I think it’s time I admit that I have a problem: I don’t have enough time to read everything I want to read. I admitted this to myself two years ago in June, and I’m happy to say I have made progress. I think keeping a list of books I want to read and checking off the ones I have read really helps. It’s like a multi-step program toward recovery, only… the list never ends. Hey, I’m improving my literacy rate! But in doing so, I’ve created a new problem by re-awakening the avid reader of my childhood and forgetting that sleep is just as important as getting to the next chapter in my new favorite book. Don’t believe me? Take a look at my reading statistics from 2007…

Number of books: 41. I’m pleased with this number, considering I’m a full-time computer science engineering student, I work part-time, I’m very active with my family, and I’m the editor-in-chief/cartoonist for my college’s magazine. I think the trick is reading before I go to bed. It’s amazing how reading an hour every couple of days cleanses my mind like a gentle sponge bath.

Number of Pages: 14,039. Some books were surprisingly short, others, almost too long. The average length was around 350-400 pages.

Genres: Historical fiction, romance, science-fiction, fantasy, non-fiction, women’s fiction, classics, and young adult. Sometimes I think I should branch out and read something new, but it seems to me the only thing I don’t really read is anything erotic, if I can help it. Any suggestions?

Best loved book: North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, by far (review coming later). Why my favorite? This book was like learning to love reading all over again for me. It felt like I was reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time, and I fell irretrievably in love with the characters and the author’s style. I was left with that satisfied calm one gets after reading a classic that is touching, well-written, and still applicable to the modern world. If you have any sentimental or positive feeling for Pride and Prejudice, you will like Gaskell’s North and South, set in England’s 19th Century industrial revolution.

Runners-up were The Thirteenth Tale, Wildford’s Daughter (review coming later), Hurricane Moon, The Extra Large Medium, The Time-Traveler’s Wife, and Stardust.

Least loved book: I rarely dislike books that I read, but I have to admit I sincerely disliked How to Read a Novel. The linked review gives some of my reasons; I felt like the author was complaining a little too much and complaining is a pet-peeve of mine.

Book list in reading order: here.

So as you can see, when reading a good book, I have absolutely no self-control. I’m an addict of the worst kind, lost to the world. So I have to admit, when I think I’ve gotten control over my reading habits and then look at my To Be Read journal, I have to sigh. My list for 2008 already has 48 books… some leftovers from last year that I never got around to reading, and others that I want to read after seeing it in my library’s most recent issue of BookPage.

What’s a girl to do? For shame, it seems I’m sentenced to read until I die. :) How many of you use a book list? If you don’t use a list, how do you decide what to read next? Amazon.com reader reviews and suggested books? Reader blogs? Newsletters like BookPage? This is something I’ve always been really curious about.

The new year cometh

Happy new year, everyone! Here’s hoping your muse is kind. Mine favored me at the end of my break from school, the procrastinating little wretch that she is, and I’m now 76% complete with the WIP manuscript! I’ve done a lot of work-shopping on the tagline and the hook. Here’s what I came up with for my WIP, Trentwood’s Orphan…

A grieving daughter encounters love and ghosts in Victorian England.

A proposal on the anniversary of her father’s death is not Mary Winslow’s idea of romance, but as a 26-year-old maid in Victorian England, Mr Spencer is her last chance. When Mary catches Mr Spencer seducing her scullery maid, her regimented world falls apart, and her secret deathbed promise to her father comes back to haunt her…literally.

What do you think? Something worth reading, or do I need more edits?

From an administrative standpoint, there are new fun things here at the blog, mainly that I have a new plug-in that highlights posts related to the topic of the post you’re currently reading. I added blurbs about the books I’ve written, and I updated the About and Reading List pages. Fellow authors, if your website needs a new look, or if you haven’t looked into web marketing, check out the Siriomi Web Designs tab as an affordable solution to your problems.

My next post will be listing my most and least favorite books of 2007, how many pages I read, etc. What would you like to see in 2008? More information on publishing? Let me know.

Books on Display

I live in a 12′ by 10′ room when I’m at home during the summers, and I share it with my younger sister. We don’t have bunk beds, and hardly any storage space. In fact, we have those bed-risers so we can shove things beneath our beds. Most of my stuff is shoved into external storage spaces because there’s hardly any living space in the room.

I would complain, except I don’t pay rent or grocery fees.

The best part of my room is in the back corner of my closet. My closet has those 70′s sliding doors, and it goes deep into the wall on either side, about two feet. That’s where I hang my dresses, jackets, suits, etc…And all the space above the closet rod was wasted until one day, my mother said the most magical words I’ve ever heard: “What do you think about making a mini-library up there?”

Being a bibliophile, I effused my gratitude and excitement at the idea. Problem: I was in school at the time, battling my way through programming assignments and midterms. I couldn’t come home to do it. Time passed. Winter break brought me home to find my mother having already completed my library. To the point where she carefully took out all of my books (numbering above 100, I think), measured the tallest one to determine where the first shelf should go, and so on. Then, she put them back in the order that I had them. I have my own library in my closet. I’m so proud of that library that I smile at it every time I reach up to grab a book. I always talk about expanding, too… when I have my own place, that is. It’s a family joke that I won’t marry a guy who won’t let me have a library. Among other things, like my own writing office, a chaise lounge…

But I understand that other people don’t have the luxury or know-how to create a library in their closets. So, keeping in mind that I haven’t tried some of these products, nor am I receiving any sort of kickbacks for talking about them, here are a couple of really cool book display ideas that I found while searching online.

1. Conceal Book shelf by Umbra. The idea is that you basically screw a large metal bracket onto the wall, with a small groove. You tuck a hardcover book into the groove, which becomes the bottom “shelf” as it were. The regular size shelf will hold about 10lbs of books, the large one 14 or so. The coolest thing about this shelf is that your books look like they are floating in the middle of the wall. I once had a dream that my walls were covered in floating books when I was younger. What an odd dream to see come true.
2. Flybrary bookshelf by Umbra. This is sort of nifty, you hang the books on a series of metal arms, essentially creating a shelf out of books. I like to see the spines of my books, however, so this one wouldn’t be for me, but a cool idea nontheless.
3. Folding Ladder Bookshelf by Picotee Int’l. I just like the look of these ladder bookshelves. The dark wood contrasts any bright colored book you might have, and complements traditional/old books. It’s pretty.
4. Corner Space Saver Bookshelf by Stacks and Stacks. I hate it when corners go to waste, but then, I hate when anything goes to waste. This is a nifty idea where you can use your corner space and be stylish about it, with books facing the two different directions that the shelves offer.
5. Flying Nun Shelf by Woodform. All right, I admit that I added this merely because the name made me laugh and think of Sally Fields. A simple floating bookshelf with built-in bookends. Comes in multiple colors.
6. Hanging Wall Book Display by Children’s Factory Inc. For those of you with children, you can tuck books into the plastic sleeves (much like a hanging shoe sleeve), and that way, the child can always see their favorite books, and make clean up easy.

Let me know if any of you happen to buy these products, and tell me what you think! I’m always looking for new ways to display my books, but I have to be careful with the money I spend, poor college student that I am.

“Gender Genie” saves the day

So about a week ago I read about an author who was having trouble with her hero’s voice… that is, she couldn’t seem to make him actually sound like a man. And then she remembered a great online tool created from an actual study in which some academics discovered men and women do, in fact, speak differently: The Gender Genie. They even came up with an algorithm that predicts whether the person speaking was a man or a woman.

So that got me thinking, “Goodness, I wonder if Alexander sounds like a man or a woman? I think he’s a man, but maybe I’m wrong…” I copied and pasted a series of his chatter into the Gender Genie, provided by the BookBlog. Saints preserve me, the genie thought he was a he! But I only pasted in the first couple hundred words spoken, and the genie says it has a better idea after five-hundred words.

Picture me going through my text and copying my hero’s dialogue from the first 2.5 chapters. Result: my character is a male! But only just so, by two hundred words, more or less. Which worries me. Apparently I also have to take out pronouns and the like, since men tend not to refer to people as much as women do. Apparently men are a little more comfortable talking about objects. Who knew?

Now I know all of you are testing out the tool for yourself, so, you have to tell me… How do your characters fare?

From the Notebook: Victorians and the Environment

By the High Victorian era, which describes the 1870s and beyond, many activists and doctors were starting to connect the welfare and livelihood of Londoners to their environment around them. In the 1860s, the Thames in London was so fetid, so polluted, that Parliament scheduled its activities so the smell wouldn’t sit stagnant in the heat. It was too hot to sit in the rooms with the windows shut, but with the windows open, the smell was so unbearable that men compared it to actual torture. Cholera, spread by bacteria in liquids, was a great epidemic in the 19th Century because of the sanitary conditions.

William Farr was able to prove that contaminated water spread the disease, rather than the popular belief in miasma. As such, water and sewage treatment facilities were put in place, though not in time to prevent a cholera outbreak in London’s East End, where all of the manufacturing plants were.

By the late 1870s, Londoners could punt on the Thames, with the river actually becoming a tourist event rather than a place to studiously avoid… Ten years earlier, one saw dead fish and the occasional person, smelled garbage and human waste; it was a mess.

Luckily, the Victorians, with their obsession with cleanliness (as it is close to Godliness), turned their eye to their environment and started to make a change.

This entry was part of Blog Action day.

Book Meme!

So I normally don’t do memes, but Word Nerd tagged me and I like this one, so I’m doing it. Which, while I’m on the topic, how do you pronounce the word “meme”? Is it “mem” such as memory, or “me-me”? What is the history of this word? Why does it mean “fill out this fun questionaire that will take up space in your blog, thus allowing you to provide content without having to think too hard?” Perhaps that’s a bit harsh. But that’s why I fill out memes, haha. If that’s the plural of meme, that is.

Another sidenote: who is voting on my entries? Why is voting easier than commenting? I really am curious about this. Thesis topic?

Total number of books
Like Word Nerd says, this is an ambiguous category. Is this total number of books read this past year? This past month? Total number of books owned? Total number of books bought in a certain timespan? Because while I have an ambitious plan to digitize my entire library catalogue… hasn’t happened yet. I can say that I’ve read 29 books and 2 short stories this year (I’ll post a definite list at the end of the year).

Last book read
Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Oh, I didn’t mention I’m in an English class focusing on the American Romantic/Trascendental movement? Oh, I never mentioned that I might be a closet-Transcendentalist? …oops.

Last book bought
On Writing Romance by Leigh Michaels. I’m reading it cover-to-cover.

Five meaningful books
1. Persuasion by Jane Austen.
Reading this book changed my entire idea of what it means to be a romance writer. I don’t know why. Something about the quiet suffering of Anne spoke to me, and made me root for the character that doesn’t always get a role in our fiction: the type A female.

2. Elantris by Brandon Sanderson.
This is one of the best well-written fictions I’ve read in a long time. I read it last summer and I’m still geeking about it, just because I literally felt for every character. There was no “bad guy,” and I loved that. A great ensemble story.

3. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne & Dave King.
This is one of the only books that I will not only say you should deface by making your own notes, I’m encouraging it. Read it. Highlight it. Underline it.

4. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde.
Who said classics aren’t making a comeback, I ask you? This was the last book before Elantris that literally had me geeking for years. Clever, well-written, thoroughly well-thought out, and full of inside jokes for the classic-reader.

5. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield.
This book, somehow, just feels like an adult fairy-tale slash love story to all readers. You might not like it, but I love it. Another book that changed how I look at writing fiction.

Now I normally don’t tag people for memes, but what the hey. Erica and Redshoeson, you’re up!