Jo Boone Reads and Writes

Newsletter #1

Jo Boone Reads:

Hello, Combined Service fans! It is 6:47 am, and I am sitting in the dark with my computer screen on its dimmest setting and my keyboard backlight on, waiting for my decaf to brew and scolding myself for oversleeping.

Nothing like a good dose of self-recrimination to start the day with, am I right?

I’m sure you have questions, so let’s break that down.

“Oversleeping?” you say. It’s not even 7 am! How can you have overslept? Well, I have a day job, you see. Technically I should work an 8-4 or 9-5 schedule. Taking a chunk that size out of your day to earn your health insurance (I live in the United States, we have not yet unlocked the achievement of universal healthcare coverage like the rest of the first world countries) … well, it takes a chunk out of your day. So, stuff like exercise and writing has to fit into the parts before or after that day. So, I have an alarm set for 5:30, and one for 6:05, and sometimes I just dismiss both of them and go on sleeping. But I’m working on it. 5:30-7 is my time to write, exercise and drink decaf.

“Decaf?” you say. How can you be oversleeping, and then try to wake up with decaf? Well, beginning a few years ago I realized I was not really sleeping well. I’m not an insomniac; I fall asleep just fine. But then I was waking up 4-5 times a night to pee, which was really irritating, and was wrecking me the next day for any productive purpose. So, I started trying to get a better night’s sleep. I did all of the things: make sure that the room is dark and cold, have a regular bedtime and wake time, get at least 7 hours of sleep, don’t eat or drink anything for a couple of hours before bedtime, limit screens before bedtime (that’s a tough one and I am worst at that one). But… none of that was working. I was still waking up multiple times a night, really needing to pee.

Then I listened to an audiobook! Caffeine, by Michael Pollan, is a history of the most-used drug in the world. It’s brief—just a 2-hour listen—well-read by Pollan himself, and, sadly, only available as an audiobook from Audible. Sorry, non-Audible customers. Nothing I can really do about that. At the end of the book, Pollan details his personal experiment in giving up caffeine, and how it affected him. And I thought: that is something I have not tried.

So I, three-cups-a-day coffee drinker that I was (and am), and soda guzzler besides, gave up caffeine.

Like magic, I began sleeping through the night. Which had all kinds of positive effects on my overall day.

My morning 3-cup habit is now a decaf habit, and I allow myself one caffeinated soda a day, because that seems to be what I can tolerate and still sleep well.

So, if you’re looking to take your sleep habit to the next level (and who isn’t?), I recommend Pollan’s book. I learned something. You might, too.

Jo Boone Writes

After the sleeping comes the waking up.

Before Thanksgiving, I had a pretty good little habit going: get up about 5:40, put on workout clothes, start my coffee, do my workout for 30 minutes, write for 30 minutes, shower and go to my day job.

And then, like a slow-moving disaster, the winter holidays hit. Between endless forbidden foods that utterly wrecked my sound nutritional habits and endless travel and social commitments that wrecked my carefully structured sleep/wake schedule and the endless depressing dark of winter that wrecked my workout habits (it’s hard for me to get motivated in the dark—anybody else?), I rolled into January with almost no good habits remaining at all.

Which, I suppose, is why people do all those New Year’s resolutions. I’m not the only one who falls off of every wagon in November and December.

I am also not the only one who utterly fails in January to right the ship.

So then we come limping in to February, the most depressing month of the year, when one realizes that all of those carefully constructed habits from the previous year that were going so well are utterly destroyed and all of those New Year’s resolutions have failed to restore them and also it’s Valentine’s Day so hey there’s one more reason to be depressed (for a lot of people most years, anyway) and it’s still so flipping DARK outside and Life. Just. Sucks.

But for all its grim unhappiness, in February there is also hope.

The light is slowly returning.

Valentine’s Day, for all its unhealthy issues, is a fairly tame holiday compared to the whole Halloween/Thanksgiving Christmas three-month debauch.

Daffodils! In a lot of places, February is daffodils and crocus, and that is cheerful.

And, along about mid-February, after the frenzy of failed New Year’s resolutions, one actually begins, brick by brick, to put the structure and rhythms of ordinary life back into place and get them to stay.

Well, I do anyway.

And for me, that looks like: going to bed on time, getting up on time, writing, exercising (I swapped the two because daylight—I like to exercise outdoors and that’s so much better in daylight), drinking my decaf, and then going to my dayjob.

Right now I am working on Book 3 of the Combined Service. In this installment, I am sending Our Crew to a gu’ul world, Garoar, where they will begin to track down a renegade group of gu’ul who may be able to help them solve a mystery from Book 2.

Stay tuned!

Until next month—

Jo Boone