Rock-Solid
Fitness Update:
"Where in the hell is the book?"
Greetings, everybody:
Through the steady stream of e-mails, voice mails and face-to-face inquiries I get each and every week, it has been brought to my attention that the "soon-to-be-released" status of Rock-Solid Fitness has been going on for quite awhile now. So...I suppose a brief update is in order.
It has been said that writing a book, doing a CD or making a film is a little like raising a child: while you can certainly influence how the kid turns out, he or she will ultimately have a mind of their own and key personality traits independent of your influence. No greater truth was ever spoken about a project than how it relates to the creative journey of Rock-Solid Fitness.
Friends, I can't even begin to describe the total amount of effort and overall number of hours that have collectively gone into this thing...especially when you consider that its true genesis began over ten years ago in the form of the very limited first edition of this work (then called Muscles, Mangos and Meditation.) Now, obviously, there have been plenty of other books, CDs, video shoots and tours through the years to come along and cause me to "back-burner" this book. And God knows I've allowed myself to get too easily distracted too often where this particular project is concerned. Not sure why. Perhaps I've felt like the task was, on a certain level, too great to try to commit to writing.
(Listen to my ass! I sound like a sniveling coffeehouse poet, victimized by the very process that virtually every writer, musician or artist has to to go through. Nonsense!)
Beyond the psychoanalysis of my inability to consistently focus, a legitimate part of the process has been the long and winding creative journey that has unfolded along the way. First, Muscles, Mangos and Meditation wound up being completely revised as it became Rock-Solid Fitness. This took awhile, but I had a far superior book in hand as I started getting closer to finishing.
And then, in my zeal to expound on all aspects of the nutrition, exercise and mind/body elements of RSF, the book just got too long and too dense. So, at some point in '05, I decided to make it a three-volume series. Good idea in theory, but a world of agony in practice. I cleared my plate of almost everything else and dove full-force into the process, with my main focus being on the nutrition volume. Summer '05 at my office in LA - writing...which merged into Fall '05 at my apartment in NY - writing...which merged into the Christmas holidays in St. Louis - writing. I was making good headway, but I needed to buckle down and get it done.
So in January '06, I decided to head 90 miles up the coast from LA to beautiful Santa Barbara for a relocation of sorts so I could finally finish this damn book. I figured this pristine beach town, with it's immaculate climate, ultra-smooth pace and salty ocean breezes, would be the ultimate creative environment. (And it has been, believe me!) Plus, without all of the LA distractions, I could finally deliver a completed manuscript.
I immediately got in a serious groove of writing everyday. Part of the process included checking and double-checking all of my facts, figures and philosophies, while keeping an eye out for any and all nuggets of info that I might have missed. This meant rummaging through the hundreds of books and archived magazine and newspaper articles that I've accumulated through the years on the subject, checking out a wide range of DVDs, videos, documentaries and news reports, and cross-checking data on the most credible scientific info hubs online. All told, I wound up with over 700 Word doc pages of largely unedited copy, covering all three volumes, the first of which was almost complete.
But as I printed out a preview copy of this first volume and considered its relentless density, I had yet another epiphany, this one two-fold:
1. If my whole trip is built around the notion that we need all three realms to enjoy superior health - that is, nutrition, exercise and the mind/body connection - then why should the first book out of the gate be only about nutrition?
2. Perhaps it is not in the reader's best interest to load them down with so much info initially. Perhaps I could actually affect more folk's lives if the first book was a great overview of the whole philosophy and gave them plenty to work towards, but was streamlined enough that they could actually read it all. (What a concept, huh?)
And with that, it was back to Plan A: The book would be Rock-Solid Fitness and it will transform lives by getting folks dialed into all three of these important modalities.
As for the other three more elaborate volumes, they will be released in due time. The idea would be that, as the reader wishes to delve further into any or all of these areas, these other volumes will provide them with even more detail, options and concepts.
In the meantime, I've come to view much of the more "detailed" info in these volumes as Urgent with a capitol "U," particularly on the nutrition front. There is just so much well-documented information out there that people have got to know about, so we're coming up with other ways for me to convey this stuff in the interim.
One of the most effective ways will be that we're "going public" with my Inner Circle teleclass-based mentoring program. This will give me a consistent forum to get all of this (and more) info out there, ASAP. More on this later. Please be sure that you're on my e-list (sign up on the upper left-hand corner of the home page) and look for an announcement about it shortly.
So that's the latest. And for everyone who's been waiting for Rock-Solid Fitness, thanks for the interest. It shouldn't be long now...
BR
