Welcome To ActiveWritingLife.com.
My name is Kevin Ikenberry, and I write science fiction and alternate history. Since 2014, I’ve written and had more than thirty novels published. I’ve also appeared in more than thirty anthologies and collections. I’m an international bestselling author and I’ve spent a lot of time on my ass. Sitting.
In 2025, I decided I needed to make a change, so I created a simple spreadsheet and fired up Google Maps to map distances around my neighborhood and then I started walking. I set the goal of walking 500 miles over the course of the year. Walking 500 miles in 365 days equates to about 1.37 miles per day. Armed with that information, I set about walking everyday (weather dependent – or I went to the gym) and tracked my progress using the routes I’d plotted.
January went okay, but in February and March the weather and a lingering upper respiratory illness knocked me back. From April through the end of the year, I upped my mileage average a little to cover where I was falling short of the goal. Now, while I consider myself a lifelong athlete I wasn’t in great cardiovascular health. I also have a pretty mangled left knee from more than twenty years of service in the Army (running, ruck marches, parachute jumps, and all kinds of experiences), but I kept walking.
In the summer, around the time I hit the 300 mile mark, I decided to buy a small backpack (“ruck”) which I loaded with around 25 pounds of weight. On the days when my knee is feeling good enough for the extra weight, I ruck. When it doesn’t, I’m still out there walking those miles.
By the time September rolled around, I was averaging around 2 miles per day and I’d started using dictation to capture ideas, description fragments, and dialogue for scenes as I walked. The walking, the dictation, and my wellness lit something special because that month I wrote more than 100,000 words.
In a month. I’m serious.
When I reached the 500 mile mark in the middle of December, I knew I’d found something special. Momentum. Not just in the physical sense, but the creative one, too. I firmly believe that physical and mental movement plays a huge role in our creative aspirations. While diet and exercise are excellent things to consider, movement can be anything that refills our reservoirs.
In the coming months, I’m going to share more of my journey and I’ll be inviting some friends to share their experiences with activity on a daily basis and how it’s transformed their creativity.
And yes, as this site gets going I’m not looking to clutter your email inboxes with a newsletter, nor am I asking a fee for anything. All of the information you find here is yours to peruse and return to over and over again. If you have feedback or suggestions, please reach out to me at [email protected].
Welcome to the movement. Let’s go.
“What is measured gets managed” is attributed to Peter Drucker.