Lesamy Year Two, Week Four: +11,-2

Been a few weeks huh?

I’ve pretty much been off the diet-and-exercise wagon for most of that. That in itself is ok. However I’ve been doing almost nothing and eating loads – that’s not.

So a week ago I decided to get back on the straight and narrow and weighed myself – came to 112.6kg or +11lbs from the 1year mark.

I managed about 2/3rds of the week mostly keeping to the diet, had a pretty serious take-away weekend and pulled it back a little on sunday. Here’s the numbers based on today:

Weekly loss: 0.9kg (2lb)
Total loss: 32.4kg (71.4lb or 5st 1lb)
To target: 16.4kg (36.3lb or 2st 8lb)
Current weight: 111.7kg (246lb or 17st 8lb)

Feeling Smug about Crap

I just finished a first draft of my task 1 Eurofiction story. As is normal for first drafts it’s pretty crap. But I feel smug about it – why?

Well…

After all the work-related stuff that I’ve alluded to I really haven’t done any writing, or even really thought about writing, since last Thursday. So my plan for “week one = draft one” will have to wait for task 2. It meant that with a couple of days to go I had to write something from scratch. OK, not quite scratch because I’d had ideas but nothing that was more than a vague concept.

Also, I was feeling happy about the work thing and feeling like sitting back and relaxing and savouring the moment. Not feeling like forcing my brain to come up with a story. I like writing (sort of) but it’s work too. Hard work.

The point is – I really didn’t feel like writing tonight. Even after, during my walk, discovering a pretty nice little idea, and developing into an outline in my head – even so I knew I’d likely get back, feel tired and just want to slump in front of the TV. Leave the writing for tomorrow since I’ve still got time.

But I didn’t. I sat down and knocked out draft 1. Complete. Crap but complete. And I’m smug not just because I did it but because it’s normally exactly the point where I’d procrastinate myself into a bad mood.

Of course I think the possibility of missing round 1 was bad enough to motivate me, but even so I feel I justified in my smugness.

Lesamy Year One

That’s right folks. It’s one year today that I started Lesamy. You may have thought I didn’t blog yesterday due to the usual slackness but in fact this was deliberate for once.

I’d love to say that the recent downward trend has continued but unfortunately I can’t. I put on a couple of pounds this week. I kind of expected that though. Things have happened at work which mean that I now have a new position. This meant some stress-relieving eating, some time spent revising for a test that could have been spent exercising and finally some celebratory eating and drinking. Nothing too excessive but enough so I knew I’d gain this week.

But I’m very pleased about my new position. It’s a great opportunity and something I’ve wanted for a while.

Meanwhile I’m still under 17 stone and have lost 80lbs this year. Which means almost exactly 1.5lbs a week – which is slap in the middle of where I should be. A shame that that represents periods of a lot more plus a few of gaining back. Still, onwards and er, downwards. I still aim to be 15 stone at some point. It’s definitely harder as there are always excuses to take time off the diet. But even if it takes another year it’ll be fine.

Of course less than a year would be fine too!

Weekly loss: -1kg (-2.2lb)
Total loss: 36.4kg (80.2lb or 5st 10lb)
To target: 12.4kg (27.4lb or 1st 13lb)
Current weight: 107.7kg (237lb or 16st 13lb)

That’s More Like It – The Fear Returns

Yesterday I tried to write and…

No wait that’s not true. Yesterday I thought I should write. Because it’s the weekend and I have lots more time. Because I wanted to get a head-start on a draft 1. Because I want to have a fighting chance of doing a re-write rather than a last minute polish/check for typos.

But I didn’t. I got ate and drank instead. I ignored the need to write and ignored my diet.

Why?

Well  because the ‘fear’ returned. It’s a weird thing to try to explain to other, non-crazy, people but the idea of writing can make me feel afraid. Obviously it’s not a fear for my physical safety or well-being. It’s more that I worry that I’ll fail and that that will be really really bad. Or that I’ll find out finally and definitively that I’m not any good and destined always to be a something-in-computers rather than a writer. To be honest even as I write this there’s a part of me shying away from thinking too hard about the fear.

But in a weird way I’m glad I felt it again, even if it stopped me writing yesterday. Without sounding too pretentious I think that if I’m not feeling that then it means I’m not pushing myself, which means I’m not producing anything worthwhile. I kinda feel writing should be hard – not just hard work as in time spent and energy invested but hard psychologically. It should require digging into yourself and asking searching questions. Because in the end all you’ve really got to offer as a writer is yourself and how you see the world.

Maybe that’s it – maybe if I was a healthy, well-balanced, emotionally together person I wouldn’t feel it was so hard to write because I wouldn’t have any fear of putting myself on paper and letting others see it. As it is I want/need to and fear it at the same time.

The real trick – and this is where I went wrong yesterday – is to not run away from the fear but confront it and do it anyway.

Lesamy Week 51 – 2 Million Steps

I passed a milestone this week – 2 million (recorded) steps of exercise since I started Lesamy. That’s about 860miles walked.

Well I had a good week and a not bad weekend. I had a bit of a “freebie Friday” with a visit to the pub and yesterday I pigged out a bit – but I seem to have gotten away with it. I have checked my scales and replaced the battery and it seems to be right.

Weekly loss: 13kg (2.9lb)
Total loss: 37.4kg (82.5lb or 5st 12lb)
To target: 11.4kg (25.2lb or 1st 11lb)
Current weight: 106.7kg (235lb or 16st 11lb)

25 Books, book 7, Binary – The Vaccinator/Andy Warhol’s Dracula

This book is actually a slim volume containing two longish short stories – one from Michael Marshall Smith and one from Kim Newman. I bought it for the Smith one but have just finished both and so I’m including it in my 25 books list.

The Vaccinator

It’s hard to know what to say about this story. It’s about a guy living in the Florida Keys who hires himself out as a kind of hostage negotiator for a very particular kind of ‘kidnappings’ as he refers to them (you’ll probably know them by another phrase).

The main character is engaging – he’s one of those ultra-competent macho men that are up to any challenge. He’s not as entertaining as Stark – my favourite Smith character from Only Forward, but that would be a tall order. It’s fun and quirky and doesn’t take itself too seriously, though it’s not an outright comedy either. Worth checking out if you’re a fan or a Smith completist.

6/10

Andy Warhol’s Dracula

This is a vampire story set in the late 70s. It mixes a straight-forward narrative with excerpts from an academic paper on the life and work of Andy Warhol – who was a vampire. Or at least in this alternate world he was.

Considering that I’m such a huge fan of Buffy you might find it odd that I generally avoid vampire fiction whether in movie, TV or book form. There’s just so much of it and so much of it isn’t that original. Given that, and given that I didn’t really care for the interruptions to the story that the academic paper provides, I was a little surprised to find myself won over by this. Even more so because the writing generally was so ‘busy’ – the exact opposite of the kind of spare, simple prose I think I like. Florid descriptions and colourful word-pictures abounded.

In the end though it had an engaging main character and an intriguing concept. Johnny Pop is a vampire who at the outset kills a punk girl Nancy and frames her drug-addled boyfriend Sid for it. The story goes on to chart his rise in the 70s nightlife of New York as he creates the drug ‘drac’ which is a form of powdered vampire blood that allows you to feel the rush of being a nosferatu for a night.

This is an alternate reality where not only do vampires exist and are widely known about, almost accepted, but also is peopled with a wide variety of characters from fiction and celebrities from our world. I guess it makes sense – Warhol is someone who made art using figures from popular culture, someone who arguably ‘fed’ off the celebrity of others,  and so it’s fitting that in this world where he’s a literal vampire we bump into Travis Bickle and Tony Manero , as well as Blondie, Sid and Nancy and a whole host of others.

Spotting the references was fun – I had to look up a couple and I’m sure there’s ones I missed – but in the end it was the story that pulled me through. I did want to know what happened next.

8/10

Enjoying Writing

I’ve just been writing, and enjoying it.

This is weird for me because I usually hate it. I love the idea of it. I love having done it. I quite like the editing process, especially if I’m weeding out the excess words to make a flash hit its limit. But I don’t normally love the writing itself. But at the moment I am.

I think it’s partly because I haven’t done any for ages so I’m coming back to it fresh. Partly it’s that I’m trying to follow this idea I read about where you do 20 mins a day and stop when you hit the time limit, even in the middle of a sentence. Especially in the middle of a sentence as that gives you somewhere to pick up on.

Actually I’ve done more than the 20mins for the three nights this week that I’ve been doing it. At least my ‘writing time’ has been up to 2 hours and more but time actually spent on a personal project has been 20mins – or a little more. The rest has been reviews and crits and reading others stories and writing forums. Also tonight I spent some time organising my folders and creating a document template for the Eurofiction ‘house style’.

I’m also at the beginning of a lot of things. I’ll list my current projects in a second, but it feels like I have all this time stretched out in front of me. Days and days before I have to hand anything in. So I can spend a few minutes noodling around and brainstorming and well, playing, without having to worry about forming it into a story. But actually that’s ok. Because all joking aside if I avoid the 10 days of procrastination and 2 days of actual work of my “stages” then even actually putting ideas down at all gets me one step ahead. If none of my ideas are formed, at least outlined, as real stories by this time next week then…

Current Projects

Eurofiction Task 1 – got the prompt for the first round of EF 2009 last night just after midnight. A choice of three settings for an argument. I’ve sketched out vague ideas for all three and real possibilities for a couple.

AFO September Challenge – this one’s a good one. There are about 5 required elements – Travel, Alcohol, Loss, Dialogue and something Jaw-dropping. Except that none of them are required if you really don’t want them to be as long as the story’s good. So they’re more jumping off points, inspiration. I’m glad the challenge setter took this approach. Sometimes these multi-requirement challenges can be more about puzzle than prompt. Which is fine but I do the challenges to improve my writing not to prove I can fit 14 Beatles lyrics into a 500-word story about ducks. Anyway I’ve got an idea for this and I like it.

TWI Monday Flash – a 250-word flash competition that runs from Monday evening to Friday night. I’ve got a 270-word rough draft of an idea that’s fun but silly. I’ll polish and bring it up to 300 and then pare it back down to the needed 250.

It’s interesting because if you look at deadlines etc then I should work on TWI (tomorrow at 9pm) then EF (13 days and a couple of hours) then AFO (a whole month, nearly) but it’s measure of how much I like my AFO idea that I’ve worked on it tonight anyway. Though to fend off potential guillt I have in fact worked on all of them tonight.

Oh and I wrote in my blog

Stages of Eurofiction

I’ve signed up again for SlingInk’s Eurofiction short story competition. Fourteen weeks, seven rounds and hopefully seven new stories. It all starts with the first round’s prompt revealed at midnight tonight.

Last year in the midst of this madness I wrote what follows about the two-week cycle of getting prompts, writing stories, submitting them and getting feedback and scores.

The Stages of Eurofiction

• Stage one: procrastination. I’ve got loads of time, why rush it? My sub-conscious needs time to brew.
• Stage two: head-scratching and brain-storming – this usually involves writing whatever drivel is going through my head until…
• Stage three: an idea! This is one of the two enjoyable stages. Technically it’s not actually writing and usually happens away from the keyboard. It’ll last for anything up to five minutes before…
• Stage four: disillusionment with idea. This stage usually does occur at the keyboard when I’m actually trying to write down my beautiful idea.

At this point I’ll usually go back to stage one and so we go around the loop a few times. Eventually though I’ll make it past stage four either because – I finally have an idea I’m happy with for more than five minutes or (more likely) deadline is looming. Which leads to

• Stage five: exploring the idea. This is a stage where I pretend I’m a real writer and do things like write character bios, plot outlines, snippets of dialogue etc. In theory that’s what I do. In practice I usually spend a lot of time googling vaguely related topics as “research” (see also stage one)
• Stage six: draft draft 1. Not to be confused with an actual draft, i.e. attempt at the story, this is a draft that I will almost certainly throw away. It’s filled with meta-commentary (i.e. the narrative will be interspersed with “omg how crap was that?”/”what a cliche – is that the best you can do Paul”). and what I call “general outline” (e..g I’ll write “and then he says something cool and then something interesting happens“) Draft draft 1 usually involves no more than 250 words that can actually be considered story, all of which will be scrapped.
• Stage seven: Actual draft 1 (part 1). It’s probably less than 48 hours until the deadline now so I’ll make a concerted effort. If I came up with a useful outline in stage five I’ll use that as a guide. But it’s only a guide I can divert from it when I think of something better. Word count is now 500. Estimated word count to do justice to the story, 2500.
• Stage eight: draft 1 (part 2). Deadline 24 hours away. Realise that the outline is crap and needs major re-organise. Realise that my part 1 is crap and needs re-writing. Promise myself I will do this just as soon as I have a complete draft 1. Word count surges up to 700 words.
• Stage nine: Deadline 14 hours away. In desperation I’ve gotten up early to write. Still plugging away at draft 1. Crap outline is now fixed in stone as no time to change it. Curse the idiot who left me things like “he says something cool” to expand on. Wonder what the point is and why I ever thought I can write. My whole life is worthless, women will hate me and small children will point and laugh. By dint of great effort and pure act of the will force the word count up to 950.
• Stage ten: Deadline 2 hours away. Have rushed home from work leaving important client hanging and probably pissed off my boss. Am now actually convinced that this is pure crap but all that matters is finishing. All pretension to art or talent is gone, stubbornness is all that remains. Word count 1500.
• Stage eleven: Deadline 15 minutes away. I have finally finished! Draft 1 that is. Now for that ahem, final polish. This is simply a quick read to spot typos, spelling and grammar mistakes. Correct as many of these as I can whilst studiously ignoring massive plot holes, logic problems and other weaknesses it’s too late to fix. Achieve a Zen-like state of denial so that whilst simultaneously recognising the crap that is my story I maintain enough motivation to actually finish the process.
• Stage twelve: deadline +/- 1 minute (probably +1 but let’s not tell the judges that) Finally hit send. I am done. The sense of relief is a pure joy. This is the other enjoyable stage. This is the purpose of writing. Like beating your head against a wall, it’s so good when it stops!
• Stage thirteen: (actually part of stage one of the next round) – waiting for score+feedback. Remind myself (without actually re-reading) of the odd phrase or bit of dialogue that I quite like. Manage to recall that sense of self-satisfaction I had with the original idea. Become secretly convinced it’s a work of genius.
• Stage fourteen: score/feedback arrives. EITHER am deeply shocked and hurt that the judges didn’t recognise the splendour and excellence of my talent, OR am ridiculously proud of the mediocre score and few nice comments (despite the fact that they show that what the judges read in the story wasn’t what I intended and I’ve completely failed to convey the themes and ideas I originally had). Also notice comments like “Your plot/character/dialogue/grammar is weak, take a look at how Famous Author does it” and then tell all my friends that I’ve been compared to Famous Author.

(and yes writing this was part of stage one of task 6 last year)

Lesamy Week 50 – Maintaining

Whilst at home for the party I spoke about last time, I spoke with my sister who said that she’d found she could maintain her weight by sticking to the diet during the week – because of the routine of packing a lunch etc – and eating what she likes at the weekend. Certainly I identify with the fact that it’s relatively easy to keep to the diet during the week but the real temptation comes at the weekend. That’s been the pattern for the last few weeks any how.

Anyway I didn’t quite eat what I liked but I did have the party and was at home. But as the numbers show I stayed about the same. Which is not what I want to do at the moment but it’s good to know for the future.

Weekly loss: -0.1kg (-0.2lb)
Total loss: 36.1kg (79.6lb or 5st 9lb)
To target: 12.7kg (28.1lb or 2st)
Current weight: 108kg (238lb or 17st)

Love This

Remember how I said I never just post random youtube clips, but I made an exception for one that was exceptionally well done?

This is awesome. Enjoy