Author: latepaul

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diet L3 lesamy Less is More

L3 Week 28 – Not, As it Turns Out

…to eating the calories that is.

The simple reason being the numbers below. I can cope with a flat week, I expect them to some extent, it doesn’t devastate me – but only a couple of weeks after a 3-weeks off the diet? I should be losing and losing quite a lot.

Don’t get me wrong, eating the calories was fun and I did like the fact that I was able to go the pub or join in with a work celebration without making it a freebie. A freebie is often too open-ended whereas with this I at least got to have a little extra – a pint, a cupcake – but still have a fixed limit. That felt more in control.

However I am disappointed at not losing weight and I don’t really like the way it skews my behaviour. I’ve pushed myself to do a couple of extra long walks because I know I’ll be able to eat back the calories. I prefer to stick to my limit and do a regular length walk.

I’ll stick with MFP because I like it as a place to record my calories but I’ll stop recording my exercise there so that my calorie limit will be fixed.

Lost: 0lbs
Lost so far: 40lbs
Average Weekly Loss: 1.43lbs
Weight: 264.2lbs (18st 12lb)

Categories
diet L3 lesamy Less is More

L3 Week 27 – Eating My Calories, or Not

I’ve started using myfitnesspal.com as my one-stop-shop for tracking my diet and exercise. It has a blog facility so I’ve written up my week there.

I didn’t want to completely abandon this blog though, so here’s a link.

Whether I carry on this way, revert to blogging here or only over there I’m not sure yet. I’ll try it for a few weeks and see how I feel.

Lost: 2.8lbs
Lost so far: 40lbs
Average Weekly Loss: 1.48lbs
Weight: 264.2lbs (18st 12lb)

Categories
diet L3 lesamy Less is More

L3 Week 26 – More Less Would be Better

So after giving myself a stern talking-to last week I got back on track… for most of the week. It fell apart a bit at the weekend. However I didn’t completely lose the benefit of earlier in the week so I am at least still going down.

Lost: 1.6lbs
Lost so far: 37.2lbs
Average Weekly Loss: 1.43lbs
Weight: 267lbs (19st 1lb)

Categories
writing

Writing as Magic

Writing as Magic

So last week I talked about writing as exercise i.e. takes effort but done regularly reaps rewards. But exercise has a certain mechanical, mathematical even, rule to it – if I do an hour’s worth of exercise I will burn a certain amount of calories. I can do it grudgingly. I can be in a bad mood. I can be unmotivated and only just manage it, or I can skip along happily. Doesn’t matter, do the work and the calories burn and a certain amount of progress has been made toward the goal.

Writing isn’t like that.

Not quite anyhow. Because it’s creative the goal is to produce something worthwhile. Perhaps not straight away and we can be patient about the level of quality but not all writing is equal. I can spend an hour writing and produce nothing but pages of ‘ideas’ and ‘brainstorming’ that aren’t anything that can be shared or published. Or I can spend the same hour writing a story that someone might read and enjoy.

But it’s not guaranteed. This is the scary part. Working hard or consistently isn’t enough.

However I kinda sorta don’t worry about that. My attitude and experience is that creativity will flow. When or how inspiration will strike I don’t know. But it does so more if I’m actually writing and it can only be turned into something shareable if I am actually writing. And an idea in my head is wonderful but it’s only something I actually write and finish and can share that really counts.

So you sort of have to have faith in the magic of it. You sit down. You’re tired, uninspired, in a bad mood and feeling lacking in any talent or confidence. Any you start to write. Anything. Ideas. Thoughts about themes, characters, words, phrases, scenes, visual ideas, snippets of dialogue. For me it’s most often writing about writing and then asking myself questions – how does this work? where does he come from? how does she feel?

And I write for my allotted time and maybe, probably for the first few sessions, I have nothing. But eventually, if I keep at it, the magic happens, the spark comes from where-ever it comes from and ideas start to flow. Better than that I actually start to like what I’m writing.

But it’s not guaranteed. I have no idea how it really works just that I do certain things and then it happens. A few days later, particularly if I haven’t written in between times or am working on a new project, I may be back to feeling like I have nothing. So I start over with my brainstorming and journaling and just typing whatever comes into my head. And hope/believe/pray that it happens again.

Repeat the ritual, keep the faith, wait for the fire to fall.

Reliable but unpredictable – magic.

Writing Done this Week

Well I was back at work this week and predictably that has meant I haven’t written as often or as much. I’ve only written on three of the last seven days. Each time though I wrote for 30mins and overall I wrote about 1565 words. Most of that was in the form of ideas though i.e. the kind of rambling I described above.

I did write the first draft of an idea for the TWI Monday flash, but the deadline was Friday 9pm and since I didn’t write at all that day I missed it. I may come back to the idea but it was very slight and to be honest it’s not one of my favourites.

I wrote some thoughts on how to do a sequel/re-write of a story I wrote a few years ago. M. told me it was her favourite of mine and that I should write something similar. I’m not sure how so I wrote about that (see above re: questions)

This evening I wrote mostly brainstorming ideas for Web Writer’s September challenge – which is to write a 3,500 word story called “Hunting Season”. Actually a lot of my thoughts were about combining it with “airship” and another idea I’ve had called “the purpose of flight” – these may still be three stories but may take place in the same world.

Categories
diet L3 lesamy Less is More

L3 Week 23-25 – Let’s Do It

OK. Three weeks behind on this and one simple reason. I’ve got bad news to report so I’ve put off sharing it. Writing the blog is like getting back on the diet. I put it off because I’ve gotten behind but sooner or later I know I have to get back to it. So here goes.

Week 23 – was a combination of an evening out and days with M. I expected this to be off the diet and given that the amount I put on, 5lbs, was not as much as it could have been.

Week 24 – was a continuation of being off the diet when I was supposed to be back on it. However I’d decided that since I was on holiday from work I’d be on holiday from the diet and get back on it when I went back to work. I put on another pound.

Week 25 – was a half-hearted attempt to get back on the diet but ended up with a weekend of pizza, no exercise and alcohol.

Lost: -10.4lbs
Lost so far: 35.6lbs
Average Weekly Loss: 1.4lbs
Weight: 268.6lbs (19st 3lb)

Obviously those are not great numbers but I’ll lose it back. I wouldn’t be writing this if I wasn’t already ready to get back on track.

Categories
writing

Writing as Exercise

As of today, I’m instituting a new weekly blog post about writing. Just as I always do an L3 post on a Monday[1] I’m now going to do a post about writing on a Wednesday. Since I couldn’t think of a name that I didn’t hate I’m not going to give it one. It’ll simply be the weekly writing post.

The idea will be to give myself a sense of accountability and progress. I can update you on my current projects and any insights into the writing per se.

Writing as Exercise

I’m doing this because I have started writing again. And I’ve started writing again on the basis that writing is like exercise. In that:

  • it’s hard to face doing when you haven’t done it for a while
  • it’s always a little hard to get going but enjoyable when you do
  • still it’s always going to be easier not to bother
  • but you do it because you want the long term results
  • doing it regularly, possibly every day, is a good idea
  • doing it every day makes it easier to get started
  • doing it every day makes it more effective
  • progress is gradual but real

Current Projects

Here’s a list of things I’ve been working on. I’m not going to give too much details here and may even resort to code names rather than titles (I’m a bit weird about talking about stuff that’s still in the early stages) and it’s not my intention to discuss specifics or give excerpts or anything like that. I mostly want to track progress.

TWI Monday Flash – The Write Idea is a writing forum I’m part of and they run a weekly flash fiction competition (250 words). I wrote a piece called “Looking for the Other Aardvark” about Noah. The prompt (that I used) was “it’s going to rain”. I got a couple of votes. There were I think 6 entries overall and the winner scored 4.

Web Writers August Challenge – This is an email list I’m part of. Yesterday I wrote a ~650word story on a theme of a change of attitude/latitude. Today I re-wrote it and it came to 999words. I was quite happy with the results even though I got latitude and longitude the wrong way round. D’oh!

The Young Poisoners Club – this is a story I submitted to an online competition I was part of in 2008. It’s the only one of several such competitions where I’ve completed each round. Anyway, when I started about a week and a half ago thinking about writing again at first I had no inspiration. So I looked at re-writing something and this was it. Sent it to Web Writers and got some nice feedback but realised I’d done little more than tweak it when it needs some structural changes. I may look at making it a play.

The Magic Witch – oh now this is a semi-mythical piece of work. I started it in 2003 and have gone back to it a couple of times but never managed to finish it. It’s a children’s story. In its current form it has, or had until a few days ago, a beginning, an ending and a part in the middle with the words “MISSING MIDSECTION” in bold. I’ve now written some notes sketching out the missing midsection. All I have to do now is write it.

Radio play – I’ve had this idea that I’d like to write a radio play. Aside from possibly converting YPC above I scribbled down an idea called “airship“. No more than notes on an idea for a sort of theme and a character.

World/Feeling – this is super-vague. If I had to describe my own work then I’d say that most of my stories are cute ideas or twist-in-the-tail stories. What I’d like to be able to do is create a sense of a world, a character or just a tone. Like I said, vague.

Well that was quite a lot. Mind you that’s almost two weeks’ worth and I’ve been on holiday. Back to work tomorrow but I do intend to still write every day.

[1]I know, I know. I’m going to do a catch-up, possibly tomorrow.
Categories
reviews

A Tale of Two Board Games

As you know I just spent a few days with M. as a sort of holiday. We went out for a day to the seaside, we went to a play, went out for meals and also played some games.

What happened was one night when we were in M. wanted to play Risk, which we did (I won – yay!), but to be honest my enthusiasm for Risk used to be huge when I was a student but these days I am daunted by it being a potentially hours-long game because of the open-ended nature (you play until someone wins). Also it can be less satisfying for just two people. As it happens the game we played didn’t fall into either of these pitfalls that night but when we discussed repeating the experience we ended up deciding to look into buying a new game or games.

Which is how we ended up visiting a games shop in Greenwich Market and purchasing two games – one chosen by me, one by M. We played both over the next couple of days, here’s my verdict:
Carcassonne (M.’s choice) – Carcassonne is a tile-laying game. It’s named after a town in France and the idea is that you pick a tile from a pile, which are face down, and place it where it connects to the existing tiles. As the tiles have roads, junctions, fields, cities and cloisters on them, it’s a question of making sure that your tile’s edges matches the one(s) you’re placing it against. Whilst there is a rule about what to do if there’s no legal move, in the games we played (4 or 5) that never happened.

Once you’ve place your tile you can optionally place one of your “men” on it to occupy it according to its type – as a farmer, thief (for the road), knight (city) or monk. You earn points for these men when the various map objects are completed – e.g. when a city becomes complete.

I really enjoyed Carcassonne. The things I liked about it were that it’s easy to pick up the rules but that doesn’t preclude some serious play. It works well for just two players. Finally, as the game ends when all tiles are placed, there’s an inbuilt time limit which for us was about 45-60mins.

There are apparently several variations and expansions and I look forward to playing them sometime.

9/10

A Friend Helping Us Play Fresco

Fresco (my choice) – a game based around the idea of being a renaissance artist restoring a cathedral fresco. You are a Master Painter with a number of apprentices. Each day you assign your apprentices a number of tasks – buying paint, mixing paint, painting portraits to earn money, restoring the cathedral, visiting the theatre (to keep their mood up). You first get to decide what time you want them to get up in the morning, which affects their mood, how much you’ll pay for paint but also its availability and so on.

The rules are not too hard to pick up though not as quick as Carcassonne. If you like having lots of different pieces, cards and a complicated board to play with — it’s what made me choose it — then that is something in its favour. It was quite complex strategically because you had to think about how best to use your limited resources and time – whether for instance to achieve points this time by restoring part of the fresco or spend time and money on mixing paint to be used next round. M. liked that aspect of it.

It also has an inbuilt time limit in that there are a fixed number of pieces of the fresco to restore. However in the one game we completed it took maybe a couple of hours and I voted to abandon the second game (in favour of Carcassonne) because of the time element.

I also found that I didn’t like that some “individual” actions required fiddling with several pieces. For example buying paint would involve taking a card from the paint store “booth”, removing your apprentice piece from your action card, paying your money pieces to the common supply, retrieving the paint pieces (usually two or three) and finally removing any remaining cards from the same booth (for some reason buying from one booth “closed” it down to any other player). I’d often go to take all the cards from a booth (2 or 3) to do that in one go but then I’d have to remember which card was the one I wanted to buy the colours for when I went to pick the paint pieces. It all felt a bit fiddly for what was one discreet game action. But maybe that’s just me.

I did however enjoy it and I think it would be better with 3 or 4 players.

7/10

Categories
diet L3 lesamy Less is More

L3 Week 22 – Back Down, Ready For the Up Again?

Well, to within a rounding error on the nearest pound, I am back where I was two weeks ago. Which puts me at an average loss of just over 2lb a week for the last three weeks. Which is good going.

See how I’m taking the longer view, you’ve got to do that, dieting is a long game. Keep that in mind.

I have a decision to make about how I behave for the next week. See this week is potentially a difficult one to lose weight in. Tomorrow I have a games night with a few friends that traditionally involves beer and fish and chips. Then from Wednesday through to Sunday I’ll be staying with M. This will probably involve a few meals out and probably not as much exercise as I normally get.

Part of me would really like to try to at least maintain this week’s weight. Another part of me thinks that whatever I gain, like last week, and like week 17, I’ll lose again pretty quickly. This is a fairly rare co-incidence of two events – a night out or a few days away happens every few weeks, but not both together – and whatever I try to do to maintain a loss may well end up negatively affecting my time with M. and I don’t want that. The only problem is that I don’t want to feel like I’m making excuses and this is the beginning of a slide into eventually giving up. So the real test is whether I get back down to it the following week.

Lost: 3lbs
Lost so far: 45lbs
Average Weekly Loss: 2.05lbs
Weight: 259.2lbs (18st 7lb)

Categories
reading

Why I Don’t Love Books (But Really I Do)

This post was going to be called “Why I Love My Kindle” until I realised I was really reacting against why some other people don’t like eReaders.

First I have to say that between the time I first blogged about it and gave it a lack-lustre 7/10[1], I have upgraded my original Kindle 2i to a Kindle 3. I’ve had this for a while now (a year?) and the differences – mostly the increased contrast of the eInk, partly the better software – have turned it from a nice gadget to something I love. In fact of the last (…counts) 12 books I read only one was on paper, and that was back in April. Of the last 26, 8 were paper and 18 were ebooks. Of those 18, 8 I had in both formats but chose to read the ebook. Prior to that they were all paper books.

Anyway, enough stats. I like reading on my Kindle, you get that. And the reasons are all the ones that you’ve heard before, basically the practical convenience issues –

  • hundreds of books in a single small object.
  • I can browse, sample and buy online via the Kindle itself
  • it remembers where I left off
  • searchability – this is huge for me, if I haven’t read a book for a few days I often need to flick back to remind myself of an incident or character, being able to search for it is brilliant.

Now of course there are downsides too, and I’ll come to those, but for me the advantages out weigh those hugely.

What I’ve found when discussing this with folks that don’t like Kindles/eReaders (or the idea of them) is that the reasons that emerge often aren’t anything to do with reading per se. Some of you will want to disagree with that statement but read on.

It’s like when cassettes and then CDs supplanted the vinyl record. These things won out (and are themselves replaced largely now by mp3s and streaming services) because of the convenience, the usability. Purists would argue that the sound was inferior but the vast majority of us just liked the fact that you could skip to any track quickly and easily.

It’s like that but different – because ebooks contain the same exact content as their paper counter-parts[2] – Great Expectations on the Kindle has the same words and sentences as it does in the most beautifully bound leather edition. So unlike Vinyl → CD where you give up some quality for convenience, here they are the same.

So the actual content, the stuff you read, is the same. What’s different? What do the non-Kindle-lovers miss?

Well there are still some practical things:

  • you can’t pass on a book easily. In fact you can’t lend, give or sell it to anyone who doesn’t have an ereader (unless you’re prepared to print it out) at all and for those that do you’ll probably be doing something illegal if you were to make a copy for them.
  • You can’t read it in the bath or other place where you’re worried about it being damaged. They’re a lot cheaper than they were but eReaders are still more expensive in themselves than a single paperback.

That’s really all I can think of on the “practical” front. Both are reasonable. Personally I don’t lend out a lot of books though I sometimes miss the ability to pass on a favourite to someone (although it also stops me doing that thing where you try to push a book you loved on someone only to have them dismiss it politely with ‘it was ok…’, or worse find they never read it). I have read in the bath but I find my arms start to ache and/or itch after a few minutes, so it’s not something I really do any more. For other venues well, they really are quite robust and direct sunlight is not an issue (makes it more readable and if anything less glare than the white of a paper book). Get a good cover and you’ll be fine.

The other reasons I’ve had cited are things like the following:

  • the feel of books, the tactile experience of turning the pages.
  • The way books look, especially well-produced hard-back ones
  • the way they look in shelves in a room
  • the smell

These are all real reasons people have given me. What I realised was that whilst I love books, I love them for what’s inside – the words, the ideas, the stories. These people as well as that, love books as objects. Now in many cases I expect that the object-love grows out of the associations, that the sense memory of feeling the paper under your fingers as you stroke it to pick up the page and turn it over with that dry smell of ‘book’ has become wedded to the joy of discovery of characters and worlds and horizons of others’ imaginations.

This is all good and I understand it, I have objects around my home that I love for reasons that have little to do with their “real” purpose, that may never even get used for that – but for the most part I don’t share this when it comes to books. I don’t love books as objects, I love them as the keepers of stories, places I can go in my head when I want to escape the hum-drum or the awful of this world.

A great book can take me away regardless of the physical attributes of its encasing, in fact to be great for me it must. It ought to be able to transcend the reality of this world, including its own physical “wrapper”. If to lose myself in a story the “box” it comes in has to be a particular quality then I’m probably doomed to few such experiences – fortunately that’s not the case.

At least for me.

[1] OK, so I wrote this from memory and as you can see I actually gave it 8/10 – which is pretty good. But my comments are far from a full-throated approval, which is why I think I remembered it as “lack-lustre”. I think that disparity shows I wanted to love it, and by the time I got my Kindle 3 I did.
[2] I confess I’m talking mainly about books without illustrations or pictures, which shows the bias of my reading preferences.
Categories
6000 pages book reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, My Legendary Girlfriend – Mike Gayle (pages 5183-5534)

My Legendary Girlfriend

My Legendary Girlfriend was a choice driven by two criteria. I’d wanted to do another re-read and it was something light. Light because of the books I’ve got in my “queue”[1] many of them right now seem to be crime thrillers or other “darker” material. A re-read because… well sometimes it’s nice to know what you’re going to get, if you know that what you’ll get you’ll like.

Genre-wise My Legendary Girlfriend is something of an oddity. It’s a kind of male chick lit. There’s was a moment – I suppose around the time when I first read this – when I was self-consciously moving away from (only) SciFi and Fantasy and I thought this might be the genre for me. In the end I’m not sure it was, I’m not sure there were ever enough exponents of it. That’s the genre, what about the book?

My Legendary Girlfriend is the story of Will who at 26 is just starting a new job and possibly career as a teacher. This involved a move from Nottingham to London and therefore it is a real chance for a new start. Why does Will need a new start? Well three years ago he was dumped by his then girlfriend Agnes (Aggie) who he had been with for three years, and he’s still hung up on her. Or is he? Can this new start be a break from obsessing over her too?

The novel takes place over the three and a half days of Will’s first weekend in London. We see him in his grotty flat where his entertainment consists of a few pathetic meals (melted ice cream and sugar puffs being a particular low point), listening to a glib irony-free agony aunt on the radio and various phonecalls, many to the girl who lived in the flat before him. Of course interspersed with this we get the back story of his relationship with Aggie, so the conceit of it taking place over a few days in just the one place is not really true.

It’s a fun read and definitely light. I’m not sure how well it’s aged. Although it was actually fascinating to read a story set in the relatively recent past when so many things were different. Will has no mobile phone, there’s no internet, his fantasy aspirational consumer item is a “flat screen TV”. He has a VCR and travel card. The later he loses, much to his consternation because it means he’s lost the money it cost him. These days a quick phonecall or visit to a website would get his credit transferred to a new Oyster card.

But aside from a glimpse back at cultural artifacts that are so soon forgotten, is there pleasure in the story itself? Yes. I think so. Will is a little annoying at times but that’s forgiveable in one so young. There were times when you think Aggie was right to leave him, or at least you understand why she might. The plot reminds me a little of Clueless (Emma) not in any specifics but in that way you are mis-directed successfully from seeing how things will play out and who will end up with who. Of course that only works the first time. Whereas on re-watching Clueless still seems plausible not to see Cher/Josh coming, the final configuration in Girlfriend is obvious once you know it. But that’s no great sin and there is the pleasure of anticipating the final playing out of the plot.

I’d also forgotten some of the slightly darker moments which are a semi-serious reflection on starting out in life and love in your twenties. But it’s more of a light-hearted book that can occasionally do a little depth than a serious book that also does comedy. It’s not, for example, High Fidelity, even though in tone, subject matter and ambition that’s what it most closely resembles.

Not sure I’ll re-read it for another decade, unless I’m really stuck for something to read.

7/10 – a good light read, not legendary, but not forgettable either.

[1]A list which tends to change, re-arrange and always, ultimately get longer. However its mutable nature means it’s never really possible to predict what the next book in the “queue” will be.