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This week’s statistics:

Beginning Wii Weight: 223.8 (My heaviest ever after this summer.)
Wii Weight on 2-18-14: 205.5 (a loss of .6)
Total: 18.3 pounds LOST

Weight Watchers on Initial Weigh In: 224
Weight Watchers on 2-11-14: 209.2 (a loss of 1.2)
Total: 14.8 pounds

So…it’s going down a bit. The lowest Wii weight this week was 204.4, which is the lowest I’ve been since 2010. (Once I hit 200, then I’m moving in 2007 territory). But mostly I’m skirting around 205.5, give or take a pound.

While I didn’t come in at exact points last week, I did a pretty good job staying close. I’m really working it this week. My thinking is to make sure my snack food is smaller and healthier, and eaten only when I need it (which is pretty much what I’m doing right now). I’m also going to make a concerted effort to keep more accessible veggies around the house.

The culprit in my life continues to be eating out. We eat out a lot. We often leave late from town, or don’t have a lot of zip. Actually, eating at home is quite a treat for us! Ironically, since I am now attending my Weight Watchers meeting after school, it’s another day I eat out.

People lose weight when they eat out. It’s a matter of what you eat, and how much. So, it’s not as big a deal as it seems. It’s harder to get variety, though, in veggies and fruits.

I’d like to make 201 by the end of this month.

In writing, there are no absolutes. So what I’m advocating today may not be a path you wish to walk, for whatever reasons, but it’s one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. And that’s having another job besides writing.

***

In order to understand my motivation, you may need to understand my background. In brief, I grew up VERY poor. I can remember being delighted that I made $9000 in grad school, and it was all for me! I paid for my own college education with scholarships and loans. I knew that there were no parents to bail me out should I run into any financial difficulty, ever. Hell’s bells, my parents, paragons of virtue that they were, tried to suck down my first summer college savings because I was more financially responsible than them.

Given that I’ve done the whole poverty thing, and really didn’t enjoy it much, one thing I wanted in my adult life was to have a stable job. I wanted to be a writer too, but you see how those two things just don’t mix. So, my strategy was to find a job where I would have some time off to write. I fell in love with teaching during my MA, and my thinking was to get a high school teaching job once my husband moved us to deepest, darkest Western Iowa. My mistake? There is no real time to write. After school gets sewn up with extracurricular activities, and to produce an entire book in a summer after an intense school year didn’t work out.

I decided to return to college education. I didn’t do much writing when I worked on my doctorate, but I kept my eye on the prize, maneuvering myself into a position where I would have time to write. I did this, receiving my Kirkwood position in 1998. I finished my dissertation in 2001. My job didn’t get to where I could write well until 2007, and then I started my writer education.

The flaw of my plan is that I’ve had to forestall satisfaction until I made it to a particular spot. I had to get my job set up so that there was time to write. I do have a job that’s very receptive to it, but you could definitely argue that waiting until the age of 42 to get serious about writing, when you’ve wanted to do it all your life, is a real drawback. Yet, I would counsel would be writers to have a career. Here’s why. Again, these are my reasons, and individuals might see things differently. I am not eschewing these as absolute truths.

Continue reading “Get a Haircut, You Know the Rest”

…but that fantasy short story is out to readers.

Onwards.

Everything is awesome! Everything is great when you’re part of a team!

Um… Lego movie. Sorry about that. Surprisingly entertaining, but the ear worm thing is a problem.

This weekend Bryon and I got out of the Iowa cold and went north to Minnesota. Yeah. I don’t know how they do it, but the cold there seems to have kind of a bite. It was the same temperature, but the cold is more concentrated or something. Theory tested by walking to the Mall of America and being more than happy to have our friend, whom the temperature did not seem to bother, go back to her car and pick us up.

Our friend Kim has been alone for three weeks while her husband Aric has been working in Japan, and we were trying to get out of the house a bit, so we took the drive up. On the trip, Bryon and I read Right Ho, Jeeves! in which Bertie is peevish, there’s a lot of newt talk, and we are introduced to Madeleine Basset for the first time. If you’re not a Wodehouse person, just skim that. Then I hit the Body Shop and stocked up for another 3 months, and made a trip to Uncle Hugo’s.

If you’ve not been to Uncle Hugo’s in Minneapolis, you should go if you’re ever in the area. It’s a huge used and new bookstore, and it’s not tidy. You’ll never get a double caff latte there either, but what you will get are mounds and boxes and shelves of used and new books. It’s really something. I managed to fill all my Lois McMaster Bujold needs that I had left. I also picked up the next issue of Ooku, and could have picked up the entirety of the series, but Mama has to buy drapes/pay for some car parts/pay for a field trip to the emergency room, so I had to exercise a little restraint. I also picked up V.E. Schwab’s Vicious from my new book list. All of these things I’ll probably get to in a year and a half.

And then, because it’s obvious, we went to see The Lego Movie.

***

I have a few things to write about that I hope to get to soon. I’ll get back to Venice research (I think one more ought to do it). I’ll also talk about exciting new reflux diets and technology!

Stay warm. Fat chance, but give it a try.

Da-dum! Plateau…eau…..eau….eau…

***

Beginning Wii Weight: 223.8 (My heaviest ever after this summer.)
Wii Weight on 2-18-14: 206.1 (a gain of .6)
Total: 17.7 pounds LOST

Weight Watchers on Initial Weigh In: 224
Weight Watchers on 2-11-14: 210.4 (the same)
Total: 13.6 pounds

What’s going on: Honestly, a lot of the first 17ish pounds I’ve gotten for free, without trying hard, and I strongly suspect that it has been my thyroid medication helping. Yes, I have cut back on my food and upped the exercise, but I also come in over my weight watchers points pretty steadily, and have still been losing weight, until this month, where I’ve been more or less hovering around the same weight.

Mission: Cut back to the points I can have. Otherwise, I suspect this is as far as I can get. That’s not so bad. I have twenty-nine points a day and a pool of 47 other points to spend as I will. Plus, I eat what I exercise. So, I should be able to do this. I just need to do this.

Will this be made any easier now that I have cut all the reflux vice foods out of my diet? Yes. I no longer have coffee, tea, caffeine, soda, chocolate, booze, fried food. So, there’s that.

Exercise is going well. I’m not stretching enough, though, and I’m falling into the earn it so you can eat it trap. So I’ve got to get better about stretching more beyond my 3 tai chi sessions a week

Hoping to report a loss here next week.

I have 100 pages of the new novel in pretty good shape now. I estimate rewriting through the main conflict in another 20 pages, and then I’m onto Lucy’s underworld journey, and Octavia’s above world war. Some Klarions just need counseling.

***

The cool thing about this is that I’m happy with how things are going. My secret? I stopped giving a damn. My number one writing agenda now is to make myself content and satisfied. I collect rejection after rejection. I collect promising rejection after promising rejection. I get asked for fulls and have near misses. No matter.

That’s right. No matter. Why do I write any given story? Because I have a story to write. And I’m not going to be a better writer if I fret about why I’m getting rejected. Nope. I want to have something that makes me feel better. Still.

It just doesn’t matter what reception your work gets. It’s wonderful when you reach readers, when you are told your work is good. Yay.

In the world of art, you are going to get rejected more often than you are going to get accepted. And that’s going to go on for quite a while. So, don’t focus on that. Focus on loving the work you’re doing, and making yourself happy.

The rest will fall into place. Or it won’t. Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

I’m up to about page 95 of the novel being something that people can read. Woot, etc. Soon I will be sailing my creativity into uncharted territory, as Octavia will waste no time in taking Lucy out of the picture, and that’s going to be all new, all different writing, so I suspect things’ll change pace-wise.

Right now, two opportunities for short stories have come up, one especially that I feel kind of obligated to submit for, as I was pretty vocal about opportunities therein. So, for the foreseeable future I’ll be cranking out two shorts. No one should be surprised that the first short is about fire fighting, given my sojourn into that field for the design of an English class for Qatari fire fighters. So, these days, if you want to know what a mini-pumper is, I’m your woman.

***

This weekend is the local gaming convention, which we will be visiting on and off. Strangely, I suspect I’ll get some writing done this weekend during those not gaming times, so hopefully I can get these short stories put together soon and get them out to some readers.

BTW, would any of you like to read short stories? I can’t tell you what the second one will be about yet, because I don’t know, but the first one will be a fire fighter going to the Inferno.

Have a great weekend. I hope we are done with nasty weather for a bit. I’m pretty sick of it.

This is the week of transition to no Weight Watchers at Work. I dug deep and went to a center after school yesterday. You’ll be seeing a 0.8 pound gain, because I’m now weighing around 4 pm, and there is a 4.6 pound difference between weighing then, and weighing on my Wii at 5:30 am. So, actually, I’m doing well. Here are the stats.

Beginning Wii Weight: 223.8 (My heaviest ever after this summer.)
Wii Weight on 2-18-14: 205.5
Total: 18.3 pounds LOST

Weight Watchers on Initial Weigh In: 224
Weight Watchers on 2-11-14: 210.4 (an overall gain of .8 for the week)
Total: 13.6 pounds LOST

So, I lost about a pound last week. Weight Watchers will start to catch on next week.

Challenges: I am still coming in over points at the end of the week. All of the exercise seems to be fending that off, but it won’t forever. I need to think strongly about ways I eat out, because an eat out can cost me about 20 points, and I do it frequently. So, gotta think about how to do it for 13 points, and I’d actually be fine. That sounds like cutting out bread, or getting more rigorous about cutting portions in half. This is a goal for next week, then.

There is a gaming convention this week, and both lunch and dinner will be out this weekend. I will need to exercise caution.

And speaking of exercising, in theory, there is no time to exercise for the next three evenings. Two days I got covered. Stepping at work. Saturday I’m just gonna have to go for a walk.

Well, we here in Cold Land salute you, and we’ll see you next week. Off to teach some wonderful conditional verbs.

First of all, let’s get this out of the way.

Artists should go read this over at Whatever. Also, if you go, there’s another great Ursula Vernon insect picture, and if you’re like me, you’d go far afield to see what Ursula Vernon draws.

***

‘Cause ain’t nothin’ more powerful than education, let’s just let some information boil this recent issue all down for us. Here’s what prompted the insect army: the quote below about the recent SFWA petition, captured in its original glory by Natalie Luhrs, which just suggests that Resnick and Malzberg were just bringing back sexy in that SFWA journal.

“The problem is that the ‘vocal minority’ of insects who make up the new generation of writers don’t scramble for the shadows when outside lights shines on them—they bare their pincers and go for the jugular. Maybe it is a good thing that SFWA keeps them locked up. The newer members who Scalzi et al. brought in are an embarrassment to the genre.” — (name withheld) on SFF.net, during the recent unpleasantness.

Hey, Mr. Name Withheld, I hope you’re having a great day. Let’s start with some basics.

Now, Sunny Moraine does a great job talking about the first amendment, and you’re probably aware that there was no violation of it, as that’s been playing on the Internet for about a week.

I can’t help but note the credentialism of the signers of the petition, so since you seem to be into that sort of thing, you should be aware that I’m not an expert in White Privilege, but I’ve taken some classes, gone to some conferences, and teach students who aren’t from around here. And I’m a woman, so there’s that. It’s not an impressive credential, like winning the Nebula, but I get by, and I think we can talk.

***

But, there are a few things you might want to know to catch you up to speed with the rights of The Other in the twenty-first century, as this seems to be kind of the heart of the matter, or why the “insects” are chittering. In other words, it’s time to explain to you what “outside light” really shines in this century.

Continue reading “SFWA: Privilege and Institutionalized Everythingism”

Excellent post from Walter Jon Williams concerning the Beatles and writing.

The gorgeous earrings from the Frozen collection by Virgin Saints and Angels that Bryon bought me for Valentine’s Day.

Off to have dinner, see a show, do those things valentines do. Have a great weekend.