So, we’re trying out the Paleo Diet.

The funny thing is that I totally don’t buy the plan’s basic rationale – that our bodies haven’t evolved fast enough to keep up with our changing diets since changing from the paleolithic hunter/gathering to agriculture and domesticated animals. I think that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution.

But… what I’ve been doing (quick starch/meat/sauce or eating out (grease, large portions, sugary sauces)) isn’t working. Not health-wise, money-wise, nor self-esteem-wise. I basically feel like I’ve lost my ability to know what’s good for me to eat, and obtain it. Food has become overwhelming, and since I (fortunately) have no anorexic inclinations, that means I’ve been eating too much. And mostly (starchy, sugary) comfort foods. *sigh*

Anyway.

I’ve been loving Crossfit for exercise, and they’re big into Paleo as a group, and a lot of people have seen good results with it, whether because they really benefit from cutting out wheat, sugar, legumes, and dairy, or because following any sort of strict diet encourages more attention to portion sizes and food quality. Since some people *do* have gluten, dairy, and other food sensitivities, I’m sure it’s a bit of both.

And they sent out this e-book.

With meal plans.

And shopping lists, and recipes, and FREE, or anyway paid for by my Crossfit branch and delivered to my in-box with no effort or even desire on my part.

Brian and I talked about it, and decided it might be worth a try. My big thing is that the meal plans take all the decision-making and a lot of the thought and planning out of the equation. Of course, then we put off doing anything more for a few weeks…

This weekend, we went shopping and bought everything on the Week 1 shopping list. (Did I mention there are 6 weeks worth of meal plans?) That in itself was exhausting, because it was all like: “where do we find the asparagus? the sweet potatoes? fresh rosemary? shallots???” (We never did find the shallots, but after looking them up online, I decided to substitute garlic.)

So lots of unfamiliar products, mostly in the fresh produce area where we know where to find the fruit and very little else. (I don’t “normally” buy fresh stuff, because if left to my own devices I forget what I was going to do with it, then forget about it altogether until it gets moldy or slimy or desiccated.)

Yesterday, I took a personal day off from the day job to fully clear out all the “no-no” foods from the kitchen, and then clean up the kitchen and do some rearranging to be more conducive to food prep. It took ALL DAY, and I still have a junk counter left to clear off. :-p (Why is it so easy to accumulate wild morasses of junk, and so hard to get it back under control? Entropy, probably.)

And now? Well, now it’s just a matter of sticking to it. The hardest part so far is simply sinking the time in for the food prep. Fresh foods taste way better, and they’re cheaper for the most part, but they’re much more expensive in terms of *time.* I’m reluctant to commit that time, especially when I’m already spending a ton on exercise, and those required blocks on work and sleep, and I haven’t figured out how to fit writing regularly back in yet.

But…

I’ve been getting fatter, and I’m already 40 pounds over where I want to be, and 55 pounds over where I was (healthily) in college. Exercise alone isn’t going to do it, because following my instincts food-wise just means I eat more to cover the extra energy expenditure. Being fat isn’t the end of the world, but I also don’t have much energy, and in theory being fitter would help with that. And more energy would let me fit writing back in more easily…

So it seems worth it, at least for now. Stay tuned for occasional recipes/food commentary in addition to my normal writing related posts. And hopefully you won’t be seeing a “fell off the plan, gorged on chocolate cake” post any time soon!

And many thanks to my good friend Sarah for posting reviews on Amazon!

*happydance*

(Oh, and in case you were expecting some other sort of review, go see Avengers – it is the best movie I’ve seen in the theater in a while, and well worth seeing on the big screen!)

(I think I’m going a little overboard on the exclamation points in this post… Oh well!!!)

Or maybe it should be a kidnapping, instead of a murder.

Or a kidnapping, and *then* a murder…

Or a murder, followed by a kidnapping!

But why would they kidnap the body? And once they’re dead, isn’t it body-theft instead of kidnapping? Unless nobody else knows they’re dead…

Ah-ha!

(Or maybe not. So many possibilities, so little time!)

I’m likely to throw out about half of it, but that’s actually a good thing too – I know *why* to throw it out, and what to write in its place.

*happy*

It feels like Crossfit is getting harder rather than easier – probably because I’m getting a little stronger, and therefore able to push myself harder, and not scale the workout down quite as much as I was at first.

In some ways, Monday and Thursday this week (our 8th and 9th full classes since finishing the on-ramp intro classes) each felt like the most difficult workout I’ve done in my life. I’m certainly still feeling a bit worn out, even if my muscles aren’t complaining much today.

It’s hard not to let it be discouraging…

I’ve been coping by comparing it to my other favorite way to make myself want to collapse like a wet noodle – climbing the beautiful Mount Monadnock in Jaffrey, NH.

We’ve been visiting the state park at least once most years since first discovering it in college – so for a little over a decade.

Sometimes I make it to the top.

More times I turn back early so that the other people in my party don’t have to wait a couple of hours once they get to the car for me to make it down too. Sometimes if I’ve been sick, I just putter around some of the side trails rather than heading straight up.

However far up the trail I get, the journey down is always an exercise in working through exhaustion and balancing rest breaks against the desire to get back to the car without making my friends wait too long. (Or depending on how late we start the climb, before it gets dark out!)

The thing is, though, the two experiences – Crossfit and Mount Monadnock – are both completely different and strangely similar.

Both involve pushing myself to my limits while trying to be just cautious enough to avoid injury.

Both leave me shaking, exhausted, and strangely satisfied. The fact that one takes an hour and the other takes 4-5 hours doesn’t seem to matter much at all. After all, both involve not giving up until you’re done.
(Though I’ll admit it’s much more *possible* to give up in the middle of a Crossfit workout. If you’re halfway up a mountain and the car’s at the bottom, you have to get there somehow.)

Both require a balance of effort and realism, whether using a lighter weight or doing fewer rounds in Crossfit, or taking enough breaks to keep from hurting myself on the trail.

Both involve a similar sense of accomplishment at the end.

I guess what I’m getting at – for me now, for anyone thinking about or at a similar beginner’s stage of Crossfit, or for that matter anyone pondering whether to try climbing Mount Monadnock – is that this *is* something doable, no matter how overwhelming it sometimes feels.

I hope so, anyway.

First up: a Library Journal roundup of current zombie fiction. I’m definitely thinking about picking up a copy of By the Blood of Heroes when it comes out in May.

Next, a couple of zombie discussion forums:

Your Zombie Plan is a place to share and discuss plans for the zombie apocalypse, and other zombie-related topics.

All Things Zombie appears to be exactly what it says, with tons of discussion boards on zombies and horror.

I even found a couple of interesting looking Facebook groups:

The Zombie and Post-Apocalyptic Fan Club and ZombieHub.

Enjoy!

Use coupon code WW55T on checkout from Smashwords by April 23rd.
Coupon code YM57T for Zombie Variations is good til my birthday, April 27th.

Of course, you can also buy everything on Amazon too!

Zombie Variations
Zombies – ravening, mindless monsters? Or just misunderstood?
Zombie Variations collects three short stories from the zombie’s point of view, and three very different types of zombies.
2795 words, ~ 10 pages

Normally $0.99, you can download a free copy in the format of your choice from Smashwords using coupon code YM57T, up until April 27, 2012.

As with the Refuge coupon, (which expires April 23, 2012) feel free to share with friends – if you have time, though, I’d appreciate reviews on Amazon, Smashwords, or Goodreads! Reviews help people who’ve never heard of me to decide whether an e-book is worth spending their time and money on.

Thanks everyone! I don’t know if I could have made it this far without you!

It’s up on Amazon now too.

When a terrorist attack unleashed a new strain of the bird flu, people worried.
When the resulting pandemic killed millions, it felt like the end of the world.
Then the dead started to rise…

~70 pages

As a thank you to all of you who have helped me keep going since I first started this blog and the Story a Week Challenge, I’ve set up a coupon on Smashwords for you to download a complementary copy in whatever format you prefer. (including .mobi format for Kindle)

Just enter coupon code WW55T at checkout before Monday, April 23rd to get your free copy!

Feel free to share this coupon with friends, family, and anyone you think might enjoy the stories. All I ask is that if you have time, you post a review on Amazon, Smashwords, or Goodreads. Reviews will help people who don’t already know me to decide whether the collection is worth taking a look at.

One of my favorite things about this so far is that everything is scalable. For the lifts, we did a lot of practice with plain lengths of PVC first, to get the idea of the form before adding weight. Then scale up to doing the lift with a bare bar – I’m currently practicing with a bare 15 lb bar for most things. Then add weights, or go to a heavier bar, etc.

A year ago, if you listed off different exercises and asked which I had no interest or actual aversion to, lifting weights would have been right at the top of the list, and Olympic-style lifting wouldn’t even have occurred to me as a thing. But it’s actually kind of fun!

My brain seems to be recovering along with the rest of my body too (if slowly), and I’m actually getting hints of a new story to work on too, yay!!!

Crossfit clean demo

My question for you is: what are your favorite bad guys? What did you like best about them?

Thanks

There were reasons – fatigue from a virus, then bronchitis, then as soon as I was over that Brian and I started going to Crossfit (Yankee Crossfit, specifically), and I was exhausted from that…

(And hmm… they have a recipe for Chicken Paprikash posted today that I might need to look at more closely.)

Anyway… writing. Today, I did some more work on Refuge: Tales from a Zombie Apocalypse, fixing a couple of problems that my awesome beta readers pointed out, and a couple more that I noticed in my re-read. It’s always interesting to read something I’ve written after a long enough break that it’s not all in the forefront of my mind already. Easier to actually read what’s on the page than what’s in my head that way, for sure.

So I think the draft is done, and even better – I really like it! Next up: look up how the formatting for Smashwords and Kindle need to be done and get to work on that. Hopefully I’ll be able to get that done this week – if not, I guess next weekend… we’ll see. In any case, it’ll be done soon, where “soon” is a value somewhere between tomorrow and a month from tomorrow. :-p

The secluded home of the tree lobsters...

Clumping dark matter...

And zombies…

I’ve finished the last of the stories for Refuge: Tales from a Zombie Apocalyps, for a given value of “finished.” There will be seven stories in total, all set in the same world. The collection includes the long-time favorite “Corpse Pose,” and was, in fact, inspired by it.

I still have major revisions to make on one of the stories, plus a polish for all the others, but I’m hoping to publish the whole shebang next weekend, after getting comments back from a couple of patient, generous, and long-suffering beta-readers.

(If you’d like to join them, and expect to have time this week, shoot me an email and we’ll see what we can do.)

The Weird, A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

It’s got over 100 stories, from the past hundred years or so, in chronological order, which I think is pretty cool. I just skipped ahead to read the contribution by Neil Gaiman, and it was amazing. VERY creepy.

Take a look! Just $15 for the e-book version.

Found via http://jaylake.livejournal.com/ and http://www.jeffvandermeer.com. This is a big part of why I love following links from blogs.

Guess what! I made this this weekend, with a little help from Dreamstime.com, the artists Fredweiss and Vector, and gimp 2.6.

Also, credit to Teenbull for the image used in the cover for Refuge that I posted earlier.

And of course, I don’t think I would’ve summoned up the guts to try it again, or the straightforward idea of assembling everything in PowerPoint, without this tutorial by William King. Thanks!

Anyway, I just uploaded it, so it’ll take a few hours (days) to show up on Amazon and B&N, but it’s up on Smashwords right now!

Can you tell I’m excited?

For comparison’s sake, and since I’m going to be changing it in the sidebar too, here’s the original version:

I’m still working on finishing up the stories, editing and so on, but I hope to have this published to Smashwords, Amazon, and B&N in a week or so. I’m also planning to offer a coupon here so that all of you can get it for free this time.

It didn’t work.

On the third day (Friday), I finally went to the doctor, more because I’d been out from work for three days than that I thought he’d prescribe anything but rest and fluids.

I walked out with a prescription for antibiotics instead, and a few hours later, I started feeling like a shadow of my usual self, rather than just an Anthea-shaped body without even the energy to write.

Fatigue, dizziness, mucous, and a rather annoying cough are still plaguing me, but I’m back to writing, so I’m definitely on the mend.

Sorry for the long radio silence here, though! I’m working on a project and hope to have big news soon, but I think I’m going to wait til it’s actually done to make any new announcements or bold declarations. There’s no telling, after all, whether I’m really in my right mind yet, or just on my way there.

Sometimes, I’ll write and write, and though the words are fine there’s no real story underneath to hold them together. This usually happens when I think I know what story I want to write.

A lot of writers talk about themselves as a duality – the everyday self who does the grunt work of typing, and the muse, or the writer-brain, or lizard-brain, or the characters, or the story council.

I’m definitely finding that I have the same sensation. That there’s a part of me that can spin magic into a story, and a part of me that can type and edit and spell correctly and remember what the character’s names are, and that successful fiction writing requires a delicate balancing act between the two.

In some ways, I feel like I sit down and start writing, and by doing so I invite my writer-brain to come out and see. I’m coaxing it out, like putting out bits of food to coax a small animal out of its hole. And like that small animal, if I look too closely or too directly at it, then it’ll flee back into its hole and make me start the hole process over again.

But if I manage to coax it out and not scare it off, my writer-brain will start poking at the words I’m writing. Sometimes an image of what happens next will pop into my mind, or I’ll realize something I’ve already written should change in *this* precise way.

Once in a great while, my writer-brain will get confident enough to take over, and then the writing flies but I don’t recognize everything when I read over it again. (Sleep deprivation will also have this effect, but I don’t recommend it.)

But a lot of the time I forget that I’m trying to coax out a shy and temperamental part of my mind, and I write blithely on with no attention to anything else, and then wonder why the story isn’t coming out the way I wanted it to. :-p

Here’s an article on it from Slate: You Need to Learn how to Program.

I figure at one lesson a week, it shouldn’t interfere with my writing time any more than random websurfing, tv-watching and reading do, and I definitely buy the argument that basic programming is becoming as important a skill as being able to type.

(No judgments from me on *how* you type – hunt and peck gets the job done just fine with enough practice, though I do find touch typing to be convenient.)

Writing is communicating with other people, programming is communicating with computers, not just in terms of telling, but of understanding.

You can read all about it, and find links to the ebooks, at his post.

There are several shorter works available for $0.99, as well as a couple of longer options for a few dollars more. I’ve read The God Engines, and it was quite good, even if I wasn’t sure about the ending.