Getting in Shape: End of Week 29

Another two weeks vanish, but here's the report.

Beginning Wii Weight: 223.8 (My heaviest ever after this summer.)
Wii Weight on 5-14-14: 203.3 (a loss of .8)
Total: 20.5 pounds LOST

Weight Watchers on Initial Weigh In: 224
Weight Watchers on 5-14-14: 207 (A loss of .6.)
Total: 17 pounds

So, finally some movement on the Weight Watchers front. You should know that my lowest weight was on Tuesday, at 202.2, and my highest is today at 204.8. There was a dinner out with friends last night, and I was a little carried away, so I am now having a parsimonious week. It doesn't take much to get carried away, but one has to balance out a misstep.

Things: A couple of friends turned me onto Chia fruit packs. Very filling, very good for my cholesterol, which is a little high now, and a good way to work in fruits and vegetables. I've been making veggie burger sandwiches with arugula and red peppers. Those are nice. The husband bought cookie dough from a student, and now I want to eat the damned stuff in the freezer. My plan is to bake cookies for the Mindbridge Annual dinner, but that doesn't seem to be keeping me from breaking in and eating spoonfuls of it. Apparently it is one of those foods I can't have in the house, and will never have in there again.

Still exercising. Watching what I eat, whether it works out or not. I hope to continue to report losses next week.

Mirrored from Writer Tamago.

Semi-Biographical

Recently, I've been working on semi-biographical pieces. I should explain how speculative fiction is semi-autobiographical.

The pieces I'm referring to are Cookies which is a piece about a brother and a sister from a highly dysfunctional family looking for salvation, and The Ground is Full of Teeth, the setting of which is a horror-verse version of the town I grew up in, although its portrayal is more accurate than you would suppose. Also, the abuse case represented in the story is NOT from my own background, as is the case with Cookies (I know, readers of Cookies, that makes things even more squicky), but is rather one I observed as a child through the lens of growing up in a very peculiar place and in a very peculiar way.

Write what you know, they say.

The Ground is Full of Teeth is something I've worked on for three years, until I managed to get it right with some helpful editorial suggestions from a place it might end up. If not, the editorial suggestions helped give the story inherent logic, whereas before, while the description and the events were well-rendered, why the story happened was loosey-goosey. Cookies was spurred by a family phone call and came into existence over the course of four hours, things just twisting and turning as they would. In Cookies, the main character is detached from the events in her narration, at least that's how she tells the story, but her actions belie her involvement. In Teeth, the poetry is the story, the Gothic representation of a very spooky place.

I will probably write pieces like this again. These pieces reveal a great deal of self, perhaps some things about oneself that one would rather not reveal, but this is writing that takes risk. My characters are not me and the events are based on biography, but are not the events. Still, there is discomfort. Some would say, good. That's what makes stories effective. Maybe.

With that in mind, I will still not make this my writing sweet spot. I believe that these are two of my more successful pieces, especially now that the internal logic of Teeth works for me. But I am equally in love with Turtle of the Earth, which is about a Chinese agricultural family, or Mark Twain's Daughter, which has nothing to do with me, or even The Love Song of Oliver Toddle, which is as close as I've come to writing romance, and which is the only piece I've ever read besides the one I wrote about Toby that has made me cry while reading it.

I know some readers would like more stories like Cookies. Bryon tells me that he probably wouldn't read my work if that was all my writing was like. Even if it made us a lot of money, I asked from some where in a fantasy. Yup.

Because these are not enjoyable stories to read, and my spouse likes to be happy. Still, I think it marks some progress in myself as a writer and as a person that I can write these kinds of stories.

Mirrored from Writer Tamago.