NaNoWriMo Hiatus

What's up, everyone?

This is just a quick little announcement post to let you all know that I'm not dead, but I'm going off to write a novel and I won't have much time for blogging.

I wish I had something suitable and dramatic for my temporary exit, but I got nothing. Hopefully, though, when I come out on the other side, I'll have a finished draft rather than just a bunch of words.

I did it, once, before. I don't see why I couldn't do it again.

KAAAAAAAAAANG!

As a fitness professional, I have a front row seat to a lot of psychology. People and their bodies are a fascinating phenomenon to watch. They really are. People have entirely different reactions to the same things.

Casting Call

So, uh. It's about to get all close and personal up in here. But, you know, it's a blog, so that's how it goes from time to time.

I don't know if you've noticed, but National Novel Writing Month is coming up. For those of you who don't know, it's a month dedicated to writing long form fiction. There's a site for it and everything, and the idea is to churn out fifty thousand words of fiction. Or non-fiction. Or five ten thousand-word stories. Or ten five thousand-word stories. The whole thing's become rather nebulous as time has gone by.

Also got bit by the 8-Bit Bug

I first heard about it when I was in college. I was reading web comics - always a good use of time in college - and one of the writers mentioned that he was going to be attempting this crazy thing where he wrote a novel in a month. I did some research and signed up on a lark.

I finished it - made it past the 50K mark. The other writer did not. That was pretty awesome.

I've done it every year since then, and every year I've made it through to fifty thousand words. Pretty cool, huh? Seven years of survival. You'd think I had seven novels just up and ready to go, and with self-publishing becoming the next big thing, I should be just raking in money hand over fist, right?

Well... not so much.

You see, a strange thing has happened to my writing. I find, as time goes by, that I settle into this cycle. I go for broke in November. I spend December as a broken writer, not able to put a single sentence down. The rest of the year is spent reclaiming my identity, slowly but surely, until I finally arrive at November, fresh and ready to blow myself to smithereens.

It's a real problem, the burn-out. And while there isn't an easy fix for it, there is a simple one: the grit and grind of a daily writing habit. I've read about Seinfeld's tactic of using a calendar and making sure he marks every day that he works on material, creating a chain of productivity that requires relatively little willpower. It's all about maintaining the habit at that point.

I suspect that I will be able to maintain my writing past November, and it's a prospect I look forward to with great eagerness.

Because Hyperbole and a Half legitimizes... everything.

But there's another problem, a new pattern emerging in my longer works. I get this idea about a world, about its quirks and the kind of story I'd like to tell in it. And I start to tell it... and it just peters out into nothing. Frustrated, I try another angle, another start. Same thing happens. I end up with fifty thousand words of beginnings and middles, but no ends, in fact, not even a decent arc to show. Seven empty promises that took seven years and 350,000 words to say that they weren't coming true.

And I've been thinking about it, really digging in to figure out what is going on, why this is so hard for me. I love writing long fiction. I love spending time with compelling characters, and watching them hit soaring heights that just don't happen in short fiction.

And that is precisely my problem. I don't know how to write compelling characters - all I ever write is myself.

That sounds depressing. Have a puppy.

93% of all sads disappear in the presence of Corgis.

All my protagonists have more than just a piece of me - they're a piece of me combined with lots of other smaller pieces. My first novel, a sort of "the Crusades, but fantasy!" piece, was about a warrior monk who went forth to have his absolute faith challenged by the horrible things he was seeing. That was me dealing with college. The next one was a young man waking up in the future to find that he's been given a badass cybernetic body and is being expected to fight in a war. That was me dealing with the fact that my brother went off to join the Marines.

Another was an inversion of Twilight, a vampire romance told from a male perspective. I actually got a real kick out of that one - who better to write a romance than someone who's never been successfully romantic, or been romanced in turn? - but the protagonist was me too. Poor, snarky, and spent a little too much time obsessing over pull ups.

True story: this image actually inspired the novel that year.

The bottom line, if I'm honest about it, is that I'm not interested in keeping up this same pattern. I need to change it, which means I need to address my lack of characters. Unfortunately, I'm a little handicapped on this. I'm too sane to have voices in my head, reacting like an entirely separate person. I dunno how the hell my friends do it. I don't really know how anyone does that.

But what I do understand are systems. And I have an idea - I'm going to start looking for prompts and writing my characters in reaction to those prompts. I've got a whole 19 days yet to figure out MC-kun sounds and if there's an MC-chan in the mix somewhere and what the hell any of it means.

Maybe it won't make a difference, and I'm just doomed again. But it's a different approach than what I used before, so there's the chance that things can be different. It's a shot I gotta take.

So, tell me. Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Am I on the right track or am I lost in the woods? What about you? Do you have voices (and have you seen a doctor)? Or do you rely on systems to write out your characters?

The Flip Side

Here is a story that you are probably familiar with.

It's five o'clock. You have done your due diligence to your duties as a functioning member of society. You have done the job and you have done it well.

Take a moment to applaud yourself. It's cool. I'll wait.

Because America is on a big time health kick, you decide that you're going to go the gym tonight. You've made a habit of going, and you feel like you might just do awesome tonight. Your scale hasn't moved very much, but it doesn't matter. Tonight's the night where something awesome happens.

Now, this story splits a little bit depending on who you are. If you're a woman, you probably wander over to the treadmill because you ate your salad, and then you accidentally had a breadstick. You have officially landed at 1201 calories, and that just won't do.

If you're a dude, you are probably burning to look like Ryan Reynolds, or Chris Evans or any of the other built stars. And you totally know how it's gonna happen. Yep. Men's Muscular Magazine, or whatever periodical you subscribe to, has listed a perfect, six day split routine where you work on one part one day and another the next. And your'e good about it. You don't even skip leg day.

Either way, we can draw these stories back together along a single common thread: the odds are really good that they've been hitting the gym every day this past week.

And you feel like you have to. You don't compromise on the other areas of your life - you still have to work, you still have your social life to consider. You can do it all.

Of course you can't.

Maybe it won't happen today, or tomorrow, or the next day, or even in the next week. But something will go wrong. You'll start to notice that your lifts aren't moving as smoothly as they were before, or that your runs leave you more tired than they used to. The vitality and health that you feel like you should have will not be there.

And the temptation is to say that it's not normal, it's a mistake, it won't work that way and you can just power through it. But your body isn't going to let you get away with that.

Thus, we are brought to the other side of the coin: active rest.

Pictured Above: Not Active Rest

I'm gonna blow your mind a little bit. You don't get stronger or faster when you work out. Strength and speed and power and all that jazz are adaptations to stress. Exercise is the stressor. And when you are stressed, the best way to recover is to get some rest.

Resting is the other side of intensity. Where you push with the utmost intensity, you stress yourself to a greater degree. Your body responds by recovering you beyond that threshold, to prepare for the next bout of stress. This, in turn, allows you to be more active, which necessitates further rest. It's a virtuous cycle.

But on the other hand, who really, truly wants to sit around and do nothing all day? One day, yeah, that's fun. But it will lose its charm, I promise. And besides, you're working your body hard to get the adaptations you want. Don't you deserve the chance to see it in action?

Hence, active rest. Active rest is the idea of putting your body through the motions. You're not looking to stress yourself, but you are looking to get your blood flowing, and the nutrients flowing from one place to the next.

And the neat thing is it can be anything you want. You can go for a walk, go for a hike, play some Ultimate, ride a bike. Whatever it takes that you enjoy doing that gets the blood pumping. It'll work.

So! What kind of stuff do you do when you workout? And what kind of stuff would you like to do for fun to relax from the stress?

TMI - Too Much Intensity

You know what our problem is on a physical level?

We don't understand the notion of intensity.

Our notion of intensity is defined based around the numbers on a treadmill. We think to ourselves, jack this number up and keep it there, and the longer we keep it there the better we're going to be.

The problem with this? The problem is that it's far too much stress for far too long. Intensity works best in brief, short spurts of activity. Lifting weights, sprinting, things like that. Driving yourself down into the ground like that has a tendency to cause stresses all throughout your body, beyond the scale of what it can actually heal.

In the case of running on a treadmill, you're flirting with overuse injuries as you keep crashing down from foot to foot. If it's a heel strike pattern, you're smashing your knees. If it's toe strike pattern, you're flirting with injuries in your foot.

This isn't even getting into the cortisol issue. Cortisol is a great hormone, not bad in and of itself. It triggers adrenaline, and in the proper doses is incredibly beneficial. The problem, though, is that we end up dosing ourselves with far more cortisol than we actually need.

It's not that the substance is bad. It's the dosage.

In the doses that we expose ourselves to, cortisol causes a number of different problems:

• It leads to proteolysis, the breaking down of muscular tissue into smaller amino acid chains.
• It reduces bone formation, creating a metabolic environment that favors osteoporosis.
• It increases blood pressure.
• Most importantly: it interferes with your sleep, resulting in a messed-up hormonal reset. The growth hormone you secrete when you sleep and the rebalancing between estrogen and testosterone is impinged. You get less restful sleep, and you're weaker in your daily life.

You end up in a vicious cycle - you're weaker, so you have to work harder, which stresses you more, which makes your sleep worse, which makes you weaker.

It's not a happy place to be. But we tend to think that we have to be there. We can't rest. Rest is for the weak and the dead, and we're neither one of those, are we?

Here's reality: intensity is only one side of the coin. There is another side as well. Becoming truly fit requires you to understand both sides.

What is the other side?

Leave your thoughts below, and stay tuned...

What I Learned in the Three-fold Land

I don't know if y'all have noticed this, but comics are pretty popular right now. It's the age of the nerd. What was once discussed in hushed tones in brick basements has become a pop-cultural norm.

It's an exciting time, filled with all kinds of interesting discussion. The ethics and morality of our heroes is a constant subject of debate on comedy websites and philosophy courses. The reality of fandom is also becoming a subject of discussion, particularly with regard to questions of feminism and diversity. It's fascinating stuff, it really is.

What might surprise most of my fellow nerds, though, is how this is being appropriated in the fitness industry.

No, for real! This is totally a thing. I think I can point out to you almost exactly where it started happening, too.

Never you mind the fact that he was lean to start.

Everybody's seen 2011's Thor, right? Chris Hemworth's transformation was a jaw-dropper, from an aesthetic standpoint. He was one of the most recent actors to develop the physique, but he's also really the first one to do so in a post social-media world.

(An argument could be made for Christian Bale in 2005 with Batman Begins, but he's such a transformer that from an industry perspective, it's kind of mundane).

And it's not a dudes-only kind of thing. You're seeing a lot of it happening with females who act in these films. Jennifer Lawrence is a particular favorite of mine, given that she had to undergo some serious strength training to prepare for the role of Katniss Everdeen.

Off to undoubtedly do a thing involving strength

And you know, she's actually a good spring board for what I wanted to talk about. Comics are not the first place to draw inspiration from when it comes to physique and physical capability. You can find it in literature too.

I mean, look at Lord of the Rings. In The Two Towers, you have Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas running down a bunch of Uruks across the plains of Rohan. They not only run this distance, day and night, but are in shape such that when they catch the Uruks, they are prepared to fight and slay.

How badass is that?

Me, though, I didn't draw my inspiration from them. I drew mine from Robert Jordan's Aiel.

Go ahead. Say hello. Don't ask them to dance.

The Aiel, in case you didn't read the Wheel of Time series, are a sort of composite culture. Think a mix of Native American, Zulu, and Celtic Ireland. They were my first real badasses, and to this day I have a soft spot for them.

Which I swear has nothing to do with the fact that they're basically desert ninjas.

Beyond feats of superhuman endurance - running 20 miles a day faster than a horse, with energy left to fight at the end - what really stands out for them is their culture. They have a complicated system of honor and obligation that nobody can make heads or tails of. This is something that, as they become more a part of the rest of the world, generates much comment.

They are savage. They are weird.

As for me, I think there's something to be learned from in that.

So often, in the real world, we hear that we shouldn't worry about getting in shape, that we're 'fine as we are.' As if the norm is for us to become obese, insulin-resistant, dependent upon a flawed and broken system that is only interested in creating more problems so that it can solve them.

Forget that. If that's normal, I embrace strangeness, and the alien ideas that come with it. We are all of us made of sterner stuff than the broken culture tells us we are.

Still, I can't imagine I'm the only one who's ever read a book and thought, man, that was cool. So let me open this up for conversation: who are some fictional badasses that inspired you? What made them stick out in your mind?

Futility, Thy Name is English!

I saw an article today, talking about the end of the English major. It was about how there are less and less of the students actually undertaking this field of study. It's going the way of the Latin major, a useless holdover of a bygone age.

This does not surprise me.

Before I offer my opinion, let me show you my circumstances. I attended North Carolina State University, majoring in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. I wasn't particularly in love with NCSU over any other college, save for two things: one, that I went to high school just down the street from there and two, that they reached out to me while I was in high school. I was the first person in my family to attend college, and the first to graduate.

To come back to it: this article is a rallying cry. It's not over, the author says. English is a good thing, and it's worth teaching.

I agree with the heart of this concept, on the whole. But I don't think it really applies to me.

I'm a writer. My job is to tell stories. Some of them are not fictional, but all of them hopefully have some element of the truth in them. So here's a true thing: my being a writer is not now, nor has it ever been, defined by me having a piece of paper. I could have gone off to be an auto mechanic, and sat down at my computer at the end of the day with grease in my fingernails, stinking of sweat and motor oil. But the story would still come out if the words were in me. Like they do now.

Here I am. I am a borderline bro. I have a total man crush on my biceps. I fret over my workout programming and how many pull ups I can do. My hands are calloused from hanging from the bar, from swinging the kettlebell. But the words come, and I can bleed on the page with the best of them.

Did I really need to spend tens of thousands of dollars just to learn to do something that I was doing already anyway?

I don't know. I don't claim to have any answers for anyone, here. But if I don't need the Major to be who I need to be, and my freaking vocation is tied to it, then what use is it really?

(Perhaps the argument can be made in the value of English Major as the shelter of those souls who find themselves in the works of the past, in Shakespeare and Chaucer and Bradbury. But keep in mind: all that means is that you're running away from the real world, choosing to engage in an extremely limited fandom and asking to get paid lots and lots of money for it. At best, it's an extremely sanctimonious con: you write your fanfiction, call it a thesis, and everyone loves you. At worst, it's cowardice, taking the wonder and beauty of story and hiding it in an ivory tower where you don't have to engage with anyone, save those young minds too terrified to show you that maybe Jane Austen wasn't the end of literature. Then again, I may not know. I had very limited access to my professors. They were too busy reading Bronte to comment).

LFC, and a Mild Promo

So, gotta admit. I'm kind of a loner.

Not the cool kind of loner that you want to know, the one with the bike and the leather jacket who just needs a hug or something. Nah, the other kind, the nerd kid who sits in the corner reading. Because stories about Buddhist ghosts setting Catholic nuns on fire just makes more sense to me than the real world.

The Cool Loner

Yours Truly

When you live in that kind solitude, it informs a lot about what you do. That's especially true with regard to how you train. I'm often left to my own devices to determine not only how to train, but also how to eat to fuel that training.

And if you're good at it, you should ultimately be able to prove it, not only in terms of your capabilities but also in terms of your 'look.' Athletic capability does not, or should not, coincide with a paunch. I mean, okay, you'll see marathon runners with some extra on the belly, but that's a cortisol/hormonal-stress issue that they don't mind anyway (it's just one more reason to not worry about getting good at running all the miles).

I'm a martial artist. Martial arts are a hybrid form of athletic discipline. You need to be strong, yes, but you also need to be able to fight for a long time without getting 'gassed,' as they say. It's a balancing trick, and it doesn't help any that the things you use to train those qualities both require different kinds of fueling to work.

Honestly, I don't think I'm very good at it.

Why not?

Well, because I can't seem to find the balance between one kind of training and the other. I can do more push ups and pull ups than I used to, but I can't do as many as I think I can. I can run nine sprints in ten minutes at the end of a hard hour's workout, up a freaking hill and everything. And I'm carrying a belly.

It shouldn't matter, but it does to me, and I don't know how to be okay with the dissonance between what I can do and what I look like.

All my study, all my knowledge, all my practice, and I still haven't solved the problem. And as I reflect on it, I think I'm probably too close to see the answer. So I've decided to follow the coach's tip and find a coach of my own.

Now, obviously, I'm too poor to actually find someone to coach me. But good coaches have a tendency to create programs that work. More importantly, they tend to be good at diagnosing which problems you have and which programs will work to solve them.

It's tricky, in my case, because my great enthusiasm is for body weight work - harder versions of push ups and pull ups and things like that. Because it doesn't involve (much) equipment, there's not a lot of research done into figuring out how diet works with it, whether you should be high-carb or low-carb or anything like that. (Can't sell a machine to a guy who doesn't need it).

But I found a gent and I've started talking to him. No idea what will happen. Don't see how it can hurt, though.

(By the way, if you're wanting more about ghosts and nuns and the like, you should check out this story by Lauren Harris. Good stuff).

The First Step is the Hardest

So, I guess I have a blog.

Haven't had one of those in a really long time. I got started on Livejournal, because I made some really cool friends, but came to realize it wasn't quite my scene. Nothing against spinster women who love their cats so hard, but there's just not a lot of conversation to be had there for a guy.

Not for me, anyway.

I told myself I'd never really come back to it. I had too much to do in terms of the important things. You know. The Next Great American Novel and all that. All writers are obligated to write the Next Great Something. Write it, but never finish it. That's what makes us fun to talk to at parties.

The thing is, though, that when the deadline was passed to me, it was passed to me along with mandatory waiting times. And so, I find myself now with extra time. Obviously, I can't not write. I gotta do something to keep my hands moving, but I've got so many created things that I haven't really done anything with, and that's got to change. Making more stories is a shitty move when I've got stories in the pipe that need to be submitted.

So, here I am. Writing about not writing and turning to writing to keep from writing.

You probably wonder why I named this blog The Fit Writer. We have established that I am a writer, or at the very least that I have some words that I can't say any other way. So where do I get off saying that I'm fit?

Fit for what? What does fit mean?

Well, for me, it's the physical journey. I want to grow in my strength and general capability. Because strong people are generally more capable, and sexy as hell. I want that.

Am I there yet?

Well, once upon a time, I couldn't do push ups. I couldn't do pull ups. I couldn't run a mile. I can do those things now, but getting there has shown me so much more that's out there that I want to do.

They say that, if you're a male, your best strength days are when you're in your early 20s, and it's all downhill from there.

I will make them choke on those words, and I mean to share that journey with you. And maybe turn a phrase or two along the way.

So. Here I go.