19,000 Words Later

I'm sure I've talked about the milestones one experiences in life that end up changing an individual's trajectory. I can point to a number of them in my own life. And while many of them cause a fair amount of regret on my part (mostly due to my behavior rather than someone else's), none have affected me quite as much as the job I worked in San Francisco. It was the only one and, because no one else would even give me the luxury of an interview for different, better work...I left the city.  

However, my time there was a perfect example of how far I'm willing to go to get what I want when I find it attainable (this often does not work in relation to other people; no means no). I took on a physically exhausting job during the day and attacked the mentally exhausting grad school work at night. My first three years out there were tough, but REALLY good. Solid friend group, solid writers to lean on and drink with, great living situation. The job was whatever, but it paid the bills. 

During my last year however, I got seriously injured. The entirety of my right arm and shoulder have a number of -itises inside them now, and mostly don't give me any trouble. But my back? That laid me the fuck out several months after I'd been home. 

Maybe I just take punishment better than most, but it's possible my lower disc had herniated well before I ever left SF. I had always done physical work, so I was good at ignoring internal things in order to get the job done (for anyone reading, I'd highly recommend against falling into this mindset). The subsequent back surgery happened a year after I'd returned home and, though it was necessary, became something of a mental impediment as well as a physical one. 

I've never been completely happy with my genetic-based appearance and I'm sure that's a pretty common theme for a lot of people. But it was never really an issue until after the surgery. And I don't want to be unfair to the people who actually suffer from this in very real ways, but there was certainly a high level of body dysmorphia happening within me (and which continues). I wasn't as active, so I was gaining weight. I was physically limited to a lot of the things I *could* do, which limited the number of ways in which I could change this. 

During this time, I met some really fantastic women who, had I not been so inside my head, I might have pursued more completely and maybe things would've gone in more interesting directions then. I've stopped trying to think about that, but my imagination takes to wandering into the "what if" eras every so often, and usually far too easily. 

Did I allow things to fall through the cracks and blame it all on my injuries? Or was I simply making excuses for not being able to follow through in various moments? I'm guessing it's a fair blend of the two, with a heavy lean toward the latter if I were a betting man. 

*    *    *

Fast forward through all the creative slumps I've been experiencing this last three years and I've finally grabbed hold of the reins in an effort to quash that dysmorphia bullshit. I am no longer at my heaviest weight ever, but it's taking some work to reverse all the damage I've done, both mentally and physically. 

I work out in my basement 5 days a week, focusing the majority of my efforts on abdominal and core work. I'm already seeing ridiculous results purely from that. I'm not going super hard on things, but I do three workouts a day. And despite my advice to not do so above, I'm trying to work through the tennis elbow condition in both arms. 

I'm on an intermittent fasting plan. I tried an app two weeks ago and loved the results, so now I've moved to something less intermittent; 19 hours of fasting with 5 hours of regular eating between 4pm and 9pm. That started this week, so we'll see if its more rigid structure provides the same kind of results. 

Smaller, healthier portions of more fruit, nuts, veggies, etc. So far, I've lost around 15 pounds. There's a little fluctuation (a pound here, a pound there), but it's staying steady now, which is a good sign and tells me I'm on the right path. My first weigh-in was a solid 264lbs. Today I'm hovering around the 251lb mark. I'm pretty sure my last visual weigh-in from my previous post was a fluke. It couldn't have possibly been that good then. The current weight though...it's both stable and dropping. 

Why did this take so long? Well, partially because the last few years have been the absolute worst of my life in many ways. No hyperbole. My entire being has been bodyslammed a hundred times over and I'm kinda just over it having control. 

Though I'm less concerned with the weight and more how it looks on me, I'm shooting for about 230lbs by March. I don't think it's too far out of reach. But really, if I'm building up the right muscle, I won't care about the weight as long as it's all healthy. 

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November was a good month creatively. I've done less social media, which I think has helped filter out the noise. 

But I couldn't sleep one night and jumped out of bed with an idea in my head. That night, I proceeded to knock out the first couple thousand words of a project. As of last night, that project is at 19,000 words and is very nearly finished. 

Even on one of my best months, 19k words is pretty unheard of, so that's giving me a little life right now. The painting has gone by the wayside a bit while I focus on wrangling this aspect back in to shape, but yeah. It's a scenario for Call of Cthulhu (so not readable fiction, not really), which I'll be playtesting over the next few weeks to tweak the things that need to be tweaked before publication. Below are the cover and the back cover description.

The back text: 

“In Greek mythology, King Aegeus was forced to sacrifice 7 men and 7 women to the Minotaur in the Labyrinth every 7 years. 

One year, his son Theseus volunteered to kill the Minotaur under the guise of becoming one of those sacrifices, and assumed his death was all but assured. Ariadne, who had fallen in love with Theseus, gave him a sword and a ball of twine so that he could find his way back out once done. 

Created to be an era-agnostic scenario, the 8 characters within this story will need to use all their cunning and wit to make it through a labyrinth of stone and violence that seems to be watching their every move while also feasting upon their gravest mistakes. 

Your players have been given all the string and help they need in order to escape this particular maze, but it will cost them dearly to get out alive. Are they friends? Are they foes? Will everyone work together to escape as a group or will one person emerge as the sole victor, having removed everyone else from the equation? 

This is Ariadne’s Deceit.”

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