Reading Hiatus Ended

I’ve gone over a few times the gradual collapse in my pleasure of reading. I’ve blamed the fact that I spend so much of my time writing and editing that I cannot approach a book without my editing head pointing out continuity errors or simply saying, ‘Well, I wouldn’t have done that’. I’ve blamed the psychological outfall of watching my wife die of bowel cancer. I’ve blamed the internet and easy sugar hit of mental entertainment from the social media. 

And I’ve also blamed the rise of woke in fiction whereby political stance seems more important to the writer than actually being entertaining. Yeah mate, you’ve made that character black/gay/Muslim not because that is any part of your experience of life, not because it’s important to the plot and not because it’s interesting, but because you’ve kowtowed to social pressure and felt you should – because you feel the need to signal your virtue to the world through your writing. It’s annoying and distracting, and as much of an off switch as it is in the worlds of TV and film.

Whichever of these had the most effect on me, I don’t know. Every now and again over the past ten years I’ve picked up a book and it’s grabbed hold of me. It has suspended my disbelief and taken me on an entertaining ride. These books have been rare and I was kinda resigned to never recovering the joy of reading I had many decades ago when, frankly, getting life stuff done was of secondary importance to crashing somewhere with a good book. But it now seems that has changed.

Devon Eriksen started it this year with Theft of Fire – my previous blog post is about that. I should also add that this is not a book from a major publisher. It’s also a book utterly lacking in woke and simply packed with story and entertainment. Having read that, I wanted more of the same and was thinking that maybe it is the woke stuff that’s shitting on the writing world. Maybe the whole publishing world is simply pushing down great writers because of their politics. So, with that in mind, I turned to another writer who in his social media posts is aggressively NOT selling racial division, pronouns and the whole alphabet soup of gender politics: Larry Correia.

To be honest I was a little bit worried about this. I like the guy’s ‘take no shit’ attitude and absolute contempt of left wing politics but, maybe that would be as wearing in fiction as the stuff from the other end of the political spectrum. And maybe he would just be a crappy writer. But nothing ventured nothing gained and, anyway, a few quid for a Kindle copy of Monster Hunter International wasn’t a big commitment. The book started with a guy faced with his boss turning into a werewolf, fighting him and tossing him out the window of an office block, and I was in. 

I read that book in a couple of days then ordered the next and the next. He’s not proselytising or virtue signalling here. Some of the writer obviously comes through, but these books are fun, entertaining, and full of great characters and great stories. I read my way through nine books of that series. I would do my writing in the day, do my exercise and then come the evening it was sofa time with a good book. Social media became something I would do when not sprawled on the sofa, when I was sitting up and eating, or drinking a cup of coffee – just marking time till I could get back into THE BOOK.

With the Monster Hunter series drawing to a close I started getting a bit anxious, but no problem: I continued with Correia because he simply had not disappointed. Next I picked up his Hard Magic trilogy and it was excellent. These were alternative history books, which is usually not my bag but, as a certain comedian once said, ‘It’s the way you tell ‘em’. After that I stepped into his Sons of the Black Sword and was reminded of those fantasy books I inhaled in my early years. And he still has more books I can dive into because, well, he delivers.

Short stories by other writers in Monster Hunter Files focused my attention on those guys. I really enjoyed one by Jim Butcher (he was channelling Mason’s Rats) and did a little research, realising he’d written The Dresden Files which I’d seen as a Netflix thing and enjoyed. This set me on another reading jag and I read through that series (something like sixteen books). If anything this writer leans in the other direction politically to Correia but it’s about a writer having fun, concentrating on story and being entertaining. And now, having polished off books at a rate of one every two or three days over the last few months, I’m coming to the conclusion that whatever brought about my reading hiatus has ended. Whatever mental block might have been there is gone and it certainly helps that I’ve started to find the good stuff. 

Books are back on the menu, boys!     

Theft of Fire - Devon Eriksen

I’m pretty much disinclined to write book reviews when asked, not because there are so many rubbish books out there but because my reaction so often will be along the lines of, ‘It was okay’ thus damning a book by faint praise. As I’ve noted before, I don’t read as much now as thirty or more years ago when I was averaging ten books a month (mostly science fiction and fantasy). I think this is due to me spending a large portion of my time writing and editing – my editing head is perpetually on and when I pick up a book I’m often thinking well, I wouldn’t have done that and you didn’t tell me about this cup of coffee he’s holding, where did it come from? This sort of reaction has sadly killed for me a number of old SFF books in my collection. 

However, returning to Crete I read a book while on the plane to pass the time, then got into another when I arrived because, well, no Netflix or Prime and internet that can be intermittent. I was approaching the end of the second book when I got a message from Christine Eriksen to put Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen on my radar. The timing was perfect as I finished that second book, looked at the star rating on Amazon of Theft of fire, and thought why the hell not? And I’m glad I did.

This book is as others have noted set in an Expanse like universe or, rather, the human race is confined to the solar system by more or less conventional physics while Larry Niven’s Belters are in the mix. Come on guys, you didn’t think The Expanse was breaking new ground did you? It was building on the shoulders of giants as most fiction does.

Being confined by more-or-less conventional physics enhanced rather than distracted here, but it helps that Devon obviously knows his stuff. There was no saying a magic spell with quantum in it to get from A to B (yes, I’m guilty) and the realities of space travel were starkly and realistically depicted. What also got to me was the engineering here – I found myself nodding my head and smiling upon finding out about a lathe and milling machine aboard, along with a bit of TIG welding. This ‘realities of space travel’ also extended to a space battle, capture and boarding (no tractor beams involved) and, well, I’ll just leave that there. 

The plot begins with a ship owner who an heiress blackmails to go on a mission she won’t tell him about. The amusing note here is that she is a descendent of him – the guy who built rockets and settled Mars. SpaceX is in there, along with other corporations. Suffice to say, because I don’t want to give too much away, something big has been discovered and the race is on to lock it down. Things are going to get gnarly.

I could of course go on selecting out bits and pieces like the above to give you an idea of why I enjoyed this, and that goes nowhere really. Other books contain similar elements. Other books can be similarly imaginative or more so. And I’ve tossed them aside after a few pages or a few chapters. What makes this stand out is simply that it is a thumping good read, with excellent breathless pace. It ‘suspended by disbelief and was engaging. The characters involved are believable (to the extent that I wanted to slap one of them at the beginning) and you care about what happens to them. They develop and change together, coming to understand each other, and this interaction is what I think is the key here. No, I did not want to stop and check my emails or see what someone had said on X or facebook. I wanted to lie on my sofa and keep on reading, which hasn’t happened for a year or more, and I polished this off in two evenings.

Thoroughly recommended.

Three sample chapters are available to read here.

And it can be found on Amazon here.

Nicotine/Benadryl

I wrote in a post about my addiction to nicotine that it is the way the drug is delivered that is the problem. Smoking delivers a shitload of poisons and damage that are absent in vaping. Vaping is the act of putting stuff in your lungs which are designed for air only, and people are kidding themselves if they think that has no effect (it eventually did on me). Pouches, which I took up to supplant vaping, cause effects in the mouth and in the stomach, so who knows what long term damage they are doing? But recently I began to wonder precisely how much is about delivery and how much is about what is being delivered.

In that previous blog post I was aiming to give up using pouches. I don’t know why I did not. Perhaps I convinced myself that the ill health I was feeling was due to a virus or a vaccine, or old age. Perhaps, because this was just prior to the spring when we all begin to feel better, I convinced myself it was simply a winter malady. Throughout the ensuing spring, and most of the summer, I was fine with using maybe 8 high strength pouches a day. Then, towards the end of summer I got clobbered with some joint-aching malady that also resulted in a shoulder impingement. Perhaps I got a virus then, and it certainly seemed a long term one. I went through most mornings of the winter months feeling like I was at the start of a cold: throat irritation, sneezing, mucus etc.

This continued but throughout it one thing I noticed more and more: every time I used a pouch I felt rougher. It was obviously irritating my throat and causing me to sneeze. Then, in the last month I was noticing a chest pain every time I used one. Next a scattering of panic attacks came along for the ride. I wondered then if the problems I’d had over the winter were mostly down to nicotine.

So I gave it up completely. I have to say that this was probably the first time in decades I had been without nicotine for so long. Withdrawal wasn’t so bad – nowhere near how it was in my past attempts to give up smoking. I got cravings that lasted about a quarter of an hour maybe a couple of times a day. I found they went away if, when they occurred, I just got up and went to do something different. Symptoms declined but I continued getting occasional panic, chest pain, asthma and mucus. It then occurred to me that there might be another cause. 

The health promoters on You Tube and elsewhere have their variable approaches to diet and exercise but one thing they are all utterly sure about is how we need plenty of sleep. I went through some bad periods of insomnia in the past, for reasons I’ve detailed elsewhere, and over a number of years built up a strategy. I take magnesium, melatonin and 5-htp, which certainly help, but then I found out about a cheap antihistamine that many use for sleep: Benadryl, diphenhydramine. I started taking that and it was very effective. Probably because it was effective I researched it, and because I researched it I started limiting how much of it I was taking. However it was something that crept back and I started using more. Buying some in the UK my dosage went up from 25ml pills I could break in half to 50ml capsules I could not.

I read up once again on Benadryl while also bearing in mind how with all these things, like nicotine, you get withdrawal as well as side effects while you’re taking them. The withdrawal is precisely why you continue. In my reading I discovered (or rediscovered) a whole host of worrying effects from using the stuff and stopped (twelve days into quitting nicotine). Didn’t take me long to realise how it had been fucking me up. In a day I was suffering withdrawal symptoms – one I could definitely identify because something I haven’t experienced in years: nausea. Chest pains and panic attacks hung on and my blood pressure shot up from around about 140/90 to 160/90. It then began to ease over a couple of weeks. During that time I kept checking my blood pressure and it went down and down, dropping to an average of 120/70 and on the odd occasions I’ve checked it in the past it had never been consistently that low. I think it was the Benadryl since, over a few years, I did go through a bottle of 600 x 25mg pills. The fucking stuff was disguising the blood pressure signal resulting from all the exercise and low carb eating!

Lessons learned in all this? It’s that old one from Heinlein: TANSTAAFL. You can be sure that if anything you take has a positive effect on you, it almost certainly has drawbacks and unforeseen consequences elsewhere.

World Walkers

World Walkers

Ever since having a dream that seemed to go on for a long time to conclude with a hammering sound, which turned out to be my dad doing some DIY, I’ve understood that dreams are just the imposition of order at the moment of waking on the chaos in the skull. A dream a couple of years ago dredged up something from my far past. I was an asthma sufferer when young as was my eldest brother and, in the days before pressurized inhalers we used capsule inhalers – devices that punctured a capsule full of the medicine in dust form and which, when you inhaled, spun that capsule around at the centre of a little plastic propeller. The dream, from what I remember of it, consisted of someone inserting dead flies inside black and white capsules for such and inhaler. It transitioned then to this being forced on a captive, and escape to another world. I guess the order and logic my mind was trying to impose was struggling to deal with some fucked up and disparate stuff.

I can think up some weird shit like what appeared in that dream on a moment’s notice. I often do and often write it down and that can lead on to other things and some inspirational writing. It can also feel as dry and dead as a mummy’s bones. But with the weird shit that has made its way into my mind via a dream comes with feeling – like its opened up a lot more pathways in my skull – and I find I can really do something with it. In the case of the dream above it was a novella called Fly Pills.

The novella never felt quite right. The setting was dystopian future of my Owner books but it felt like an incomplete snapshot of something much larger. I was doing far too much telling in it and nowhere near enough showing. I contemplated publishing it in one of my novella collections (Lockdown Tales) but decided that no, it needed more work.

I began that work, writing out those tellings and exploring the past of a far future human called the Fenris and what had been 40,000 words soon reached 50 then 60 and still there seemed to be more I needed to write. At one point I understood that the story lacked an appropriate antagonist, because the simple fight against a dystopia is not enough, and yet, oddly, the antagonist turned out to be another dystopia. Meanwhile Fly Pills was necessarily supplanted by the title World Walkers for this many-worlds doorstep of a novel.

I hope you enjoy it!     

Low Carb and All That

How does the body’s energy system work? You eat food consisting of carbohydrates (sugars), fat and protein. These get digested and go into your blood. Carbs and fat get burned up as fuel and protein generally gets used for repairs. If you eat more than your energy needs these get stored first as glycogen in your liver and muscles and then as fat. When you eat less than your energy needs the body first burns the glycogen and then the fat. This is very simple and the basis of the calories in calories out idea.

So just eat less and move more and everything will be rosy, right? This would be true if the body wasn’t very stubborn about hanging onto its resources. It annoyingly reacts to a dearth by making you hungry, miserable and, by prompting your base metabolic rate to drop, it allows you to become cold and tired. But there are ways to beat this system.

One of the biggest health problems in the world today is metabolic syndrome. This is due to a change of diet over the last half a century. We are eating too many processed carbs, constantly in energy storage mode and getting fatter and sicker as a result. 

This is where the ketogenic diet comes in and why it has been such a success. By eating fat instead of carbs you switch your body over to fat burning. That in itself makes you more metabolically flexible but is not the main advantage. In fat burning mode the body easily transitions, when you eat less, to burning its own fat. Also, not eating carbs you lose the insulin spikes and crashes that result in cravings. Carbohydrates are addictive. We all know, during a meal, that though we can’t eat another lump of meat or cheese, we can happily consume a thousand calories of dessert on top. The keto diet makes you less hungry.

My venture into it on this occasion came about when after months of weight training and eating anything I reached 200lbs and had acquired an extra chin. In February of last year I first did a fast that burned up the glycogen (dropping about 5lbs) and cut the carbs. I wasn’t strictly keto because I did not replace all carbs with fat but increased the amount of protein I was eating too, which is apparently a good idea for someone my age. I was also exercising hard (6 hours weight training plus long walks each week).

Everything went great. In six months I dropped 30lbs while putting on muscle and took 7 inches off my belly measurement. For me, this was not just about appearance but I also wanted to reverse some of the damage from 40 years of smoking, eating crap and going on the piss. After of six months I hit a weight loss plateau, tiredness and low mood, and then seemingly all at once aching tendons/joints throughout my body with the worst being my right shoulder. I assumed I was ‘over trained’ and started taking rests from heaving weights about. But the malaise would not go away and I still had to put a hot beanbag on my shoulder and take pain killers. 

Now, here’s the thing. Bringing down your insulin, which is a driver of metabolic syndrome on a high carb diet, is a good thing. But insulin is also a driver of growth and helps the body to build and heal. A mistake many make in the keto community and one I was prone to as well is that it’s a kind of slow poison and for your health you really need to keep those ketone readings up and thus your insulin down. Well, no, it’s in the body for a reason. Regarding it as deleterious is as ludicrous as the present day regard for cholesterol. So in the back of my mind I suspected I might need some carbs while, at the same time, felt that perhaps I wasn’t sufficiently ‘fat adapted’, that I was still addicted to carbs and I needed to suffer further to attain that goal. Then, still feeling like shite, I read someone on Facebook suggesting carbs and decided fuck it, and went shopping.

I didn’t start with the best of carbs, eating a Snickers bar while walking out of the supermarket then inhaling two packets of cookies when I got home, then a chocolate bar later. The effects were very fast. First I lost a nagging headache that had been recurring for some time. In the evening when getting up to go to the toilet I noticed my joints didn’t ache so much and my shoulder felt a lot better. This morning there’s just a slight nag in my shoulder and nothing elsewhere. I feel warmer, clear headed and the low mood has dispersed. And now, as is ever the case with stuff like this, 20-20 hindsight is kicking in.

I realise now that, over those six months, though I was losing fat and gaining muscle, I was also declining in other ways. At the start I was weight training three days a week and on other days either going for long walks or shorter ones during which I was jogging longer and longer distances. The longer walks stopped about three months in along with the jogging on the short walks. Maybe a month or so after that what I could do in the gym reached a plateau and later began to decline. The short walks became less frequent and increasingly arduous – knees, hips and ankles not feeling great. Meanwhile my mental function was going down. My mood was increasingly low and it seemed the only way I could raise it was exercise. Writing was getting harder and plot threads slithering from my grasp. My practicing Greek declined and more recently stopped. 

Now, could this be because I simply wasn’t getting the required calories to function at optimum? But . . . I was eating low carb/keto, getting ketone readings every day between 2.0 and 3.0mmol/L. Obviously I was fat adapted by this point and burning my own fat and even now have plenty of calories available there. Surely I should have been fine?

One of the premises behind a low carb diet (keto, paleo and carnivore) is that it is, in essence, a return to something closer to the ancestral diet. For hundreds of thousands of years as hunter gatherers we would grab up what was seasonal in the vegetable world without a lot of carbohydrates involved, but preferred meat and fat because they gave us what we needed. Inventions like bread are anathema since grains are only a recent thing in terms of human history. Our fruits and vegetables have been bred to be too loaded with carbs (sugars) and are bad for us. So why, I wonder, did I go into a steady decline over those months while eating what my body really required? Other people do fine on this kind of eating – thrive in fact. Well this is where I think the keto, paleo and carnivore advocates have got things a bit wrong. 

We have evolved under agriculture. A prime example of this concerns milk. Beyond the milk we had as babies the stuff was not part of our ‘ancestral diet’. A hangover from this is that many people are lactose intolerant. However, many are not. Grains not being part of the ancestral diet fall into the same category. A small number of people are gluten intolerant (plus a larger number because it’s fashionable) but most are not. Think on the tens of thousands of years it took to selectively breed our crops. Did we remain static and unchanged during that process? Of course we didn’t. The child whose body rebelled against any of these products when they were all that was available sickened, maybe died or maybe survived but didn’t breed – rejected as being unhealthy, dying young or dying in childbirth. The one who was fine with them lived, perhaps into robust breeding health. Darwinian.

But it’s complicated. It is true that some will do well on keto, paleo or carnivore. That they do well is probably not as some claim because it is ‘the proper human diet’ but because genetically they are more closely related to those ancestors. Then there’s adaptation and age. Maybe you can by epigenetic means easily adapt to these diets when you’re young, but likely it’s not so easy when you’ve been eating carbs as a staple for five or six decades. Maybe I could adapt but how much misery do I want to go through to do so? It’s quite possible I would need to do it for ten years, sacrificing my health in more deleterious ways in the process. I could end up perfectly fat adapted with my internal organs clear of the dangerous fat, and my knees needing to be replaced.

I’ve come to the conclusion now that carbs are something I require. I’ll either include a small amount daily or cycle them – maybe eating low carb for three weeks then snaffling pasta and bread for a week. I just have to keep a close eye on the process. I’ve no regrets about the six months low carb and am pleased with the results. I experimented and found out that it’s not sustainable, at least for me. Perhaps you disagree with all I’ve written here or some of the points made and that’s fine. Maybe I’ll disagree with it in a few months time too.

You do you and I’ll be me.

Zero Alcohol

Checking back through my journal I see it was the 12th of June 2021 when, after returning from a 6 mile kayak run, I supped on a freezing cold beer in Revans – a Cretan beach bar – and didn’t enjoy it. I then had a glass of red wine and found that better, then proceeded to drink three half-litre carafes of the stuff. The result of this was a hangover that lasted for three days and no wish to have any alcohol at all. 

After a couple of weeks I had a case of the roaring shits which, I ascertained, might well have been my guts shedding years of damage. My general health and mood improved and I found the anxiety I had often been prey to started diminishing. But then I lapsed on day 72, had a couple of false starts on stopping again, then got back on track on the 5th September 2021. This time I went for 302 days to July of the following year. Why did I drink this time? Because I was overpowered by my terrible alcohol addiction? No, not really.

On the two occasions above when I gave up I never felt any strong craving for the stuff – just on the first occasion an odd kind of physical puzzlement and defeat of expectation because, at so-and-so point in time I should be feeling this way with some beers inside me. And every time I started again it was because I was in a bar and had kow-towed to social pressure, almost certainly cumulative, to drink. 

During the second lapse I didn’t drink enough to actually get drunk and half the time was wondering why I was bothering with the stuff. I kept quitting for a week, or two, then lapsing again, and then quit on 21st August 2022. What helped with this were some occurrences that made me realise I no longer wanted to keep my kayak at the beach bar, and which led to me going off to join a gym on the other side of the island.

Now I have to add that the dates, upon checking my journal, have come as a surprise to me. I was all set for writing a blog post, today, talking about having given up for a year. However, a series of brain farts in my recording ‘zero alcohol days’ has led me to miscount. Today is not day 365 ‘sober’ but day 378. 

Still, it’s worth celebrating, with a cup of tea.     

Diet and Exercise Update

Time to assess where I’m at with exercise, and with eating in a way that raises my ketones but is not strictly ketogenic i.e. I’m eating high protein and not the high fat of that diet.

Prior to February last year I was doing 6 hours of weight training in the gym each week, along with three or four combinations of walking and jogging over a few miles. The latter, without getting into technicalities of VO2 Max, was because I knew I wasn’t getting out-of-breath enough. One of the realities of exercise I’ve learned that it is often what you want to do the least that you need the most. At the time I wasn’t paying much attention to my carbs and as a result, even though I put on a lot of muscle, I ballooned to 200lbs. I saw that on the scale on Feb 25th, noted the acquisition of an extra chin and decided that wasn’t good enough.

Starting out with a couple of fasts I ate my way through remaining carbs in the house and bought no more. Prior to coming to Crete I ate my way though remaining food so on the last day had something like a couple of eggs and a handful of nuts. I arrived in Crete during Easter and, the shops being closed, I ate tinned sardines and some chickpeas over a few days. Then when I could shop I bought only meat, eggs and veg. I’ve detailed in other posts what happened thereafter: constant high ketones, an initial big drop in weight followed by a steady loss of a couple of pounds a week. During Spring into Summer as I my garden started producing I lived on salads with the addition sardines and boiled eggs, followed later by a second small plate of nuts, cheese, sausage and pickles in the evening. Meanwhile I hit the gym here doing the usual 6 hours (but in temperatures much higher) and started walking and jogging in the mountains – substantially different from Essex with slopes that are in places as much as 45 degrees. 

Weight loss has continued but has been slowing down while muscle has increased. My average weight last week was 174lbs – so a 26lbs loss – while my waist measurement around at the level of the belly button has gone down from 40” to 34”. The latter is a great look in a T-shirt but not so appealing without, since I have wrinkled skin on my belly because of all the fat that has disappeared. The same applies to my arse, which I am now down on the bones of while being able to pinch up an inch or more of skin. So where do I stop? 

According to even the inaccurate measures of BMI I am now in the healthy range. However, I’m aware that by no means have I shed my accumulation of fat and, more importantly, insulin-resistant fat, of the last 30 or so years. My ‘fighting weight’ when I was in my mid twenties was 154lbs (Shotokan karate, 2-3 lessons a week prior to club competitions at Crystal Palace), but getting there would be ridiculous. I do have a lot more muscle than I did then so maybe at 20lbs heavier I’m about right? I’m not sure. It could be that my perception of fat around my middle is all due to the amount of loose skin I now have, though there is still a lump of something under it around the belly button. .   

Damn it. As part of my gym routine I’m now doing 150 sit ups on an inclined bench and other abs exercises. I will keep going as I am until I can actually see the abs I’m building. Only then will it be time to assess matters and maybe increase my calorie intake. However, with the results I’ve had I’m never going back to eating processed carbs. Maybe some fruit or sweet potatoes as a treat, but that’s all.