Redemption - Will Jordan

Since I really enjoy the Critical Drinker’s You Tube videos I felt I should give one of his books a try – written under his real name Will Jordan (I think). An action scene and a soldier apparently dying in the desert got me into the book, then other stuff kicked me out. It started to drag a few chapters in with character sketches and scene setting. Much of this seemed to consist of laborious info-dumps and I felt this writer had failed to grasp the basic principle of ‘show don’t tell’. At least this was my initial impression and I put the book aside.

But then the internet came to the rescue by crashing in my Cretan village for ten days. I’d managed to download some books during a brief spell when it came back on again but, since I seem to be on a reading jag I was soon scrabbling round for more to read. So I thought I’d give Redemption another go.

It seemed I’d opted out of the book just before the good stuff started. What I got thereafter was an action thriller right through to the end with characters that grew on me along the way. Sure, the hero Ryan Drake annoyed me with his vulnerabilities and I felt he could do with the occasional kick up the arse. Some scenes slid into bathos and/or had the emotional sensibility of, well, a neophyte writer. I also have to add that it was a source of amusement to me that the character Anya was a kick-ass, zero-compromise petite blond woman who could kill trained soldiers with her bare hands. Contrast that to the Critical Drinker’s take on Hollywood boss-bitches. However, other characters, like Dietrich, had an arc that was a joy to read. The action scenes were spot on and I suspect well researched, just as were the locations. And the story itself  (after that initial phase) rolled on at a good pace and came to a satisfying conclusion with, of course, a nice scattering of hooks to pull the reader into the next book.

Thinking about my initial reaction to this book I realized that just because Will Jordan as the Critical Drinker is high profile doesn’t mean he was never a new writer labouring through his first book. We do tend to be more critical of those who are in the limelight and in some way successful – a lot less forgiving. This also being the first time I’ve gotten so deep into reading for the best part of a decade, maybe my reading mojo wasn’t up to speed when I started it. It could also be that the critical facility Jordan applies to films was applied here in his first book with a heavy hand. He was being too meticulous about laying the groundwork from which the story springs, and he was ‘telling’ us stuff about characters they later ‘showed’ us.

However many years ago Jordan wrote it, Redemption was a good start. I will try the next book in the series on the assumption that the faults I mentioned will go away. And I do want to know where this story and these characters are going.      

Internet Break

My internet is not always 100% either in the UK or on Crete. Sometimes is slows down so that loading circle appears in the middle of watching something and sometimes it disconnects completely. I suppose it might be due to a hundred million Americans waking up and checking their phones, or a mouse ate a wire somewhere or the sun decided to thwack a burst of radiation in our general direction. It can be irritating but, generally, never lasts for long.

On Crete since I’ve been here the internet dropping out was becoming more and more noticeable then, last week, it shut off completely. I expected it to come back on sometime later, as always, and so filled in time reading some Greek. It didn’t come back on and when I stepped outside my neighbour asked me if I had internet. No. And that seemed to be the case for the whole village. 

I learned that the provider was having technical problems. Okay, whatever – my problem was not getting the service I was paying for. Various people in the village phoned up the provider to complain. I got on with other things: learning Greek, writing and reading books. When the internet fired up again, rather than check my emails, my first thought was to buy and download some more books. Good thing I did because the thing went off again. I went to the shop where I signed up for the internet and complained. They were sales of course and I needed to phone a certain number to find out what was going on. It was the same number others had been calling and being told it’ll be fixed in two hours. Now it turns out this ‘technical issue’ requires some equipment to be shipped from Athens.

You’d think I’d be angry. I was initially but that soon faded. Now with over a week having passed since the internet first dropped out I’m glad. It has been a real eye-opener for me just how mentally disruptive is the constant flood of information at the touch of a screen. It fills the mind up with incomplete equations, hundreds of images, fragments and blobs of information and the angry shouting of the mob. Without that option there I can think more clearly, enjoy books more and generally feel a lot calmer. I’ve even been contemplating the idea of doing without that flood and using the internet maybe once a week at a café in Sitia. 

But I know that once all those lights are lit up on the modem I’ll be back to scrolling, sucking up fragments and getting annoyed at things over which I have no influence at all.

However, I have been becoming less and less inclined to use the information drug. I think this has a lot to do with a general boredom with social media – I’ve become jaded with it.  I make sure to get 200 words down before I even look. I tend to read and post articles and watch informative videos rather than scroll now. And I definitely don’t bother arguing with strangers online. This brief outage has pushed me further in the direction of away – away from the madding crowd.   

Keto Continues

Since my last blog post on the subject a month and a half ago I’ve been eating a ketogenic diet (as I noted in that blog post: I’m in ketosis but haven’t been replacing carbs with fat but eating more protein). Generally I eat two meals a day. The first is after midday and consists of meat, veg and eggs – say three strips of belly pork, three eggs and a pile of broccoli. The second sometime between 6 and 8 consists of a small plate of preserved sausage, cheese, a handful of nuts, some pickles and perhaps stuff like cucumber, radish or tomatoes. Time between last meal and first is about 16 to 18 hours so there’s a bit of fasting involved too, though a dirty fast since I drink coffee with cream and tea with milk. I don’t count calories – can’t be bothered. 

On top of this I’ve been hitting the weights in the gym and putting in some long mountain walks. It’s interesting that the expected target of a ketogenic diet is to get your ketones to between 1 and 2mmol/L and maintain them there while enjoying the benefits, meanwhile mine seem to have stabilized at about 2.7mmol/L. Sometimes they go down directly after exercise to between 1 and 2, sometimes in the morning after a day of exercise, lower food intake and a night’s sleep they go above 3. I don’t know whether this indicates I’m well fat adapted or whether my body is struggling against insulin resistance. But I’ll take it as a win.

In that time my weight has dropped another 5lbs on average though is bouncing between 182 and 187. It seems like a bit of a plateau yet my belly measurement has continued declining. Putting a tape around my middle at the level of my belly button when I was near 200lbs gave me a measure of 39 – 40 inches, and it is now down to 36. I take this another win and will continue along this course. As I noted in a social media post: that area is where fat clings stubbornly, so losing that girth probably means I’ve lost it to a depth of half an inch all over those other parts of my body where it is stored.

Ill effects have been minimal. I sometimes think I feel colder but that might be because of living in a house in the Cretan mountains where the weather this year has decided not to adhere to the Global warming religion. Occasionally I’ve been dizzy and lacking energy, but these are usually cured by hydration and electrolytes. My main concern is that I might be lowering my BMI, which is the bugbear of any diet and why people start layering on fat again the moment they stop. However, I intend to continue regardless while I’m getting positive results.

What are my goals here? Of course fat loss is one of them. Fat is not aesthetically pleasing and feeling bad about your appearance has its knock-on effects on general mood. Having lost a lot of weight in the past I also know that fat saps your energy. The difference a loss of 20lbs of the stuff makes on an 8-mile walk through the mountains is huge. With the weight I trudge back utterly knackered. Without it I contemplate running sections of the home stretch. You just have to imagine that difference as a backpack filled with ten bags of sugar, while adding in that the sugar does not require your heart pumping blood around it. But the big objective here is health. 

Having spent most of my life eating crap carbs, drinking to excess and smoking, I would like to reverse some of the damage. I am almost certainly insulin resistant and have resistant and fat around my internal organs. Getting rid of that will reduce inflammation, which is one of the main problems we have as we get older. Be nice too to clear it off my liver to get whatever remains of that organ, after forty years on the piss, as functional as possible. The autophagy and other clearance of the body’s junk is a damned good idea too. Listing all the benefits of this way of eating (along with all the exercise) I’ve gleaned from hundreds of video and blog posts would just go on and on. In the end I want to feel and be better. 

As has become an aphorism in many parts of the social media: I want to become the best version of myself.  

New Cover: Owning the Future

Here's the last of the new covers for my Kindle and POD books produced by Vincent Sammy. I think he's done an excellent job. Depicted here is a scene from the short story Bioship.

Stories:

Memories of Earth
I believe I wrote this one as a publicity exercise for Tor Macmillan while they were publishing the Owner trilogy, but then it wasn’t used. I subsequently shunted it off to Asimov’s and they published it in their October/November 2013 issue. There’s also an audible version on Starship Sofa (No. 383).

Shell Game
This appeared in The New Space Opera 2 edited by Gardner Dozois and Johnathan Strahan published in July 2009.

The Rhine’s World Incident
First appeared in Subterfuge from Newcon Press in 2008, next appeared in In Space No One Can Hear You Scream from Baen Books in 2013. This is the story where the swarm AI the Brockle makes its first appearance.

Owner Space
Appeared in Galactic Empires published by Gardner Dozois in 2008

Strood
First appeared in Asimov’s in December 2004, next in Year’s Best SF 10 published by Hartwell and Kramer in 2005. StarShipSofa did an audible version: No. 463

The Other Gun
Cover picture story in Asimov’s April/May 2013. This is a backstory for the Rise of the Jain trilogy – it concerns the Client. 

Bioship
This appeared in George Mann’s Solaris Book of New Science Fiction in 2007

Scar Tissue
Not appeared anywhere at all!

The Veteran
There’s an audible version of this on Escape Pod, episode 118, read by Steve Eley – went up there in 2007

Introduction:

I have a varied collection of short stories in my files and, of course, the temptation is there to dump them on Kindle, take the money and run. However, though I think some of them are great, some aren’t, and some are profoundly dated. I am aware that there are those out there, who will just buy these without a second thought, so I have to edit, be selective, and I damned well have to show some respect for my readers. Kindle in this respect can be a danger for a known writer, because you can publish any old twaddle and someone will buy it. Time and again, I’ve had fans, upon hearing that I have this and that unpublished in my files, demanding that I publish it at once because surely they’ll love it. No they won’t. A reputation like trust: difficult to build and easy to destroy.
I’ve therefore chosen stories other people have published here and there, and filled in with those I really think someone should have published. Here you’ll find some Polity tales, some that could have been set in the Polity (at a stretch) and some from the bleak Owner universe. Enjoy!

Neal Asher 04/06/18

New Short Story Collection: Fantastical

 

I’ve stuck a new short story collection up on Kindle and POD. This was shortly after I received the cover from Vincent Sammy, who has again done an excellent job. The picture is from a short story called Marie and the Witchfinder, and he nailed it.

Included in this collection are the three Mason’s Rats stories because though these can be bought as a booklet through Kindle it is too small for Amazon to do a print version. Also included – another that appeared on Tim Miller’s Love, Death and Robots on Netflix – is Bad Travelling. Along with that are two others set in the same world.

 

Introduction:

I’m known for science fiction and that work ends up as a book or in some story collection. But as over the years I scrabbled around to find my opening I also wrote fantasy and other stuff that doesn’t comfortably take a label. These stories have been mouldering on my hard drive for years and I thought it time to scrub them up and put them out there. It concerned me that some might be a bit duff. Publish them anyway, cried the readers, either out of genuine interest or eager to see me fall flat on my face. Some stories were duff, but I have rewritten them into functionality, I think – there are a few here about which I have my doubts. The one about a twenty-something wannabe artist running away with elves still makes me cringe. I also said I would write waffly introduction to each. Do more waffle, the readers cried, so I did. 

Enjoy. . .

 

Neal Asher 20/04/23

It's Not All Muscle

After going back into weight training in a gym in the summer, when I usually only do it in the winter, I began to get bigger than about half my collection of antique T-shirts and was very satisfied with my progress. I got occasional comments of, ‘You’ve lost weight’ when in fact I’d gained about 10lbs on the 180 I was before. What the commenters actually meant was, ‘You’re more triangular’. So, I was very pleased with myself when I came back to the UK and signed up to the gym here.

Throughout all this I wavered in deciding on the best diet. Low carb and my muscles were more defined and stomach flatter, but I often felt thoroughly knackered and training sessions weren’t as pleasant. This last was even more the case in the UK where the gym temperature is 5 to 10 degrees lower than on Crete. It didn’t take me long in the UK to binge on carbs in the form of stuff like crumpets and malt loaf. After an abrupt climb in weight I then pulled back to lower carbs like crisp-breads and wraps – only two meals a day. My weight kept going up but hell, my arms, chest and legs were growing thicker, so that was a good thing, right?

It was only when I stepped on a scale a month or so back and saw it clear 200lbs that I decided I was kidding myself. Okay, I’d made some gains but they’d arrived with a layer of fat. Side on views in the gym mirrors weren’t pretty and seeing my belly bulge out and wobble when doing squats made me cringe. It was time to do something about this.

Now having experience in all this I knew that the best option for shedding fat is to cut the carbs and do a bit of fasting. I’m not sure I completely characterize what I do as a ketogenic diet because generally that means replacing the carbs with fat, when I am more inclined towards replacing them with protein. However, that does lead to the body going into ketosis. To get into this I simply stopped buying anymore carbs and simply used up what I had. I also limited myself to eating only after noon to get in a dirty fast (because I was having heavy cream in coffee and milk in tea in the morning). 

After instituting this protocol the over 200lbs on the scales was only a one-time event. As the carbs ran out my weight steadied at about 199 and I started to see 1.0 to 1.5mmol/L on a ketones breath meter, which is good. Then something happened a week ago that is familiar to those who go on ketogenic diets: my appetite started to diminish. With this happening and the amount I was eating declining, ketones went up to above 2.0mmol/L and at last I found the willpower to do a fast.

About a week back the will was simply there and I stopped eating and I stopped putting dairy in tea and coffee. I also started drinking some yerba mate I’d bought the year before (check out the Huberman podcast on that subject). Since my willpower had arrived I aimed to do a long fast. Also, knowing how the day seems to acquire extra hours when you’re fasting, I went off on a 7 mile walk that morning. Late afternoon I also went to the gym and weight trained. I ended the fast at 53.5 hours mainly because of low mood and feeling bored about not eating, not because I was particularly hungry.

The next day, feeling disappointed in myself I went straight into another fast – leaving that heavy cream out of my morning coffee. Despite having eaten the evening before, my ketones kept rising to 5.0mmol/L on the breath meter. That’s the point at which the screen turns red as a warning since the meters are primarily made for diabetics in whom that level of ketones is problematic. Timed from when I ate last I did a 21 hour fast. On subsequent days I did two 22 hour fasts and today as I write this am half an hour away from yet another one, if I eat. Over this period my breath ketones have been lowest to highest, 2.8 to 4.0mmol/L (and deep purple on the test strip). I’ve continued to walk 7 miles each day of this and put in another gym session too.               

It’s quite weird that my appetite is practically non-existent now and it seems I’m burning mostly ketones. Meals have been just a chunk of chicken and some veg. It was nice to look at the scales this morning and see 192lbs. Yes, I know it’s mostly water weight, but then human bodies are mostly water. Certainly, factoring in that 3,500Kcals deficit = 1lb of fat, I’ve shed some of it. I’m now looking forward to getting down into the 180s.

In conclusion: Do The Work!

Nicotine Trajectory

 It seems my nicotine trajectory has been one of, ‘Hmm, this is hurting me – I’ll cut it back just enough to stop the pain.’ So, over the years, I’ve gone from unfiltered roll ups to ones with filters, to delaying the first cigarettes with nicotine gum and ameliorating ill effects using an asthma inhaler, the varieties of e-cigarette and negotiations with them for least damage options, to NRT followed by pouches, and now at last to no nicotine at all. This history has also been interspersed with side branches into NRT and attempts at cold turkey quitting, all of which obviously failed. Incidentally, NRT is perhaps one of the most badly named therapies out there, since nicotine is the one thing it doesn’t replace.

I started using the pouches as better alternative to NRT and seemed to be getting along fine with them, just as one time I got along fine with the ecig. See, I didn’t want to quit nicotine; I wanted to quit ill health. But as with the ecig there comes a point when you realize you’re in denial about what it’s doing. 

Ever since quitting the ecig my lungs have been crappy. I’ve been trying to do something about this with cardio since I’ve known for a long time that I need to do exercise that gets me out of breath. To this end I’ve started with a 45 minute morning walk, and began reducing its time by jogging between telegraph poles. It’s been going well and I’m now down to 30 minutes while jogging between up of 30 of those poles. However, my chest still ain’t that great.

At this point I have to wander off into all the possibilities and these range from indigestion to heart failure, intercostal damage to exercise-induced asthma and so on, and so forth. In fact such is the data on these things and so similar are their symptoms that you can choose your malady dependent on your hypochondriac tendency. It’s one of these but, for the purpose of taking action it doesn’t matter which one: you exercise, eat well, and stop stuff that makes it worse.

As with the ecigs I went through a period of denial before admitting that within a minute of putting a nicotine pouch in my mouth the nag in that region of my chest over where most of us would point at our heart, would get worse. So, three days ago, I took the selection of nicotine pouches I had and threw them all into a bag and then that into the loft. The effects of doing this have been quite notable. I’ve had no particularly extreme cravings during the day but at night have had nightmares and panic attacks. Today, according to the stats, is supposed to be the worst day, with a steady decline in withdrawal over ensuing weeks.

I bloody well hope so!       

Lockdown Tales II and War Bodies

Things have been getting busy on the writing/publication front. Last year, upon finishing up with War Bodies I was a bit undecided about where to go next. I put together a few collections, one being Lockdown Tales II which has now been published by Ian Whates over at Newcon Press. Here’s the cover of that along with links above to Amazon and the new page I’ve just made on my website.

Meanwhile, Macmillan has released the cover for War Bodies. I love this piece from Steve Stone. Oddly, the intended aim was for a different ‘war body’, but smacked right on target with this one. Readers familiar with my stuff will need no explanations.

While selecting the novellas and short stories I included in Lockdown Tales II I also rejected a few. One of these was a novella concerning parallel worlds – one of which is the Committee Earth of the Owner books (The Departure, Zero Point & Jupiter War). ‘Fly Pills’ (working title) was another of those that started with a weird dream and though I enjoyed where I went with it, it just did not feel right nor did it tie up neatly. I started playing with it, steadily expanding it, and realized a number of things. Firstly it did not have a suitable antagonist. The antagonist of the novella was essentially a dystopian earth the characters were escaping from. Secondly it was something I needed to explore on a larger scale. I have since finished the first draft of that exploration with a book of 195,000 words, which is 25,000 larger than my largest The Line of Polity.

Now, while editing backwards through that book I’m thinking about what next. It could be I’ll do some more stand alones or it could be that I’ll launch into a new trilogy. Damned if I know at the moment.  

New Covers for Mindgames: Fool's Mate and Runcible Tales

Judging by some of his posts on social media Vincent Sammy has been busy producing artwork for publications for Stephen King and Richard Chizmar, but now he’s got round to doing some more for me. I’ve been in no hurry with all this and suggested he get on with them time permitting. 

When I’d just about reached the stage where story rejections were not so common for me, I threw together a selection of foundational Polity stories. Runcible Tales was taken by the small press publisher of ‘chapbooks’ Piper’s Ash just before I got taken on by Macmillan. The guy continued selling these for some years afterwards until closing down his press with the stories reverting to me. Now the collection is up on Amazon Kindle and POD but was sorely in need of the new cover you see here.

Mindgames: Fool’s Mate was my first book for which I actually got paid a decent amount: £1,000. I dislike the title the publisher foisted on me but am not sure it’s worse than the original To Die but Once. MFM always seems to me to be statement to which the reply should be, ‘Yes, they do indeed.’ This was another one in need of a new cover which Mr Sammy has provided.

New Covers The Parasite and The Bosch

As I have detailed elsewhere, before I got taken on by Macmillan I was working my way up the writing ladder with numerous setbacks along the way. I did not leap from zero to a big publisher as has been the case with some and I’m quite glad about that. I learned the craft from that zero, to small articles in local papers, to stories in small presses for which I was paid nothing, to a few quid for stories, to novellas and collections and on upwards. I’ve had an agent that went nowhere, numerous companies taking my stuff and going to the wall. I’ve made the error of sending a snotty letter to a publisher because of a delay and having my submitted piece kicked. And I’ve learned along the way. After 20+ years of effort I got to see my books published around the world. And now have been producing books for another 20+ years on top of that. 

One upshot of this is that when Macmillan did take me on I had done hundreds of shorts stories, a number of novellas and various other bits and pieces either sitting unpublished in my computer or with small presses. Some of them came back to me as those small presses either went to the wall of shut up shop. I needed to decide what to do with all this stuff and, I gathered from fans, there was an appetite for it despite it being produced along my learning curve. Then along came Amazon Kindle, and latterly Print-on-Demand.

I didn’t expect much from this – just a way to make this work available to the few who might be interested – so I gave it a try. I put on there a novella called Mindgames: Fool’s Mate published by a company doing airport books and which fell foul of the net book agreement. I put another called The Parasite, published by Tanjen Books for a while until that closed down. Three short stories published in a magazine called Kimota and then distributed as a booklet at and SF convention went in – and those were Mason’s Rats. Another was a short collection called Runcible Tales published by a small press called Piper’s Ash, which closed down. And since then I’ve been throwing other stuff that way like a collection called Owner of Worlds, and a novella called The Bosch.

In every case I put these up with their old covers or something generic selected from the Amazon Kindle site. However, seeing that these constantly keep selling, I decided some time back that I should really give them some decent updated covers. How I got to the ones you see here involves something else I put out through Ian Whates’ company Newcon Press. Prior to and during lockdown I produced a few short stories but mainly novellas and published these as Lockdown Tales. I’ve since sent in Lockdown Tales II which you will see next year. I much liked the cover picture for the first book done by Vincent Sammy and so contacted him about doing covers for all my Kindle/POD stuff. I told him to take his time and see what he comes up with and here show you the results for The Parasite and The Bosch. More will be incoming, including a large collection of short stories which, not fitting any particular genre, I have titled Fantastical.

Enjoy!          

Twitter and Facebook Bansturbators

I recently had my Twitter account restricted, which came as a surprise what with a ‘free speech absolutist’ now in charge. But then Twitter is a big organization and despite the apparatchiks in ‘Trust and Safety’ being canned, it still has a lot of dead wood that needs cutting out – both human and algorithmic. I protested the restriction and it soon came off. I then screen captured my tweet and the one I replied to and put them up on Facebook for ridicule. And next I got a 24 hour ban from Facebook.

Just as an aside from this let me show you some algorithmic stupidity because, only when investigating this ban did I come across one from back in August:

So what was my heinous sin this time in December? Someone posed the question of how does one reply to a silly conflation of biological gender with gay marriage, to which my reply was, ‘Straw man argument. Now identify as a seagull and fly off a cliff.’ I kid you not. Apparently on Twitter I was encouraging suicide while on Facebook I was going against ‘community standards’. I disputed that of course since I’d made a rhetorical analogy i.e. you can identify as whatever the hell you like but that does not mean you can be that thing, and it was not directed against an individual. Anyway, checking now to find the text of that conflation I find that my 24 hour ban has been lifted early.

But all that is beside the point I’m getting to here. I’ve been reading through the ‘Twitter Files’ where we’re getting an inside track on how the various methods of silencing people actually work. Obviously there is crappy code stuff that picks up on certain phrases, has no perception of sarcasm, satire and parody and often gets things wildly wrong, as per my screen shot above. But then there’s the hands-on human element and this is where things get a crappy. 

Throughout those email and slack communications between the apparatchiks of ‘Trust and Safety’ since booted from Twitter, things become plain. They were simply rationalizing what they selfishly wanted to do, which was shut down those they disagreed with or disliked politically. They talked a great deal about ‘rules and safety’ because, y’know, giving the other side of the USA political aisle a voice is dangerous, while apparently child porn and dictators elsewhere calling for death and destruction of other cultures is fine. Various ‘teams’ and individuals discussed this at length and had many meetings, which I guess is what you do when you haven’t got any actual work lined up. And the upshot was of course precisely what they wanted with accounts being muffled and shut down including, after much tying themselves in knots to designate a couple of innocent phrases as a call to violence, that of the sitting president.

Arising out of all this and my own bans/restrictions, I see that you also cannot definitively separate the human and algorithm elements and that there are gradations of influence throughout. Of course humans write the programs and can make those politically biased. I can guess that somewhere there are bits of code that get you noticed if you use the phrases ‘Make America Great Again’ or ‘Trump rocks!’ It is almost certainly the case that those you ‘associate’ with, whose tweets/posts you like and/or share have an effect too. I have no doubt there are watch lists and sliding scales running from harmless to dangerous (under their ridiculous definitions of these) and the higher up the scale you go the more likely you are to be shut down. 

In my case I look at stuff I share ripping into woke Hollywood, global warming, China, left wing politics and so forth, and assume I’m some way up the scale. There is undoubtedly ‘sensitivity’ there to anything I post and a greater likelihood of me being banned/restricted. This thumb on the scales, this knowledge that some blue-haired woke activist can shut me down with the press of a button, brings home to me the dangers of social media. You end up silencing yourself on matters you feel strongly about just to stay visible. It’s in the region of making excuses for and altering your lifestyle to fit the booze or cigarettes – forming yourself to something that is anathema to you.            

And that way the fuckers win. 

Vaping Update

If there’s one lesson I hope people have learned and are learning in this internet social media age it is that are no founts of truth out there. Every media outlet, every scientific paper, every written and otherwise broadcast thing has a bias – whether deliberate or otherwise. In fact there is so much ‘stuff’ out there you can of course find papers, studies and articles to fit any particular bias you have. This becomes frustrating when you are actually looking for the ‘truth’ because you can find ‘facts’ on any subject that thoroughly contradict each other.

I recently stopped vaping (two weeks ago) and prior to that and up until now I’ve been trying to find out some truths concerning vaping and nicotine, and their effects on the lungs and cardiovascular system. You see, I don’t want to give up nicotine; I just want to give up having shitty lungs.

Medical articles on vaping are very often old ones about smoking retooled as anti-vaping propaganda. Rarely is the harm reduction mentioned i.e. vaping is 95% less harmful than smoking. Elsewhere all the old bullshit is on display about ‘popcorn lung’ (disproven) and deaths from vaping (people vaping THC with vitamin E) accompanied of course by the cries of ‘think of the children!’ Particularly egregious is the stuff out of the USA where states get pre-emptive damages from cigarette companies, which they budget for and don’t want to give up, and which they would have to give up if everyone stopped smoking by switching over to vaping. And when it comes to nicotine, it’s difficult to find articles about its effects that are divorced from its method of delivery – as with the vaping hit pieces, nicotine is conflated with smoking and demonized.

It is in the end a field loaded with misinformation, disinformation and malinformation as the apparatchiks of Twitter label anything from those outside of their political tribe.

So you have to do your own research, figure out what to believe and what not to believe, and come to your own decisions.

I started smoking at about the age of 15. I smoked for 38 years. Initially I smoked unfiltered roll ups until my chest started to get crappy and wheezy and to hurt. I smoked filtered roll ups until the same occurred again (about 10 years later). I tried to give up many times, cold turkey and with NRT. Ten years ago I was delaying the first cigarette with nicotine gum and using an asthma inhaler to open up my lungs enough to be able to sleep. Leaving aside all the other influencing events at the time, I took up vaping about 9 years ago and, with a few hiccups over maybe 3 years, stopped being a smoker and became a vaper. My health improved immensely. Supposed acne rosacea cleared up, constant eye infections went away, the asthma inhalers went in the bin and within a year I found I could swim a mile straight without having to stop and cough my lungs up.

All of this made me an advocate of vaping and I am still mostly in agreement with everything the vaping community says about it. It has improved the lives of and in many cases saved the lives of millions. Meanwhile it is under constant attack by vested interests in Big Pharma, Big Tobacco and from the politicians in their pockets etc. You can check back through my blog here to find my relevant posts on the subject.

One of the big things about giving up smoking is that suddenly being healthy is an option. Taking up jogging, when you’re still on a pack a day, is a tad ridiculous. It’s twiddling with the 10% of the problem while ignoring the 90%. Having stopped smoking I went all in on exercise regimens and within a few years was a lot fitter and healthier than I had been in preceding decades. This has continued with swimming, weight training, kayaking, and mountain walking and so on. A year or so ago I had a crack at doing some running because I felt I wasn’t getting enough of the out-of-breath cardio I needed. My lungs hurt and I got very wheezy so I though no, I’ll just ease into it. I tried HIIT to the same effect, then cramp and an injury knocked that on the head. I thought nothing more of the way my lungs behaved until recently.

Over the last year I think I may have had covid so that really messed with the signal. I thought the morning cough I developed might have been an outfall from that. Anyway it soon went once I was on the move and, damn it, I could still swim a mile with no problem. I guess it took a few months before I properly understood that my lungs were getting a bit shitty. And then it took a little longer to let Occam’s razor in and accept that the more I vaped on one day the shittier my lungs felt the next morning.

Note: I’m not unaware of timings here. My lungs got worse during the period of ‘The Pandemic’ and my reluctant trips for two vaccinations because the authoritarian cunts in control made it likely that I would not be able to travel. And, as is becoming increasingly evident, by lung problems could be related to either the vaccines or the virus. A big source of annoyance to me is that having had the vaccines and getting the required app/paperwork, when I returned to Greece, nobody checked them at the airport! Anyway, I have to put all that aside and look at the reality: more vaping = shittier lungs. 

There are options of course. I have learned that some people have a problem with the propylene glycol in vape juice. I learned how this can dry the lungs, but I also learned that the other component you replace it with, vegetable glycerine, does the same though to a lesser extent. In retrospect, I realise that when I made one attempt to reduce nicotine in the eliquid and just ended up vaping more, it made me feel worse. Interestingly, propylene glycol is in asthma inhalers and I have to wonder if maybe use of inhalers is related to adverse effects from the stuff while vaping. Also, with my distrust of the medical establishment on many matters, I have to wonder if many using asthma inhalers for their malady are in fact exacerbating it with their medication. 

But changing eliquids I suspect would a stopgap for it seems to me that my vaping is tracking the same progression as my smoking. Maybe I could cure present my problem for the next few years, but it would come back because, however you do it, you’re still putting irritants into the lungs – you are still causing inflammation on a regular basis. When I started talking about this stuff I also learned of others having the same experience and, in the end, only one option remained: give it up. Stop putting anything other than air in my lungs.

But the jury is still out on nicotine by other routes.

Note: I could not give up smoking with NRT but I could give it up with vaping. However, I am finding it very easy to give up vaping using NRT. Perhaps those who want to give up smoking should go this route: smoking > vaping > NRT > freedom. But I’m also aware that every stage of ‘giving up’, for me, has been instigated by noticeable damage and not simply the knowledge of future damage. 

Colonization

Between my school years and my early twenties I was coming to decisions about what to do with my life – where to apply my effort. I’ve mentioned in interviews how I focused on writing because it could incorporate many of my other interests. All knowledge is useful when your vocation is describing the world and its people. Though that world might be a fantastical or science fictional one, there are truths about the way ecologies work, physics works, science works, how people behave and more besides. Once asked what I thought was one of the most important factors in writing my answer was: the truth. In writing I could eclectically select from my other interests and apply them.   

What I haven’t mentioned before is how I put aside one of my interests: art. I was good at drawing and painting and felt that with sufficient effort I could become very good at it. But what is the measure of success in this enterprise? Money is one measure, personal satisfaction is another, but at the time I looked to the art world to see what was lauded and what did I find? I found daubs that looked like the products of snails dipped in variously coloured paints and dropped on a canvas. I found sculptures that looked like interpretations of the world from a five year old. And I found a pile of bricks sitting in the Tate gallery. No, art was not for me, because the systems of measure of excellence were fucked up and had been for a long time.

I remember the feeling of disappointment; of an option closed down by gatekeepers who seemed to have lost all grip on reality. Now I wonder about the many girls and young women, physically competent and excelling at sports, who push themselves to do better and into competition. Are many of them now feeling the same when they look to the future of something they want to turn into a vocation? Do they get that sinking feeling of disappointment seeing the option, the course, and the final goals closed down by a silly ideology that puts them on the track, or in the swimming pool, or whatever physical sport they want to pursue, with a man? Are they reconsidering their futures?

The ideologues of the left talk much about colonization and, as ever, they are accusing those who oppose them (basically anyone who isn’t them) of the sin they commit. While in the process of supposedly ‘decolonizing’, their ideology has colonized the arts and humanities, the media, governments and schools, and it’s now colonizing the sciences and the sport’s world. It’s a virus – spreading from the organs originally infected to destroy others too. It does not assess whether what is destroys is good or bad, and offers no rational replacement for the same. Except, of course, for the wonderful utopia it purports to be ushering in.   

Keto Eating and All That.

Those who follow me on the social media will know that for quite a few years now I’ve been on a health-optimising rollercoaster. The background on this I’ve detailed and you’ll find it by scrolling through the hundreds of blog posts here, but in précis it is this: 1) A life of booze, cigarettes and the usual food until past fifty. 2) Knowing I must do something upon seeing the decline of people around me of similar age or just a bit older. 3) Watching my wife die of bowel cancer.  

Stopping smoking using e-cigarettes was a start because, as anyone who smokes knows, exercise is unpleasant while smoking and, along with other measures like diet, seems like a sticking plaster over the gaping wound of destroying ones lungs. Next was walking, mainly to ameliorate the psychological outfall of my wife’s death. With these my physical health improved markedly, though it took some years before the organ between my ears got back up to full function again. I lost a lot of weight and became quite fit, mainly because I couldn’t drink, wasn’t eating a great deal and was walking seven miles nearly every day. As my mind came back so did nasty habits, like drinking too much, eating crap, and like many in their fifties I wasn’t too happy with my side reflection in shop windows. Walking declined though I did other exercise like kayaking and weight training, but still the dreaded pod returned.

Phew, and now we’re up to date.

During all this time I’d started reading up a lot on ways to optimise health. In fact I was looking for ways to reverse or ameliorate 40+ years of bad choices. I’d hit a big one by stopping smoking, my exercise was good but still there was that fat. Fat is not good. Fat is hormonally active and can take you into diabetes. I won’t keep on about its many drawbacks sufficing to say that I needed to lose weight. I had always known that exercise does not cut it. There’s a perception out there that visits to the gym will take you along the course to the weight loss but it is simply not true. I’ve spent plenty of time in gyms and know that if you heave about the weights you’ll grow muscle, but every time I’ve done it the girth of my waist increased along with my biceps. And, frankly, when you sweat out twenty minutes on a cross trainer and burn only the calories of a slice of bread, you know that’s not the answer. The answer is controlling what you put in your gob.

So, over the years I tried fasting, and continue to do so. It works very well and drops off the fat at an astounding rate. However, though sometimes I would find it easy going into a fast, at other times it seemed plain impossible. I will continue doing this when I can, but find it difficult to sustain. What I needed was some method I could maintain: a change in lifestyle. 

Part of that change arrived over this last year and that was knocking the booze on the head. I did 73 days and had a lapse, but now after that I’ve been six months off the hooch. There’s more about all that a few posts back here. Meanwhile, I had been reading about various diets. From what I am given to understand a ‘normal’ diet doesn’t work so well because constantly starving your body brings your base metabolic rate down. Your BMR could be 2000Kcals a day at the start of a diet, but if you go down to eating 1500Kcals a day you’ll eventually plateau with your BMR set down to that (with the side effect of feeling cold, miserable and lacking in energy) and then, when the hunger becomes too much to bear as it inevitably does, you’ll go back to eating as before and pile the weight back on, usually more than you lost. But I had also been seeing much about the ketogenic diet and thought it time to give this a try. 

The theory of the keto diet is this: When you eat carbohydrates they knock up your insulin – big time if they’re simple carbs like sugar and starch. Insulin pushes one way to stick any excess you eat into fat cells and to a large degree prevents those cells releasing fat to be burned. If you can get your insulin down it is easier to burn fat. Ways of doing this are fasting ranging from those lasting 16 hours and upwards to days, or eating a diet without carbs – the ketogenic diet. Apparently you easily lose weight on this diet, so off I went.

After managing to do a fast of two days I dived in, eating main meals of just vegetables, eggs and meat, with a later plate consisting of cheese, nuts, raw veg and preserved sausage. I delightedly had cream in coffee too because eating fat is good while those bad carbs were down to 50 or 20 or sometimes zero grams per day. Hey, it’s all good stuff, fat is good, no problem! My weight, to my dismay, went up.

So no, the ketogenic diet is not as easy as some would have us believe. Delving into it all further I found that the reality is this: you do feel more full eating this fat based diet, you can lose body fat much more easily with your insulin down and hell I knew I was burning fat because my keto sticks were well into the purple and my breath meter readings were 3.0mmol/L and above, at one point even going as high as 8.00mmol/L, but the problem here is which fat am I burning, dietary or body fat? The problem here is that despite the claims of the keto fanatics, calories in and calories out still matters.

I convinced myself for a while that my weight gain was due to me putting on muscle, since I was hitting the weights regularly for an hour a day four or five days a week. I had in fact attained a body shape resembling a brick shithouse. But I was back to where I had been before while weight training with waist girth growing in consonance with biceps growth. Further investigation into the matter revealed a simple reality I had been aware of but was not admitting to myself: nutrient density. Nuts, cheese and cream are keto favourites but they are hugely calorie dense. You might not feel as hungry when you eat them, but seriously, check the number of calories in just a handful of nuts or, as had become a favourite with me, a pot of clotted cream. It was just too easy to eat too much.

I didn’t give up. I didn’t buy any more nuts or clotted cream, and reduced what I was putting in my coffee to a teaspoonful of full fat cream. The cheese went to being a rare treat rather than a staple. I was also more strict about the intermittent fasting I had introduced when my weight started climbing – not eating my first meal for 16 to 20 hours after my last meal the previous day. I did a two day fast at the start of this new course and my weight started to tumble. After a period of time I began to notice muscle definition even reaching the point where I could lose the end of a finger between the muscles on my biceps and forearm. Then I started to really feel like crap.

Now this is where it gets weeds and I don’t know what caused what. I’d also been reading about the benefits of lion’s mane mushroom and started taking the powdered version of that. It might be that I also picked up a bug – it certainly felt like that. I felt like I had a cold and then I got the roaring shits. Later reading reveals that lion’s mane can cause severe stomach problems. Or maybe I got a dose of covid. Or maybe, as seems possible, I’d over-trained. Or maybe it was a combination of all these. Whatever the reason I didn’t want to keep feeling like this, went off to the shops and bought carbs and, over the last five days stuffed myself. Almost immediately I put back on a lot of the weight I’d lost. Certainly much of that was glycogen filling up my muscles and my liver – another thing I learned is that though you will often read that glycogen weight is about a pound (500g) that is not necessarily true. It can go to two pounds and more, and this weight is multiplied three to four times by the water retained to hold it. I also stopped the gym for a week which didn’t help 

Now, at the end of a week of no gym, no keto, no lion’s mane and eating carbs I feel better, but I still have no real idea what I’m feeling better from. Today, as I have done on a few occasions before, I emptied various food packets into my composter and skimmed slices of bread over the back hedge. I’m going back into keto, probably including a long fast, but certainly re-introducing the 16 to 20 hours fasts each day. I’ll return to the eggs, meat and veg and forgo the nuts and clotted cream, and I’ll be heading back to the gym. This time I won’t do anything beside that and hope no bug comes along to clobber me, then I’ll find out. If I start feeling rough again and end up spending more time on the toilet than I like I’ll know that straight keto is not for me and I need to apply some other strategy. Perhaps what is called carb cycling. . .

I’m a work in progress, as ever.    

Hope this was helpful for those who are interested.

Social Media Posts February 2022

 Feb 2nd

Phew! I guess I've now got what I was aiming for with ketosis. It's been 6 days since I ended my last fast. I've been eating 2 keto meals a day in a 6 to 8 hour eating window. Breath meter reading hasn't dropped below 2.8mmol/L ketones while the sticks have been reading higher at around 4 (pink/purple). Face looks haggard and my weight is definitely 5lb down on last week and still dropping.

So how is your health and fitness routine going?

Feb 3rd

Trudeau only has a hammer and everything is a nail. When you see stuff like this, and the recent asshole opinion of Whoopie Goldberg, you come to understand that the woke left exist in a parallel universe. Also, in our universe, they're just a reality check away from occupying a rubber room.

Feb 4th

Just in case I ever disappear from here on FB, which is always possible with their censorious attitude, I can be found on Gab. Neal Asher @nealasher

And my Twitter alternative should I ever get kicked off there is Parler, again Neal Asher @nealasher

Feb 5th

Corporates as usual collapsing under pressure like empty suits. Gofundme have cancelled the millions of dollars donated to the truckers in Ottawa. Those who donated will have to fill in forms to reclaim their money else it will go to 'approved' organisations, y'know, like one that was burning down buildings not so long ago. Meanwhile Spotify is hurriedly taking down Joe Rogan podcasts from the likes of dangerous comedians. *sigh*

Oh I see what you did there: reality doesn't match the models, therefore reality must be altered.

He blinked and backed down (Rogan), validating his woke detractors. They will only increase their attacks on him. For the woke, or their opinions, attention is oxygen and they should be deprived of it.

Jack Reacher on Prime -  very enjoyable.

Feb 6th

Okay, plenty of smart IT guys here. When I'm looking at a site in Safari and want to post it to Facebook I just hit the post icon top right of the page and that opens a box of sites I can post it to. All I get in that list, however, is FB, Twitter and instagram. How can I add others there? When I want to post to Gab or Parler I have to laboriously copy and paste the address and would like to simplify that.

Damn Twitter. With this new Ipad I had Twitter back and started scrolling through it again. It is ridiculous how it sucks one back in. I found myself getting annoyed, political and making comments. It just isn't any good for the mind. Okay, in terms of liberty and the awful rise of the woke, those truckers in Canada are important, as is what's happening with Joe Rogan, but me getting angry and shouting into that vacuous site only serves to make me feel crappy. In all honesty I kept Twitter up because I stupidly hadn't figured out how to hide it from my home screen rather than delete it i.e. I wanted to keep it to post to through Safari but not be tempted to look. Now I have and it can bugger off.

Feb 8th

The day before yesterday I all but emptied my fridge. I'm now 42 hours into another fast and have been keeping myself busy to avoid thinking about a trip to the supermarket. 2,000 words written and house cleaned throughout. 🤣 Since I was eating keto before there's been no delay on ketosis - I never dropped out of it. It has been interesting to see how ketosis varies between the two measures I have. The sticks and the meter show changes that seem unrelated (they do measure different ketones) though if I got really anal I could probably track it e.g. perhaps breath ketones dropping when I drink milky tea or urine ketones rising x hours after my last meal or something. Whatever. My clothing has stopped shrinking.

Feb 9th

It's not just 5 years they've been shouting resist and putting #resist in their profiles. The self-proclaimed revolutionary left have been 'the establishment' for decades.

Interesting metabolic functions. During a 46.5 hours fast the highest I got on the breath meter was 2.9mmol/L. Finishing my fast at 5.45pm yesterday I ate sausages, veg and eggs in one meal then cheese, preserved sausage olives and celery in another. I also ate clotted cream, put cream in coffee and milk in tea. Now look at the breath meter this morning. This tells me I am fat adapted. My ketones went up during my fast but I was burning them. Then eating all that fat knocked them up even higher.

Excellent stuff today. I'm now on the downslope of my latest book and heading towards the ending. 2,000 words today typed without appreciable pause. I think I did them in 2 or 3 hours. All I know is I sat down at my desk sometime this morning and then when I looked up again it was 1.00 PM. I love writing when it goes like that. Of course this is first draft so there'll still be lots of work to do after I've written: THE END.

Feb 10th

Well, I guess the ketogenic diet is working out. I fasted a few days ago then returned to eating keto. My ketones, instead of going down when I started eating again, have continued to climb (the picture). Meanwhile, since getting into this properly with my first recent big fast two weeks ago, I've shed 7lbs and it ain't water weight.

Feb 12th

Same bullshit as with covid: dodgy models, predictions of catastrophe from 'experts' who like the power and the limelight, graphs that never match reality, massaged statistics, plain lies and corporates and politicians with their hands in our pockets, except in the case of global warming this has been going on for twenty years.

Feb 14th

Keto diet plus intermittent fasting seems to have stabilised me at high ketones constantly. Around 7.0mmol/L on the breath meter and varying from light purple to darkest purple on the keto sticks. Interestingly if one goes lower the other goes higher. The ketones measured by each test are different ones and I wonder if their variability relates to whether body or dietary fat are being burned?

What are you doing for health and fitness? What routines and plans?

About to head to the computer to get on with the latest book. I did 10,000 words last week and aim for the same this week, or to finish it, whichever comes first. Be nice to have the first draft out of the way so I can concentrate on some other things. I want to get up to date on my accounts, update my website which still has The Human as my latest book, work on sorting out a novella collection and do some editing there. Also there are some other more prosaic things like buying some more clothing. T-shirts are faded and getting stretched around the head hole. Socks are getting thin. And weeks of doing squats have rendered many pairs of underpants too small! 🤣💪

How are things going with you lot? What plans do you have for this week?

Feb 15th

Just stuck myself on gettr too @nealasher. With all these (Parler, Gab) it's just a case of posting stuff, following people and seeing what occurs. Mostly not a lot which is why FB and Twitter persist.

Goodness me. I now check someone's timeline when they send a friend request, but before then many got through without vetting. Every now and again one pops up with some dim-witted leftism and I delete them. What's sad, when I check the profiles of those spouting the most egregious woke fuckery, is I so often find the word 'writer' there.

Feb 18th

A somewhat blustery day today. It's flipping the letterbox and just outside there's a red plastic light cover obviously peeled out of a car. I hardly noticed this until writing THE END. Yup, I just finished the first draft of my latest book at 160,000 words. Hack, slash, hammer and chisel, with increasing amounts of sanding and polishing now begins. Some call this editing.

How is your day going?

Feb 19th

I wrote a story years ago for Nature, in which a guy who broke his back walks into a museum to see the wheelchair on display there. This will happen.

This is an old one (podcast). I wonder now, since I've come to enjoy podcasts so much, whether I should say yes the next time someone asks me to come on one. I never really took much notice of them before, but now they're quite a big thing. What do you reckon?

Feb 20th

There's a Greek expression 'making a hole in water' i.e. attempting some task but failing. The figures here make me think vaccinations have been a costly attempt to stave off the inevitable. That the vaccinated are more likely to be infected now is a function of the limited life of the vaccines and that those who have actually been infected have better immunity. The UK government was right about herd immunity at the beginning, before politicians started shitting their pants and chose the Chinese totalitarian route.

Been farting about with internet stuff this morning. Blog posts up comprised of posts from here, Jack Four on my website homepage, security issue sorted with my router and . . . there I stopped. It's like tidying the house sometimes. Where's that potato peeler? Ah, it is in that drawer, best I clear the rubbish out of there. Five hours later all the drawers and cupboards have been sorted and I'm halfway through cleaning the oven.

I got back to editing instead because chores should be in order of priority. And now I want to get in a gym visit. It is Sunday, after all.

Feb 22nd

Editing editing, then in chapter 7 I decided one section was a clumsy segue and needed work. The result was a 2,000 word expansion there with more to do tomorrow. This is required finessing of the first draft, which was essentially getting down the bones of the story. Hours drifted away and no gym time was had, but I'm happy with the results.

Has anything interesting happened in the world while I've been aboard War Factory Room 101? How has your day been?

Feb 24th

Weak, vacillating leaders fiddling while Rome burns, pouring money into non-existent problems, into leaden stifling bureaucracies and into the pockets of their corporate buddies, and then via circuitous routes back into their own. More concerned with how they appear in the world than making a better one - arrogant, psychotic and utterly incapable of admitting to error. Desperate to maintain their con game and its supporting narratives. Then next topping that off with a panicked economy-killing response to a virus and transitioning that into a power and tax grab from the people. 

And now, sensing the weakness, the vain turpitude of societies that have lost their way in silly ideologies, the predators are moving. Putin has started the ball rolling and China may be next in Taiwan. Perhaps China and Russia can be regarded as the first components of a new 'Axis'. It's easy to demonize, but the US and its 'Allies' aren't exactly clean. All the wars and proxy wars in the Middle East, while the people there seeing the jets shooting over and the bombs coming down had, and have, the same fears of those now in the Ukraine.

My brief and perhaps incoherent thoughts on present world events - to be updated and altered as I learn more. What do you think?

Ooh, I'm actually enjoying editing this latest book. While writing it to first draft I had reservations about many things, along with the usual generalized angst about whether it would be good enough, but now they are going away. 

In retrospect I realise that I've been here before . . . about thirty times! 🤣

Yes, I need a bit more world-building description, and need to spend a bit less time in the protagonist's skull. And yes I need to chop out some repetition and clarify stuff about how a particular entity works. But that's easy stuff going from whole book focus to the specific. Working title, which seems likely to stick: War Bodies.

How has your day been?

Feb 25th

Good grief. The utter lack of rationality about all this. The possibility of world war looms and Biden continues stopping oil and gas drilling in the US, while Kerry bemoans the damage to the climate arising out of war. Meanwhile, deeper down the rabbit hole, Putin's attack is all about white supremacy, or because his mother didn't love him enough. 

I'm aware that the silly ideologies of the Western world are going to be its downfall. But It's probably going to happen sooner than I expected, which I hoped would be after I'm pushing up daisies.

Don't Ask

As a child, in my teens and through to my twenties and early thirties, I was an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy. I used to alternate between the library and a second hand bookstore to get my supply and, being a bit anal about such things, recorded all this. In those years I was reading on average ten books a month. There wasn’t much selectivity there since my aim was that sensawunda fix, but things changed over the years – I changed. I read outside of SFF, I wrote more, I got on with a life outside of reading, and I steadily read fewer and fewer books. I think this is a natural progression. To the youthful avid reader everything you find in books is new and shiny and, of course, at that age you have more time for it. Then life and a degree of ennui get in the way. You find repetition in books of themes, characters, story lines and all. But that doesn’t stop you reading, it just tends to make you choosy. Things would have continued like this with me had something else not happened. I would have continued to read fiction books but more selectively until I turned my toes up. However, I got published by Macmillan in 2000 and, within a year or so, became a full time writer.

My reading continued as before for a number of years, but the ‘getting published’ is the start of a steep learning curve. Though I am still what is described as a ‘seat of the pants’ writer i.e. I don’t plan much and writing a book for me is as much an exploration as reading one is for others, I began to really learn the profession. I began to see the bones of books, the sinews and essential organs. I could see how things worked, or didn’t work. One upshot of this I began to see that in the fiction of others too. I would often know where the story was going. I would see the holes and think ‘I wouldn’t have done that’ which applied even down to the choice of a single word. As this perception first began to kick in I called it having my ‘editing head’ on (hat tip to Wurzel Gummidge), as it was more intense when I was editing something, or just after.

During this period I went by the dictum of ‘paying it forward’ and read stuff yet to be published by others. In every case, when I’ve spent my time with an editing pencil because the writer concerned wanted my opinion good or bad, the response was mostly lacklustre. They didn’t want help; they wanted praise. As I became well known, I also read ARCs of books by big publishers, enjoyed some and provided jacket quotes. Notable examples are Blindsight by Peter Watts and The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, but exceptions like them to my growing response of shrug and toss it aside were becoming rarer. Recently I tried reading books I always loved in the past and found myself giving up when hitting a continuity error, excess verbiage, silly plot twists – bad writing. I also recently tried a batch of new fiction to be very often baffled about how the books even got published.

Now, after more than thirty books, numerous short stories and novellas totalling over three million published words, I’m finding it very difficult to switch my editing head off. Which brings me to the point of this post: I am no longer a ‘normal’ reader and I don’t read or enjoy very much fiction at all anymore. This is why, when other writers now come to me with a reading request and possible jacket quote, I refuse. You guys, who want comments on your books, need to look elsewhere. You don’t want me reading your book; you want the bright-eyed SFF reader I was forty years ago. So sorry: don't ask.

Facebook Posts January 2022

 1st Jan

January 1st 2022. If previous years are anything to go by, and ignoring the viral push to be frightened of leaving the house, gym attendances will be up this month. Booze will also be capped and hidden away, or given away or discarded. Last cigarettes will have been stubbed out. Waistlines will be inspected, diet sites visited and promises made will be looming. As much as it is sneered at by many, the transition to a new year is a watershed and resolutions are a thing.
Have you made any resolutions, and dare you write them down?

2nd Jan

I've felt I've been getting slack on the writing front lately what with a lack of self-motivation and other factors. Yesterday (a day of sloth watching The Witcher) I decided it time to enact the physical impossibility of kicking myself up the arse. Reading science articles, learning Greek, reading a book and gym time went on hold today. I got up, showered and dressed, made a cup of coffee and went straight to my desk. I'm now out the other side of eight hours working on the book and feeling pleased with myself, though with neck ache and gritty eyes. Same again tomorrow.

 

4th Jan

A bit of sleety snow coming down earlier, which seems appropriate weather what with me feeling as rough as a pineapple today. I suspect 11 days of keto, plus going to the gym for an hour most days, lowered my immune system. As all colds seem to start with me, it's entry point was my left eye, making that sore and gummy with sneezes and snottiness ensuing. This does make me wonder about 'ketogenic diet benefits' since it's been all negative thus far and I should be getting through the worst of it by now. I'll see how I feel after this cold has passed (usually gone in a day or two but with eye gumminess lasting longer). If I'm not seeing benefits soon I suspect I'll be falling headfirst into a packet of crumpets and a malt loaf.

6th Jan

Toy purchased. Now why is it that when my brother Bob visits I often end up spending money?

7th Jan

Ah that's better. Sometimes you need to get proactive to blow the dregs of a bug out of the system. 20 minutes HIIT on the cross-trainer followed by 40 minutes sweating with weights. Feeling good now. Cup of tea time.

7th Jan

Damn, after using my old Ipad then having to resort to a Samsung tablet for some things no longer supported on it, it’s a pleasure using this new one! But what the hell do you do with an old Ipad? Put a hammer through it and bin it?

10th Jan

Meh, continuing dodgy throat, runny nose etc. I suspect I went back to the gym too early. But Paracetamol and Ibuprofen do the job and, as far as colds go, I’ve had worse.

11th Jan

Yay! The postwoman found me! (FB Memory)

Okay, my cold has diminished and suddenly I’m finding energy to clear out cupboards, tidy stuff up and even a shopping trip. But I must resist the temptation to hit the gym and go buggering myself up again. Steak, eggs and vegetables today - at least I managed to stay strict keto despite the urge for comforting carbs - and continued relaxation.
How is your day going?

13th Jan

Medical profession and Big Pharma still want to capture ecigs, while idiot bansturbators want to be rid of them and to continue with methods of smoking cessation long proven to fail.

14th Jan

Buggeration. I’ve been a bit bollixed over a couple of weeks and am only kinda out of it now. It started as a cold whose method of entry (as usual for me) was through my left eye. I felt a bit rough for a day or so, it then seemed to go away so I did some weight training over two days. It came back with feverishness, sore throat and a runny nose. I took it easy and now it’s past. What variety of virus it was I’ve no idea.
Today started with my second covid jab whereupon I returned anxious to get on with some work. I have page proofs of Weaponized to go through, which I thought needed to be done by the end of the month. I was wrong as the email said ‘early this month’. I started looking at these and things hit me in the eye right away. I don’t know whether it’s my state of mind or what but I want to make lots of alterations. I now need more time for these or, as advised by Bella Pagan (Macmillan), to wait until my mind is firing on all cylinders.
I really should trust my past self, who has been through this manuscript a number of times, but I don’t - that guy is a dodgy bugger.

19th Jan

Damn, time for a dirty fast transitioning into a clean fast to give me a boost towards weight loss. With one or two lapses I’ve been eating keto in a narrow eating window but my weight has gone up. This is probably due to weight training because I am taking on the physical characteristics of a brick shithouse. But sadly none of the fat is going away. Lesson learned: a fat adapted keto diet is not the answer for me.

21st Jan

Ooh shiny.

22nd Jan

The ‘plant based’ fashion and virtue signal eh? Meanwhile one must remember that sugar, white flour and seed oils are plant based.

25th Jan

Bits of me aching and sore since this is the second morning I’ve pushed myself to go on a 7 - 8 mile walk. Yesterday, after doing this, I followed up with 2,000 words written, an hour of Greek, an hour in the gym and cleaning and tidying in the house. It’s a reality that when you push yourself to do more you find yourself inclined to do more besides that. It is also a reality that sloth is a downward spiral leading to ‘what happened?’ days at the end of which you find you’ve done bugger all. I now resolve to get things done that have dropped by the wayside during a crappy January.
How’s this month been going for you?

26th Jan

And if kids were taught how the tax system works, fewer would go through the socialist delusional phase of life, or grow out of it more quickly.

At last: a combination of eating keto previously and, each day over the last two, walking 7 miles and spending an hour in the gym, and now 36 hours fasting has put me firmly into ketosis. The strips are into the purple, the breath meter is reading 3.7mmol/L and I’ve dumped 6lb of water weight. Bit of advice here for those who want to try fasting: do it clean. Even a bit of milk in tea is enough to kick in hunger pangs and lead to failure. Been doing this for years and I still need that fact tattooed on my forehead.

I’ve not really been following this but what is the situation regarding Putin and the Ukraine? I got the impression that he was getting tetchy a while back because of US armament/missiles there. If this is the case then all the sabre rattling in Europe and the US at present is hypocritical, since his response precisely mirrors US tetchiness about Cuba 60 years ago.
What do you think?

27th Jan

Just past 60 hours fasting and laughing at the red screen on my ketone breath meter. It’s evident it was manufactured on the basis of medical opinion sans any knowledge of nutritional ketosis - the myth that ketone level can be equated with ‘ketoacidosis’ while leaving insulin out of the equation. Now I’ll go for a 7.6 mile walk to burn off more of my waistline fat roll, in the firm knowledge I could live off my body fat for months without harm and with great benefit.

29th Jan

Excellent stuff. I fasted for 72 hours while walking and weight training each day. Keto stick went to it’s darkest while the breath meter reached 8.3mmol/L at one point. On the evening when I stopped I ate a load of nuts, cheese, meat and raw veg and ketosis continued just below 7.0. The next day I ate two meals: sausages, veg and mushrooms, and meat, cheese and raw veg. Ketosis still stuck at between 6.0 and 7.0. Now this morning it’s still in the ‘red zone’ between 5.0 and 6.0. I’ve dropped about 5lbs (not water because I’m now in a fed state). I may continue today. Certainly I’ll get another walk in and a gym visit.

Just appeared on Twitter. Seven years and eight books ago!