Holly Lisle's Blog, page 63

Readers, Writers, and Affiliates: Meet the Guardian of the World-Rift Forest

My Choose-Your-Own-Adventure email game has gone live!

You can play the game now if you’re already a list member, or restart at ANY time (using your same email) by joining the adventure at the bottom of any page on this site…

Or if you don’t see the Adventure sign-up on your browser, you can join the game HERE.

The game is not a new thing I’ve added to my email list.

It is the list, totally replacing “Welcome to the list, this is how things work, get these emails here, get announcements there.”

Now, you choose the character you want to play as, and you CAREFULLY work your way through the adventure, discovering things that interest to you, and meeting with adventure along the way.

As I have new things for you, I’ll add new sections to the adventure.

But today?

Just have fun.

 

 

So today I built the Bug-Hunter edition of Longview 5

Today I spent three Patreon hours putting together the bug-hunter version of Longview 5: The One With The Broken Title.

This involved cleaning up a significant amount of weird formatting in Scrivener — (my fault) — moving the project into .docx, then opening it in Vellum and doing the actual book formatting, setting and revising front matter, end matter, hand-setting the chapter heads and subheads, hand-setting the special text, picking the styles, and other little bits to make it look as close to the finished version as I can come.

It’s important that bug-hunters see the equivalent of finished text, and have real page numbers to work from. Books in double-spaced Courier look different, and some things get missed that show up in … hell … whatever font I ended up picking for the finished version. It’s a nice font.

Email requesting volunteers to bug-hunt will go out late this afternoon MY time, deadline is going to be about a week to read and get the bugs back to me.

I’ve heard back from some of my previous bug hunters, once the invite goes out, will pick six folks I’ve worked with before who did really good work, and six new folks.

I’ll be looking for a mix of folks who HAVE read the previous stories, and those who HAVEN’T, because each story needs to stand on its own.

And just for this book, bug-hunters who find a phrase or a situation in the story that would make a good title will be asked to include that with their bug-hunter sheets.

Because — DAMN. Vipers’ Nest was targeted right at the heart of the story, until the heart jumped five meters to the right and threw itself on the ground to avoid me. Now I don’t know what to call the thing.

This isn’t going to work…

Longview-5-No-Title-Yet

Longview 5 is DONE! (But isn’t Vipers’ Nest anymore)

I’m going to need some beta readers for the story that was going to be Vipers’ Nest.

So much changed in the writing of it that the Vipers’ Nest in that title turned into a side plot, and the title no longer fits.

As I mention in the afterword (written just a few minutes ago) things change. This time they changed in magnificent ways. But they TOTALLY broke my title, so I’m going to be brainstorming new titles, too.

And because of a rather stupid cleanup of what I though were duplicates of a lot of old text files a month or so ago, I’ve discovered today that my lists of beta readers are gone to the Land of Lost Pixels.

A couple hours of hunting have given me a list of new swear words, but no old lists.

If you want to help me by beta reading / Bug hunting (it’s the same thing) THIS book, here are the steps:

If you’re not already on my Everyone In One Place mailing list, sign up here.
If you’re already on the list, or once you’ve signed up, watch for the email going out at two PM today, which will also go out again at two PM tomorrow for folks who miss it. It’s going to be titled The Beta Reader / Bug Hunter Invitation.
Beta Reader / Bug Hunter is going to be one of the choices in the “Choose your own adventure” game, but I’m still putting that together, and I actually need some bug hunters now.

If you would love to Beta Read/Bug Hunt, but missed this post and are reading after 2PM Eastern Time on Wednesday, June 14th, 2018, don’t worry.

I’m still putting together the Adventure, and once it’s built, everyone on the Everyone In One Place list will get to play through, pick your paths, and start doing some cool things or reading some new things, depending on the adventure you choose.

The BoxBe Mystery… Solution in progress

Dan is getting ready to take the next-to-last set of HollysWritingClasses.com upgrades live, and has been working with old payments on our test site to do that.

For reasons I have not yet figured out, BoxBe notices have been sent to the students (and me) claiming emails were waiting for them. These look like this:

BoxBe Notice

None of us should be getting them, so I have passed the information on to TigerTech, and have let Dan know that something he’s doing on the practice site is connecting to real folks in the real world.

We’ll get to the bottom of this and you’ll stop receiving them, but in the meantime, simply ignore them. Feel free to delete them.

10:30 AM UPDATE: Very cool, but NOT YET LIVE

Just got off the phone with Dan.

He had set the emails he’s testing to NOT SEND, but obviously some of them did send. He’s going back through to fix that now.

But WHY he’s doing what he’s doing is cool. He’s going back through all our historical data and validating payments from before he built me this system, and moving the verified OLD pre-system payment data to the new system.

You know how you needed class receipts from ten years ago to get really old classes you owned?

What this means for you is…

that if you bought classes back before Dan joined me, AND if we can verify the old data (MOST of which is parsing) you’ll have all of your old and very old receipts and classes in your account.

Books and courses that did not belong to me from the old HollyShop will NOT be in there. I don’t own those and cannot provide them.

The remaining issue is folks who have changed emails a bunch of times. To get your old stuff, you may have to dig through all your old email addresses.

And it may take Dan a week or two to finish this. It’s a LOT of stuff to go through.

PLEASE be patient. That which is cool takes time.

The Fung Fasting Report #3: Improvements noted

Fun stuff first.

Here’s where I started.  (And why I started.)

Waistline: 42″ even (106.68 cm)

Here’s where I am today.

Waistline: 35″ even  DOWN 7″

(88.9 cm) DOWN 17.78 cm

As noted in a previous post, I’ve stopped checking blood sugars. My fingers were pincushions, and my blood glucose before and after meals is always healthy/ low normal.

In the previous month, I did one 4-day fast, and all the rest 23/1. (23 hours of not eating, one hour for meals).

Meals, by the way, have been stuff like:

Grilled bone-in fat-on pork steaks with asparagus
Grilled buttered porterhouse with broccoli
Butter-grilled chuck soup with mushrooms and onions, and blue and cheddar cheese

Fatty cuts of meat, above-ground vegetables, real butter, good cheese.

And I eat the fat.

One meal a day most days, with NO meals a day some days, no snacks ever, and drinking only water, tea, and coffee (no sodas, no sweetened stuff) gives the food budget major elbow room.

I had one problem that ran me into a wall, so I’m reporting that.

I have always run on the assumption that if I need water, I’ll be thirsty. So I didn’t bother watching my water intake. I drank when I noticed I was thirsty.

Turns out, when you’re doing this, you need to make SURE you’re getting enough water, and thirst may not be a reliable indicator.

You especially need to watch your water intake if you’re fasting. I apparently need about two liters of water a day. I didn’t get that — or even come close — and at the point where I started feeling bad, I’d had less than a liter two days in a row.

I have been working insane hours for a months, and while I make sure I eat, drink, and move, drinking while working is always a risk:

Water + Hardware = VERY BAD THINGS

Years of keeping my hardware safe while working has given me the camel’s perspective on fluid intake while I work — I’ll do that once I get where I’m going.

SO…

The first three days of the fast, I felt great. The fourth day, I felt tired. Ate that night, figured I’d be fine the next day.

But eating didn’t help. I felt sick for several days, until I realized I’d been on the same 2-liter bottle of seltzer for two days, and remembered the admonition to Drink. More. Water. in the fasting book.

I still needed a couple more days to get back to normal, but water was the solution. I pushed water. I rehydrated. I was fine.

So, not fun, but useful information.

Finally, a book for the folks who think I have lost my freakin’ mind: The story about how the “eat less, move more” low-calorie, low-fat, high-carb diet got railroaded into the AMA, AHA, and everyplace else where it should never have gone, in spite of very early knowledge that it was a BAD theory that didn’t hold up.

The Big FAT Surprise, by Nina Teicholz

The Big FAT Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

Massively researched, carefully documented, highly, highly recommended.

It reads a bit like a thriller where you’re the one looking down the barrel of the killer’s gun.

If you think eating low fat – high carb is healthy, you owe it to yourself to find out why the medical industry has been lying to you, me, and everybody for about sixty years.

Finished the revision of Vipers’ Nest!

It’s done! It feels like I’ve been working on Vipers’ Nest forever.

I can’t believe it, but it’s finally fully and completely revised, and I LOVE the way it came out.

This has been a brutal project, because it hit in the middle of personal chaos, website chaos, GDPR chaos…

And for the longest time, I couldn’t find the ending.

Well, yesterday I suddenly realized what had to happen to get me to the ending, and ripped out one old scene, and wrote one brand new scene today, and nailed it.

It took me four and a half hours from the time I started today until the time I did my many, many back-up saves.

But THIS is the story I wanted to write.

So now there are the following steps I have to get through before the book goes live.

Matt has to fit me in between clients for a content edit.
I have to revise to his edit.
I have to gather up volunteers for a bug hunt.
I have to revise to clean up what the bug hunters find
I have to build the publishable edition of the book, assign ISBNs, and put it up on all the sites where it’s going.

I’m going wide with this one — publishing it from the very beginning on every site that I can find that will pay me regularly and reliably.

From this point on, I’m eschewing Amazon exclusives. They haven’t done anything for my sales, and they have kept my books off of other platforms. I gave them the best run I could, and I can only conclude that following that path is not in my best interests.

So I have everything working its way out of KDP select, and by the time I have everything done to take Vipers’ Nest live, MOST everything else will be available for distribution elsewhere.

So… Back to work. Still have about a few thousand more words to write of How to Write Short Stories Lesson 4: How to END Short — Landing, Twist, Resolution, and Meaning.

The Fung Fasting Report #2: Four-Day Water Fast

Sunday Matt said, “So… you wanna go long on the fasting?”

My response. “Yeah.”

So I had a wonderful ribeye steak (ribeyes are fatty, and I ate the damn fat, and it was delicious) and a salad with lemon juice instead of dressing at our favorite restaurant last Sunday at 4 pm.

Have not had a bite of food since.

As I write this, it’s 8:23 am on Thursday, and I won’t have anything to eat until our regular mealtime at 7 pm tonight, when we break our fast.

Why am I posting early?

Because this has been Hell Week.

I’ve been buried all week in GDPR compliance work, digging into the details of the course I took to know what I had to do.

Massive overhauls of privacy policies, changes in email forms, conferences with Dan about the GDPR “account close” option we’re adding to allow folks with my classes to close their accounts and delete their personal information instantly and on their own.

I’ve been sneaking in time on the forums to talk to my folks at 4AM when I wake up because I can’t sleep because I’m worrying about missing something important.

I’ve been working from 7 AM to 9 or 10PM or later.

And I am amazed at two things:

The enormous amount of work I have accomplished.
The fact that I have been on-task the whole time. No digressions, no diversions, no mind wandering, no drifting off to read emails.

I have not gotten a word of fiction written in the past week. Have not gotten Lesson 4 of How to Write Short Stories past the introductory paragraphs and an outline. There has simply not been time. I still have some small GDPR work to do this morning before I actually dig into both fiction and nonfiction again.

But the fasting was a help. Not a nuisance, not a hindrance, not something that caused me problems. It gave me days of open time in which to work without interruption, and a clarity and focus that allowed me to do large amounts of tiny detail work without screwing things up and having to start over.

The Fast Details

I’ve had water (mostly seltzer) and coffee, black, no MCT oil.

Matt looked at the MCT oil, thought about our objective of staying in ketosis so our bodies would burn our own fat, and said, “Wait a minute… if we’re throwing readily accessible fat into our systems, won’t that slow down our bodies burning their OWN fat?”

And he did research. Yep. He’s right.

So the MCT oil is gone.

We’ve both stopped testing our blood glucose. Mine was fasting – 60s, 2h pp (2 hours after eating) 70s. His are equally good, but ten points higher on both measurements.

If you’re not eating sugar, your body makes its own from fat — gluconeogenesis. So if you’re not on medications, your blood sugar becomes a non-issue. It’s going to be good because your body will make the right amount of what you need from your fat to keep you healthy and alive.

Your body, after all, has a vested interest in you not dying, and a lot of built-in systems to prevent you from dying — if you let it use them.

So poking my fingers twice a day for the same results became an exercise in masochism, and I’m a lot of things, but masochist is not one of them.

I’m getting all the results I need just by moving through the day.

My clothes are hanging off of me. My favorite pajama bottoms fall off — I’ve had to go to the few pairs I had that have drawstrings.

I can see where the backs of my arms, my inner thighs, and my abdomen are all thinner.

I’m not measuring now. People get addicted to seeing progress on a scale or a chart or an app, and that becomes their reward. (How do I know this? Because I’m people too, and I’ve been there.)

When you hit your goal, and you don’t see any more “progress,” you lose motivation.

I don’t want progress. I want “healthy as a stable state.”

The fat I’m losing now has an end, after which I won’t see any more progress. I’ll hit a size where my body has the right amount of fat (something like 30%) and I won’t have any more abdominal bulge below my rib cage, and at that point, I have to be able to walk away from the tape measure.

I have to be able to say, “Good enough.”

At that point, we’ll just eat our one meal a day, and I’ll do a couple of longer fasts a year as a way to fight cancer with autophagy. (The body’s own recycling system.)

So I’m avoiding the addiction of the scale, the chart, the app. I can see this is working. I’ll do one more waist measurement this month, just to report in and let you folks know what two months in with one meal a day, plus one four-day fast, looks like.

And then I’ll do little monthly updates until the belly fat is gone. I’m guessing it will be the last fat to go completely, so you should be able to see the whole arc.

At that point, we’ll just keep doing what we’re doing. LCHF. Low carbs, high fat. One meal a day, because it’s easy and it doesn’t waste our time. And because you can eat really good food and still live on a miser’s budget.

Anyway…

Back to work. I should have the last of the GDPR stuff in place in a couple hours, and then will do some of the Vipers’ Nest revision, and some work on Short Stories Lesson 4. My brain has been working on both in the down-time, and gave me a nice twist for Vipers’ Nest AND a really cool demo on putting subtext into a story drawn from the one story I sold where I failed to include subtext.

It was an awesome revelation.

HA! More Brain On Fasting! BOF

This is some pretty good shit.

That could be the fasting slogan… Fast more. BOF more.

FICTION READERS: Requesting feedback on what you’d like to read next

Over on Patreon last week, I gave my patrons a bunch of story starts I’ve done over the years, along with references to some stories I still want to write that are parts of existing series, and some that I still want to write that I started, but that have vanished from my hard drive. (Still know the stories I want to tell, though).

Got their results saved.

So, TODAY I took these two private Patrons-Only posts public. You can read the LONG post about the books I’m doing next, and the ones I’m open to doing after I finish them:

The May 2018 Rewards

And then you can download the reading material I’ve provided, read what interests you, and vote (for as many items as you want) in the poll:

Which of these books would you personally actually buy?

I’ll appreciate any comments you make on why you voted as you did.

Why am I doing this NOW?

Because I did the math.

Between the one remaining Longview novella I have to write to write (under 40,000 words), the next Cady novel (50,000-ish words), and the final Moon & Sun novel (50,000-ish words), I have an open schedule in 140,000 words.

I don’t remember the last time I had an open schedule, and I want to make it count.

140,000 words used to be 6 months of writing for me. (Well, it still is — actually I’m doing more than that, but most of it is in writing classes over on HollysWritingClasses.com)

But for me, that’s a tiny number of words between “I’m writing” and “I don’t know which project to do next.”

So I’m asking for some non-binding direction. What would YOU like to read, and why?

You can vote for just one thing, for everything, or add something I mentioned in the past and forgot about over the years that you’ve bee going to see.

I found the DREAMING THE DEAD manuscript!!!

Sometimes it pays to clean your desk.

There it was, a printed copy of the incomplete manuscript with all my notes, all the background stuff, all the words.

And then I noticed the manuscript was printed in one of my earlier Scrivener formats. Maybe two years ago.

So I dug through the printed version, did a search for a unique word in the manuscript, and did a content search for just that word, and found…

Here’s a tip: If you have a book with a working title, NEVER in your filename surround that working title with quotes, as in “Dreaming the Dead.” Not even if you’re working on a Mac, which will allow you to name files pretty much anything.

Found it, fixed it. Banged head on desk.

“Looks like meat’s back on the table, boys!” (Movie version of Fellowship of the Ring)

The Fung Fasting Report #1: One Month of WOW!

A month ago, I told you about the books I was reading, mentioned my previous morbid obesity, type 2 diabetes, and tongue cancer.

What I didn’t mention is that while the majority of my family on my father’s side died in their 50s of complications of raging alcoholism (which I neatly sidestepped by deciding when I was a kid that I was never going to drink — and then sticking to that), just about everyone on my mother’s side of the family died of complications of food. Type 2 diabetes, obesity, stroke, heart attack.

And as well as I’d done with Paleo in getting my weight down, in getting my blood sugar under control, I could not get that last mile.

My fasting blood glucose was always in the 90s, my 2-hour postprandial (after meal) was always in the 120s. If I were being snarky, I’d say these were minimally exceptional.

Since I would NEVER be snarky, I’ll note that these are NOT good numbers. They’re borderline. You’re standing with your toes hanging over the cliff with these numbers, and if you sneeze wrong, you’re going to go over the edge.

So when Matt found Fung, and something we hadn’t tried, I was motivated.

I’ve never done things in half measures. When I decide to do something, I’m all in — so when I fail, it’s big and messy and sometimes expensive and always painful. And someone a little less o/b/s/e/s/s/i/v/e FOCUSED than me would learn that Moderation is Wisdom.

I can type those words, but when I look at them on the screen, all I can read is Moderation is Wimpy. Hey, we all have our bears to cross, and this is just the way I’m made.

So I have not been moderate. I have been both focused and driven.

Baseline, Matt, the Kid (who’s twenty, so he isn’t, but I can’t bring myself to call him the Man, or the Guy) have eaten one meal a day that contains less that 20 grams of carbs, moderate proteins, and high fat.

No snacks, no cheat days, no compromises. Not once.

The quality of our food has gone from the cheapest meats and veggies Wal-Mart sells to the expensive pastured chicken and beef, grass-fed butter, and fresh asparagus at Whole Foods because…

At maximum, we’re eating seven meals a week. 

If you figure what you’re spending on food now, cut that down to one meal a day with no snacks or soft drinks, figure the prices for the best ketogenic whole food money can buy (and throw in my secret kicker — more on that in a sec), and go through the week on a MAXIMUM of seven meals, you can eat like kings.

Here’s the secret kicker. Originally we figured the meals would be the same size as the meals we usually ate. So we were going along on Wal-Mart Hamburger Salad with Lettuce and Mayo-Mustard-Paprika Sauce. And other “yep, still hamburger” meals. And I noticed that I wasn’t finishing my portions. I have been a big eater for a long time, so this was strange. One meal a day, and I wasn’t finishing the one meal I had.

Matt grilled us these gorgeous boneless pork chops, and made fresh asparagus for me, and salads for the kid and himself, because I’m the only one who would rather have asparagus than candy.

We got two chops apiece. Delicious, perfectly prepared. I ate about 80% of the asparagus, one of the chops, took two bites from the second, and I was done.

DONE. Not another bite of food was going into my mouth, because my stomach said, “STOP, dammit.”

And I stopped.

So the secret? You get less hungry eating this way, so you eat less, so you BUY less. (Why cook stuff the Stomach Boss won’t let you eat?) But you can afford to buy better.

And this isn’t just me. Both Matt and the Kid have had the same reaction.

But there’s more…

In the past month, along with the 23-hour fasts, I’ve also done several 48-hour fasts, and one 72-hour fast.

So subtract the six days in the last month that I didn’t eat at all (just had 8 oz. of black coffee in the morning, a cup of unsweetened green tea most days, and seltzer water or club soda as often as I wanted.)

When you figure that, I’ve actually averaged a bit over FIVE meals per week.

I haven’t been hungry.

During the fasting, I’ve occasionally felt a bit weak or wobbly, but it turns out that was my blood sugar dropping to places it hasn’t been in — well, probably decades. (Results will follow, but hang with me here).

I’ve had MORE energy than I’ve had in ages. Which is good, because right at the moment I’m neck deep and drowning in more work than I can believe (along with the accompanying stress).

Even if I weren’t dealing with medical problems that needed resolution, this “one meal a day most days and no meals a day some days” thing would have been a winning strategy for dealing with the ungodly amount of stress I’m under right now.

Not having to make time to eat has been one of the massive benefits of eating this way over the past month. I’m not even in sniffing distance of being caught up, but I’ve gotten a LOT more done than if I were wasting time with multiple meals and the sluggish after-meal doldrums that result from non-ketogenic meals.

So. The results.

I don’t own a scale. We haven’t had one since around 2010.

Frankly, I don’t care what I weigh as long as I’m healthy. The metrics that matter to me are my blood sugar (diabetes, kidney failure, amputation, and a laundry list of other ills too long to mention) and my waistline — because storing belly fat is indicative of feeding your next heart attack, and with my damn Energizer-Bunny personality, I figured I was PRIME for a heart attack.

Here’s where I started.

Waistline: 42″ even (106.68 cm)
Fasting blood glucose: in the 90s mg/dl
2-Hour post-prandial blood glucose: in the 120s mg/dl

 

Here’s where I am today.

Waistline: 36.5″ DOWN 5.5″ (92.71 cm) DOWN 9.47 cm
Fasting blood glucose past 7 days: In the 60s mg/dl (Lowest 62 mg/dl)

Average drop of 30 mg/dl in one month
2-Hour post-prandial blood glucose: 68-78 mg/dl

Average drop of 52 mg/dl

 

Even after Matt loss a hundred pounds and I lost at least 60 back in 2006 (and the weight stayed off), I could not get my blood glucose into a GOOD range, and I could not get the fat off my waistline. I had what folks call an apple shape.

The apple shape is already gone. I have no belly bulge. I don’t have that spiffy inward curve I once had, but I’ve discovered this month that that may be within reach again, too.

As a teenager and young woman, I was tubular. The boy I liked most in high school once told me that if I stood sideways and stuck out my tongue, I’d look like a zipper. (You never quite get over something like that.)

I’d love to have the 22″ waist I had when I was nineteen back, but after three kids, that’s not going to happen. Getting a waistline under thirty, though? Getting the fat out of my liver and off my abdomen, adding some muscle — oh, yeah.

Incidentally and slightly off topic, I’m now back to doing both guy pushups (no knees, just straight back, hands and toes) and squats again because the increase in energy has to go somewhere, and it might as well go into doing something useful. Building muscle is always useful.

Status right now? I haven’t eaten for a couple of days. I’m not hungry. I just wrote this really long post, and then I’m going to go get some coffee and get some real work done.

We have a birthday/Mother’s Day party we have to go to today where I’m going to have to deal with a bunch of food outside my eating zone. So, following Fung’s advice, I’ll enjoy the party, eat the goodies… and tomorrow I’ll fast again.

One month in, I’m seeing amazing results, I have not suffered, I have not been hungry, and I have made enormous inroads into regaining the health I want to maintain for the rest of my life. And… wait for it…

This is the easiest damn thing I’ve ever done.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I got these results from eating a ketogenic diet, and from daily intermittent fasting mixed with occasional multi-day fasting over a period of 30 days. I was taking no medication for any medical condition, so could do this without medical supervision.

The Complete Guide to Fasting

If you’re taking ANY prescription medications, you’re going to have to consult with your doctor before trying something like this. Buy your doctor a copy of The Complete Guide to Fasting if you have to, and if you get resistance or the doctor things you’re insane or full of shit, take the copy back and find another doctor.

This is not an affiliate link: I’m recommending the book because it’s helping me. I will not make a dime if you buy the book.