I didn’t like 2010 all that much, either. It’s not like anything horrible happened to me to make it an especially bad year. More the opposite: absolutely nothing at all happened in my life, which makes it a lost year. Not sure if that isn’t even worse. If anything bad had happened at least it would be memorable in a way.

The fact that that was completely my own fault doesn’t make it any easier to accept, because that means I am the only person who can make 2011 a better year. Yeah, thanks for the pressure.

Anyway, last night I spontaneously decided to start looking forward to 2011 and all the new exciting things it might bring. What changed my mind was the fact that I managed to convince myself to work on my NaNo novel again. I had been thinking about that ever since NaNo ended, but I always found excuses not to open it again. I started 2 new stories (that will go nowhere, because they are not supposed to) and fiddled around with some other things, but my NaNo stuff stayed firmly closed.

Last night I thought I might as well look it over once more before giving up on it forever. And the craziest thing happened: I read a couple of paragraphs, then a couple of pages and then a couple more and I realized that I still love the story. I love those characters and their bantering and bickering. And I want to know how their adventure ends. Which, of course, I only can find out by finishing the story. So I told myself to just write another 500 words, to just push on a little bit, to see if the story was still alive.

1200 words later – around 2 a.m. – I was sitting there grinning happily and thinking maybe 2011 might become a good year after all. It might turn out to be the year I finally finish my first novel.

So here’s to 2011: things might actually happen this year.

Now excuse me while I get back to my writing…

For weeks now it has been raining almost daily. Which was fine at first, because it allowed me to sleep at night without marinating in my own sweat and it made my garden look like more like a jungle again instead of a desert. Unfortunately, meanwhile it’s more or less on its way to a swamp.

And while I first welcomed those big fluffy clouds after all that glaring sunshine that had hurt my eyes, seeing nothing but a whirling grey mass overhead for weeks isn’t quite as funny anymore. For all I know the sky above those clouds could have turned green in the meantime.

And it’s gotten cold enough that I already have to wear a jacket again when I’m outside. Now, I still do maintain that I like cooler weather more than unreasonable heat, but it is still supposed to be summer over here. And in summer I generally don’t like to have to lug around a jacket (much less a fucking umbrella) with me when I go out. As much as I love autumn, August is really too early for it to start.

This is all getting a bit ridiculous. I really wouldn’t mind some rain or even a little thunderstorm every day. But not all friggin day. A little sunshine in between all the rain really wouldn’t go amiss.

Ah well, but at least I have enough good books to read so I can ignore this whole outside world. I just started Stephen King’s “Under The Dome” a couple days ago and so far I love it.

And there is the little matter of this year’s NaNoWriMo that’s coming up pretty soon. For once I have started prepping early and it’s going well so far.

So screw the weather. It could be worse after all: at least I’m not living in Pakistan, so I guess I don’t really have all that much reason to complain.

I’m not a big fan of hot weather anyway, but now I’m really getting fed up with the damn heat. We don’t have air conditioning in our house, so the only thing that even marginally helps is opening all windows overnight and locking everything up again in the morning. Or, that would help if it got any cooler at night. Which it really doesn’t, so I’m marinating in my own sweat all night and can’t sleep well and then the sun comes up and everything gets only worse. Is it any wonder this friggin’ heat makes me crabby?

Yesterday it rained. For all of 10 minutes. And not like a real downpour, more like an unmotivated drizzle. Half an hour later there was no trace of it left.

My garden is wilting, my pond is falling dry, my dog is suffering and I’m starting to seriously contemplate moving to Alaska. *grmpf*

And if that wasn’t enough to aggravate me, there is this stupid Soccer World Cup going on, which is all that everybody is talking about. Unfortunately, the german team seems to play rather well, so they’re still in the running to win this bloody thing and everybody is going crazy about them. I don’t care about soccer at the best of times, but by now I really can’t stand it anymore. Everytime I see someone drive around with these ridiculous little flags on their car I want to just ram them and push them off the street. And if I have to hear that ridiculous expression “Sommermärchen” once again I’m afraid I will punch somebody in the face.

All in all I’m more than ready for this summer to be over. I wish I could just fall asleep right now and wake up in September.

And while it was a great feeling to accomplish this two times in a row (after all, there are many people who take part for years before making it over the finish line even once), it was mixed in with a little disappointment as well.

Yes, I did write another 50.000 words during November (58.678 to be exact) and that is great. But I didn’t quite make my own goal of 60.000 and neither did I finish even one of my two stories.

But, to look on the bright side, I did move along in my original story quite a bit farther and I think I will be able to get it finished eventually. Hopefully before November 2010.

I try to keep writing at least 500 words a day since NaNo ended, but since the real world has caught up with me again this proves to be even more of a challenge than banging out 2000 words a day in November.

I am also itching to start revising and editing the story, but before I haven’t finished the damn first draft that would be a complete waste of time. But that just gives me more motivation to keep writing. Although by the time I finally get around to revising I probably won’t feel like actually going through all those endless pages again. But I’ll cross this bridge when I come to it.

More than 2 weeks of writing lie behind me and even though I am quite comfortably ahead of the official wordcount goal for this time of month, I still feel a bit disappointed with myself because I had hoped to do so much better this year.

Unfortunately I didn’t keep my statistics from last year, but I do remember that there were several days where I didn’t write anything at all and serveral days, especially towards the end of the month, where I scrambled like mad to catch up. I made it to 54.000 in the end, if I remember correctly, but it wasn’t exactly fair sailing all the way and I knew it could have been a lot more if I hadn’t procrastinated and dragged my feet quite as much. But since I had started 4 days late I was still happy to have made it over the finish line at all.

Now this year, because I already knew it would be possible for me to write 50.000 words in a month, and because I wanted to do better than last time, I set my goal at 75.000 words – and even more important, I wanted to finish last year’s novel.  Because it is all nice and well writing so much stuff, but I know if I don’t finally finish this thing now, I probably never will. Not that that would be such a loss to the world of literature, since it is never going to be published anyway. But for my own sense of fullfillment (and because I am prone to start all kinds of things, but have a hard time sticking to one thing long enough to actually finish it) I just need to do this. I don’t care if I never get around to edit it and let other people look at it, but I want to be able to say that at least once in my life I wrote an actual novel from start to finish.

The good news is, I was actually able to pick up the story where I left it off a year ago. That wasn’t something I was quite sure I could do. So I am happy that at least it isn’t already dead in my mind. And I am making headway with the plot. I know what is left to write and I roughly know where I want to go with this, instead of just letting it meander more or less randomly. And I do feel that the end draws closer. Not quite close enough to see it from where I stand now, but maybe just around one or two more corners.

The bad news is that I have written only 17.000 more words for this story so far. The rest of my wordcount comes from the other story. The one that I started on a whim on day 3 of the contest, because for the life of me I didn’t feel like working on the original one that day.

So now I am working on 2 stories at the same time. Every night when I start up my laptop I have to decide which one to work on this time, which in a way feels like a bit of a luxury, but it also stresses me out that every time I choose “the other story” is a day less to finish the original one.

Also, one would think that if I write 2 stories, I shouldn’t have a hard time racking up a much higher wordcount than last year. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work this way. I might still make it to 75.000 words, but it will be a close thing.

And do you want to know the punchline? It’s not because I wouldn’t have time to write. I have oodles of time. Well, actually I should be working most of the time, but I’m not (which is a tale for another day). For the last 2 weeks my parents were on holiday and I had the whole house to myself, nobody nagging me or reminding me to do “something useful”, nobody I had to even talk to at all (except for the dog and she is not much of a talker). Fourteen days of uninterrupted writing time all to myself. In theory, at least.

And even now that they are back they don’t really bother me all day, because they assume I am up here in my office working. In theory I could have written another 1000 words since breakfast easily. But I didn’t. And that’s not only because I am plain lazy and love to distract myself with all kinds of useless other stuff – although both of these things are true. But the biggest reason for that is that I can’t seem to write in the day. For some reason I always, always only start writing in the evening and then keep going until I have trouble to keep my eyes open and string a coherent sentence together. Quite an annoying habit, really.

But there are still 2 more weeks to go and hope springs eternal and all that shit. I do still think that I have a fair shot at finishing both my stories in time and maybe even reach my unofficial personal wordcount goal. And even though, as you can see from the graphic to the right, I already skipped one day this month, I do hope that I will also achieve my other goal of writing each and every day for the remainder of the month. We’ll see how that goes.

(FYI, if I was allowed to count this post towards my wordcount, that would be a whopping 964 words more already…)

As I mentioned in my last post I have dropped 6 kg (12 pounds) in the last 2 months.

For somebody who is already reasonably slim this would be a huge weight loss. For somebody like me, who isn’t, it turns out to be just a hardly visible drop in a very big ocean.

Not that I am morbidly obese or anything. Nothing of that sort. I wear a US-size 18, which as far as I know is still quite a way from the upper end of the scale for really fat people.

Nevertheless it is hard to find really nice clothes in my size. Or, if I do find them, they just don’t look good in my size. Or they are much more expensive than in smaller sizes. No wonder clothes-shopping is one of the things I hate the most.

But since I am not really interested in fashion anyway the clothes aren’t the issue. Being overweight, apart from being a health-risk, is just a complete hassle in every aspect of life. I know fat people often say they feel good just the way they are and it’s the thin ones that have a problem. But that’s just a big, fat lie. It is something we try to convince ourselves of so that we don’t feel too bad. Being fat is just not fun – and nobody will ever be able to convince me otherwise.

So, I do want to lose weight. Quite a lot of it (about 60 pounds in all). Preferably without having to deprive myself of too much in the way of food etc. So dieting is out, obviously. Since it has been proven that most diets don’t work long-term, that’s just as well.

As I wrote in my last post I decided to use running as my weight loss tool (no, that’s unfortunately not me in the picture – I wish it was). And so far it seems to be working. 12 pounds in 2 months is more than I had hoped for, actually. If it goes on at this rate I will reach my goal weight in a couple of months, even though I gave myself 2 years to do it. After all, it took me 25 years to gain all this weight so I can’t reasonably expect to lose it all in a short time.

In the last weeks I have also started to read up on healthy eating. I know I have a lot of work to do on that front, but I wanted to make the running a habit before I started in on the whole food topic. Besides, I just like eating too much to think about cutting out some stuff altogether. I guess in the end it will all come down to gradual changes at some point.

But you know what surprised me when I found out I had lost 12 pounds? That I didn’t feel it at all.

I had put the scales away about 2 weeks after I started running again, because I felt it just depressed me when I checked my weight every day and didn’t see more than the usual random fluctuations.

Not until I returned from my week in London did it occur to me to check even once again. Of course I had in the intervening weeks noticed that some of my pants had started to sit rather loosely and for one I actually need a belt now. But it’s not like I can’t wear any of them anymore, because they are too big now.

So imagine my surprise when I step on the scales one morning and see that a whole 12 pounds have magically vanished. I must have looked on that number for 5 minutes or so, because it just didn’t make sense.

6 kg are the equivalent of 6 one litre milk cartons. Stack them on a table and contemplate the picture. And then lift up the whole stack. Pretty heavy, don’t you think?

And all that weight was until very recently distributed over my body somewhere. And now it’s not anymore. Shouldn’t I feel some kind of difference? Shouldn’t my legs look thinner, or my belly smaller? Or my boobs, for that matter? Everybody had promised me that would be the first place were weight loss was noticable. Yeah, right. Empty promises.

But really, I am a little bit disappointed in not being able to discern any noticable difference at all in my figure so far. I guess I will just have to be patient until I lost the next 15 pounds or so. Or until my pants really start to fall down if I don’t use a belt (hopefully not in public).

After all, all runners are slim, right? And common sense says they can’t all have started out that way. And even though, for somebody as overweight as I am, it is recommended to start not running, but walking, because it is easier on the joints, I always found walking rather boring. Besides, having tried it a couple of years ago with a friend, it didn’t help me to lose any weight at all. So, after reading some books about running technique and getting some expensive shoes, I decided I would just give this whole running thing a try for a while.

The first try

I first started in March, when the weather was still filthy and cold most of the time. Only then I did it all wrong – not wrong per sé, because I had read those books and had found some good training plans for beginners to follow. But all wrong for me personally, because as it turns out I hate following training plans. I hate wearing a watch that unflinchingly told me that I had been running for only 45 seconds before I was totally out of breath and had to walk for 2 minutes. I hated writing all the times down later and seeing no discernible progress from one week to the next.

Another thing I did wrong was running in the afternoon, and having to drive to the field where I ran. During the day there are just too many things that can come up to interfere with my running time, or I was already too tired or unmotivated to get off my butt and get in the car when the time came around, so I put the run off to tomorrow. Until after 2 months I gave it up completely. Feeling like a failure again and once more convinced that I will never be able to change.

The second try

When I started again in July I decided to forget all the stuff everybody else said and just do it my way. Nowadays I run first thing in the morning. In summer I got up at 6 a.m., put on my running shoes, took the dog and off we went. Meanwhile, because the sun comes up later I can sleep in until 6:30. I guess in winter I will go back to getting up at 6 and get some reading done until it is time to go out.

I also don’t drive up to the fields anymore, instead just walk down to the river where I go for walks with the dog every day anyway. Along the river to the next village there’s a nice route of about 1km (one way). The ground is very uneven, so first thing I did was spraining my ankle, but I got used to it meanwhile and it beats running on asphalt.

Another thing I don’t bother with anymore is taking a watch along. I just don’t care anymore how long it takes me to run that puny 1km and back. I don’t wanna know how fast (or slow) I run, or how many calories I burn, what my heart rate is or whatever else those fancy things tell you nowadays. If I can’t breathe anymore I am running too fast – I can ascertain that much without any technological doo-dad.

Does that work?

Yes, for me it does. Not bothering with plans and stuff means that I can just run as fast or as slow as I feel like at any given day. Sometimes I walk a bit more than I run, but that’s alright, too. I don’t stress myself anymore about reaching some goal that somebody else set in a training plan.

All I do is get up every morning, get out there and run. Oh yeah, and have fun with it. I do actually look forward to my morning run nowadays. It is not something I have to kick myself in the ass to do. It’s not something that seems like work, made complicated by rules and plans and boring stuff. It’s just me and my dog and the sunrise and the mist over the river valley.

But, I hear the “experts” say, that way you have no way to track your progress. You don’t know how long it took you in the beginning to run the route, and you don’t know if you got faster. You don’t know if you are training within the fat-burning zone, or if your heart rate is too high. And if you have no way to track progess your training is just not as efficient as it could be.

And that might well be true. But I don’t give a damn, because my way, as inefficient as it may be, is the only way that works for me. It’s the only way don’t get bored or annoyed. And it’s the only way I actually enjoy doing the same damn thing every single morning, again and again. So, the way I see it, a little inefficiency is a small price to pay for that. I never wanted to break any records or compete in any contest or run a marathon.

Besides: I may not train as efficient as I could, but I still lost 6 kg in the last 2 months (for the americans: that’s roughly 12 pounds). Without, I’d like to add, changing my eating habits in any way! I still eat chocolate, I still drink my coffee with milk and sometimes sugar, I still eat not nearly enough fruit. And still I lost 6 kg in only 9 weeks (2 of which I couldn’t run, because I was first in London and then down with a cold).

So I really can’t complain about inefficient training. However wrong I might be doing it, it still works for me. And, what’s just as important, it still allows me to enjoy my life and indulge in all kinds of treats.

Beat that with your stringent training plans.

As you probably deduced from reading my last post I returned home from London last Thursday. Unfortunately the only souvenir I brought with me was a nasty cold. The result was that I spent the next 4 days mostly lounging around on the couch, oozing various fluids, coughing parts of my lungs up and just generally feeling like crap.

Not the best fun I had in a while. But it’s getting better and I am able to actually concentrate on something again (even though I still feel too lousy to actually work). Today I even went on my morning run again for the first time in 2 weeks. And considering that I had to stop frequently to let a coughing fit pass or blow my nose it wasn’t too bad.

Still, the London trip was fantastic. A week is exactly the right amount of time for me to spend in a big city: enough time to get re-acquainted with old favorite places and find some new ones, but not long enough to get all fed up with the noise and the hustle and the millions of people everywhere.

Oh, and it gave me enough time to go book-shopping. Unfortunately I had a 10kg weight-restriction for my luggage (one of the downsides of ultracheap airlines), so I couldn’t go quite all out with the book buying. But I managed to cram 25 books into my backpack anyway. And since they were all either from used book stores or Oxfam, they cost me about 30 Pounds altogether. And even though, as usual, I bought many books I had never heard of before, just because I liked the title or cover or something else caught my eye, I also found quite a few books from my wishlist (a Neil Gaiman, 2 Richard Russo, a Kate Atkinson, Douglas Adams, JG Ballard etc.). So in that respect the trip was very successful and enjoyable.

Besides that I went to a somewhat unusual Bookcrossing meetup with several british Bookcrossers. Unusual because one of us went up onto the fourth plinth on Trafalgar Square to educate the masses about the concept of Bookcrossing and to give out more than 160 books by just throwing them down from there. The rest of us went around the square and gave out more books to everyone who seemed interested. The plinth thing is part of some kind of art project that’s going on this summer, called One & Other. (You can watch our BCers one hour stint here.) It certainly was a new exerience for me, but I had a lot of fun. And it was great to meet some BCers face to face. And the subsequent visit to the nearest pub wasn’t too bad either.

Apart from that highlight I found 3 other great things which will surely become part of my favorites:

Abney Park Cemetery

It took me ages to find the place, because I was too stubborn to ask for directions and I just can’t seem to get the hang of the bus system in London. But it definitely was worth the long search. A beautiful old, derelict cemetery with an abandoned and crumbling church right in the middle. I only regretted to have gone there in the brightest afternoon sunshine. A nightly visit would have been more appropriate. Maybe next time.

But I took about a hundred photos anyway. I’ll see if I can post a couple of them later on.

Hunterian Museum

This one is inside the Royal College of Surgeons and it proved a bit hard to find as well, since when I first went looking for it on Monday (when it is closed) I couldn’t for the life of me find any sign with the name on it. When I stubbornly went back on Tuesday it was open and they had put out a sign so people would actually know which building it is in.

The collection itself is splendid: thousands of pickled body parts with all kinds of deformities, dead babies  and foetuses in all stages of development, skulls and bones and pretty much just any kind of anatomical object you can think of. All very impressive and educational, and what can I say: I just love to look at dead things.

Although I have to admit, the one thing that I would have loved to take with me was this sculpture of a panther eating a rabbit in the art gallery part of the museum:

(Sorry for the bad quality of the photo. Since taking pictures inside the museum is forbidden I just grabbed this one from the interactive panorama thingy on the website.)

I have no idea why I was to taken with the thing, but I know if I ever see an affordable replica of it somewhere I will buy it.

Wellcome Collection – “Exquisite Bodies” exhibition

This one was a random find. I had never heard of the collection itself and I only saw the posters for the exhibition in the Tube stations. Of course when I read “an exhibition of anatomical models” I knew I had to go have a look.

The exhibition was pretty interesting. Of course I had seen anatomical models before: mostly made from wax, or the newer ones from plastics, they are those kinds of things where you can simulate an autopsy by removing the abdominal wall and single organs. But it was interesting to see how the art of making those models developed and I was surprised to see that the overwhelming majority of the things show female cadavers, pregnant ones mostly. Either the female anatomy and the marvel of pregnancy is very much more complex and needs more explanations for educational purposes, or the men who made these models were all just obsessed with naked female bodies.

The rest of the collection is equally entertaining. Herny Wellcome was a collector of a very special sort. He collected pretty much everything even marginally connected with health and the human body. You can probably imagine that he ended up with a pretty eclectic pile of stuff. Definitely a place to come back to on later visits.

* * *

Apart from those new finds of course I also had to pay a visit tothe big 3 of my old favorites: the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the British Museum. All of them never cease to delight me in their various ways.

So, I had a pretty interesting week. But as much as I love London, being back home, sleeping in my own bed, having some peace and quiet and all that is really nice, too.