Teel – Page 15 – Teel McClanahan

Dieting, and unusual dieting

I don’t know how much I’ve mentioned about it here in the last couple of years, but my wife and I have been working on improving our health. When we got married we were both somewhat overweight (obese, by BMI), and in January 2010 we started making an effort to do something about it. We started with little stuff, using our Wii Fit more, going for walks, and around April 2010 we started using the loseit.com app to track everything we ate & all our exercise. The app, once you get used to it, makes tracking and controlling your behavior pretty easy – I’ve had similar success in the past with keeping a written log of everything I ate, but doing it digitally is much smoother and allows for easier planning & adjustments. We set our goals at a reasonable 2 pounds loss per week, with the understanding that we wouldn’t hit that goal every week and even if we did it would take a long time. I won’t detail everything, but gradually, over the next year or so, we each lost about 50 pounds. Just by eating a little less and moving a little more. I went down from the scary-enough-to-provoke-action 250 to about 200, and from about 25% body fat down to about 18%, by April 2011. (I also went down about four inches in the waist.)

By summer of last year we’d both plateaued, and by December 2011, largely due to depression, I was rapidly re-gaining weight. When I hit 210, I started a crash diet (which overlapped Christmas, unfortunately), and got back under 200 within a couple of weeks, and I’ve been struggling again with the last of my stubborn belly fat since then. Normal “eat less, move more” wasn’t quite cutting it (or I wasn’t really moving enough), and when I saw some science backing up an unusual sort of diet I’d thought about before, I figured what they hey, let’s try it … Actually, I just showed it to Mandy on a lark, not intending to try it, but she suggested trying it … And the week of March 26th we started doing a version of an alternate-day-fasting diet.

There are a few ideas about this sort of diet, ranging from full-on fasting every other day to eating 20%-50% of your “maintain” level of calories on the alternate days, and from normal to 150% (or just “whatever you want”) on the non-fasting days. Different people swear it has different effects, ranging from “helping get rid of that last 15 pounds” to curing asthma & allergies, and possibly to postponing the onset of diabetes or MS. Who knows? The science isn’t in, yet. Give it a few more years/decades. Since we were still trying to get rid of the last of our excess fat (I was still at/above 18% body fat) we decided to aim for a reasonable 50% on “fast” days, and 100% on “high” days – this keeps us losing weight, but confuses our bodies. (We also re-started our attempts to complete the 100 pushups and 200 situps challenges (we didn’t succeed on our first six-week attempt) three weeks ago.) In five weeks I’m down 10 pounds to 190, and down 2-3% body fat, as well. (Plus another inch at the waist; it’s a bit frustrating to be between pant sizes, but I just ordered a new pair of suspenders to hold them up, at least until I lose another inch and buy some new pants.) Mandy, unfortunately, has not been having as dramatic a success… but she’s sticking with it.

It’s been interesting. With alternating days being so low-calorie, the days we eat at our “maintain” calories are like cheating days, or feast days. If I’m having trouble sticking to the low-calorie limits, I usually only have to remind myself that the next day I’ll be able to splurge, eat what I want, and then I can more easily control myself. I can definitely say that having the relatively-high-calorie days (versus most of the last two years, where I’ve been eating little every day, first to lose the first fifty pounds, and then unsuccessfully to try to lose this last 15 pounds) have been very liberating. Also helpful since I’m still frequently overcome in difficult situations with an urge to emotionally overeat – the trick now is to control the urge, if possible, on low days, and keep it near my maintain calorie level on high days (which feels like plenty of leeway after years of running 1,000 calories lower than that every day).

I’m still a bit away from even my initial goal (technically, my BMI is still a bit into the overweight, and my body fat percentage is a few points higher than I’d like) though I hope after another few months of this unusual diet I’ll be there. I also hope I’ll be able to do 100 pushups at some point; progress on that isn’t going well, though it is going, a bit. Getting back to a point where I can do a lot of situps would be good, too – I’d love to actually have some abs worth looking at, once this obscuring fat is worked away. Not that my abs would be visible in it, but I’ve been putting off getting a new author portrait (née headshot) taken (or having my wedding ring resized) until I reach my weight goal; I’m most of the way there, and look very different from the photo I’ve been using most places, but there’s something psychological about actually reaching the goal… if you’ve been wondering why I don’t look like my photo, this is why.

So, that’s a sort of a general update on what’s been going on with my dieting. Mostly success, mostly by eating less and moving more. I didn’t mention that it also involves eating generally whole foods, plenty of fruits and vegetables, with most meals cooked from scratch – because that is for another post (or series of posts), and predates any attempts as weight loss, since eating real food is awesome, anyway.

Subscribing to middlemen

Over on Google+, I lamented briefly at not having a good option for offering pre-orders; last night I put in the order with LSI for the 50-copy Limited Edition hardcover print run for Never Let the Right One Go, and won’t be able to sell any of those copies until after they’re actually here (and signed and numbered and ready to ship). Payment services like PayPal (yech) and Google Checkout don’t technically allow pre-orders; you must not charge customers until your product is ready to ship (or shipped), or you violate the TOS.

Someone commented, asking, “Have you looked at http://backmybook.com/? It’s what Scott Sigler’s using — and Scott Sigler pushes preorder of his books pretty heavily in his podcasts.” This was my reply, and I thought it worth re-posting, here:

I never get past the front page, where it says they charge more per month than I earn from my books most months, just to set up a store, and double that to try to build a community around the books. You have to keep in mind I’ve not got lots of eager, paying customers: A clue is my recent Kickstarter – which I used as a way to sell pre-orders of this book, actually – which failed because I could only come up with 14 backers.

The pre-order system I’m looking for needs to be cost-effective at selling as few as half a dozen books. Really, any store I set up needs to be that way, right now. Last year I sold 26 paper books and 133 eBooks, or an average of just over 13 copies a month. That’s across all platforms and venues – I can’t afford any platform which costs more than the <$25/month I make in sales across all platforms (most months); even $10/month is really too much.

I sell more copies each year than the last, and for most titles each new book is more popular than the last – I’m building an audience, slowly but surely. (Last year an average of over 1,500 people/month downloaded my free eBooks, and a little over half as many downloaded my free audiobooks.) I’m in this for the long haul. In another five or ten years I expect to have passed the inflection point where my books sell enough copies that I can throw money at services like Back My Book and MyWrite, and where a signed numbered limited edition hardback release doesn’t take several years to sell 50 copies. (Which, frankly, is an optimistic outlook for Never Let the Right One Go, right now. Could take a decade.)
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This also precludes services for hosting/selling digital goods (there are several out there, most charge a minimum monthly fee) such as ZIPs of my audiobooks (without all the extra intros/outros/chatter that you get on podcasts), or eBooks. In fact, it also means I don’t have a business checking account, because the minimum monthly fees would cancel out half my monthly business (and the situation was much worse four years ago when I started doing this full time) – I still do everything through my personal accounts. As a general rule, if a service provider between me and my customers operates on a subscription model or on upfront costs, rather than piecemeal (per transaction costs), I can’t afford it. My business is not regular enough, yet.

As I keep posting, even the upfront costs of printing paper books (and the subscription-type costs of keeping them available for “market distribution”) no longer make sense to me; the 50-copy print run of Never Let the Right One Go could, potentially, wipe out this entire year’s revenues, if few copies sell. I don’t expect to create paper versions of my next 4 (planned) books, three of which are YA novels. By the end of this year, I’ll have cut off the “Market Distribution” for every single one of my (paper) books; the eBooks and audiobooks will still be everywhere, but the paper versions will only be available directly from modernevil.com. With any luck, this will help maintain my gradual, but steadily increasing, distance from losing money on every book, every year.

Getting back to online journaling?

I keep thinking about trying to get myself to write more personally on this blog. For years, I actually used my blog as a personal online journal. Then in early 2005 I had some personal issues interfere with my ability to post freely about my life and emotions, and after the first oppressive year or so of that, my predilection for meaningful journaling had atrophied. After I left my last job in 2008 and began working full-time as a creative, writing about my ongoing projects and the progress of my business created a semi-steady flow of things to write about, without much getting into what was going on in my life. There have been a few painfully personal posts since then, but almost all within the context of posting about my work.

My life isn’t only my work, though my work certainly defines and consumes most of my life. So where are the posts about my happy marriage and the fun and interesting things Mandy and I do together, about the ups and downs, the adventures and the goose chases? Where are the posts about food; I’ve been baking and cooking more and more, adapting, following, and inventing recipes, where are the posts about how I find the culinary arts to be an important part of my overall creative life? Where are the posts about diet and exercise, the descriptions of the successes and frustrations Mandy and I have had, about losing fifty pounds (each) in the last couple of years (mostly 2 years ago; mostly plateauing last year), and about how we’re in the best shape of our lives? I used to write book reviews, movie reviews, product reviews, and more – I still read, et cetera, I even write reviews sometimes, but why aren’t they here on my blog? I finally started attending church regularly again, a few years ago, and I’ve been working little by little on giving my faith more prominence in everything I do; I’ve even been more overtly (it was always there, but it was less than obvious to some readers) writing Christian themes, characters, and lessons into my books, but where is any mention of that on my blog?

Heck, what about politics and economics? I construct book after book with my political and economic ideas as foundations on which the stories and characters’ lives are built – my two new books, Never Let the Right One Go, are so chock full of political commentary I keep worrying readers will choke on them. (Luckily, the rest of the content seems to have been well enough crafted to carry people through.) I have strong reactions to quite a bit of the ignorance and idiocy and injustice I see taking place in the world, but where are the posts about it? I live in a state which, because 55% of the (voting) residents can be convinced to vote for crazy people, has a horrible reputation for passing bizarre, draconian, often unenforceable and sometimes unconstitutional (even re: our own state constitution) laws. I’ve been biting my tongue (restraining my fingers from typing) about these things for years, now, not just here but also keeping myself from commenting on news articles, blogs, and social networks when these topics come up – now I’m considering, at the least, posting my thoughts here, if not smearing them all over the web.

I suppose the answer is that I’m going to try to actually get myself to start posting here, more, and more about the parts of my life beyond just writing and publishing books, creating and selling art, and the business of it all (though that stuff will continue to be a part of this blog, too – it’s still the biggest part of my life). Hopefully I’ll be successful, too.

First FREE day for Untrue Tales… Book One, at Amazon

So, today (Saturday, April 28th, 2012), Untrue Tales… Book One is available for free in the Amazon Kindle store. I would love it if you would click over to Amazon and click the Buy button -even if you’ve already read it, or listened to it, or if you have no intention of reading it, or reviewing it- because everyone who “Buys” it helps increase its Amazon Sales Rank. It would be even better if you then read and reviewed it, but that’s not really the point of this FREE day; the point is to increase visibility for the title, and if you have an Amazon account, you can help. (If you’re reading this after 4/28/2012 and before 5/5/12 – it’ll be free again 5/4 and 5/5, so you’ll have another chance to help!) Here’s the book description, in case you actually want to know what it’s about before you click through:

High school Sophomore Trevor believes he’s got a rich and detailed imagination. When his wandering mind shows him visions of car-size insects, arcane rituals, and odd-looking people talking to other creatures who don’t seem human at all, Trevor doesn’t think it’s any different from his sexual fantasies, or his daydreams about what it would be like to know what the girls from school were really thinking. When an afternoon of such intense mental wandering proves to be a real out-of-body psychic experience, Trevor soon finds himself literally teleported into an unseen world of magic and Mentalism – the science of reading other people’s thoughts and memories he didn’t know he had a natural talent for.

Transferred to a school where they teach subjects ranging from the mathematics of magical ethics to the secret histories of the magical world, Trevor tries to fit in to a student body who believes his existence has been foretold by prophecy – and that he might cause the end of the universe as they know it. Some of the students, and even a few of the teachers, are willing to risk lives and their own ethical balance to stop Trevor from fulfilling his potential, while he just wants to get through his first day at a new school.

Add the menacing conspiracy of three dark figures -two of whom work at the school- and the fact that Trevor accidentally got a girl pregnant when he thought he’d only been fantasizing about her, plus a P.E. teacher who thrusts him into a game of dodgeball where Trevor has to quickly adapt to avoiding balls of fire, lightning, and worse, and the first book of Untrue Tales gets the series off to a potentially apocalyptic start.

Please, go to Amazon and “buy” Untrue Tales… Book One for FREE, today!

Update: The book peaked at about #40 in Contemporary Fantasy (2,250 overall)… as a free eBook… and has now, apparently, lost all visibility as its sales rank has reverted to only include paid copies? Perhaps this is a failed experiment. Alternatively, perhaps some of the people who “bought” it for free weren’t just my friends/family/contacts, and they’ll actually read it. And perhaps some of them will want to read more, and will buy the full Untrue Tales series… Incidentally, it only took 85 “free” buyers (78 Amazon, 7 Amazon.co.uk) to reach #40 in Contemporary Fantasy and #2,250 overall at Amazon. I wonder how many “sales” it would take to get into the top 10.

Never Let the Right One Go is nearing completion

I managed to finish recording the audio version of Never Let the Right One Go on Friday, finished updating the text, updated the InDesign version for the hardcover, did four or more passes over every page of the book to be sure it was ready to go to print, double-checked that I was happy (enough) with the dust jacket design, and uploaded the book to LSI – I should be getting a proof copy sometime this week. Then I also got the two eBooks ready (twice) and sent out updated copies to all the First Readers who never finished, and copies to my Beta Readers and a couple of book bloggers who expressed interest in reviewing the books (still looking for more book bloggers, if you can recommend any you think would be interested). I had to build/polish/test the eBooks twice because I was sending different versions as ARCs than I’ll be selling, later; I added a couple of chapters of the other book to the end of both Sophia and Emily, so readers who only bought one will (hopefully) want to go buy the other–but I didn’t need to include those preview chapters at the ends of the ARCs, since I knew I was sending both books to everyone getting the ARCs. Anyway, then I sent the “finished”/current versions of the eBooks to Apple, to get them set up for pre-order through the iBookstore – Apple is the only eBook retailer which allows me to do this; for Amazon, Smashwords, BN, et cetera, I have to upload the files on the “release date” and hope they get processed in a reasonable period of time (Amazon can take 2-3 days!).

Remaining to complete: I have to edit the rest of the two audiobooks; I’ve only done about 10% of the audio editing so far. I need to update the Book Trailer I created for the Kickstarter, to post when the book is actually available, and to point people to where they can buy the eBooks. I have to go over the proof copy very carefully and then either approve it or prepare corrections – and once approved and the 50-copy limited edition is ordered, I’ll have to sign and number every copy (and cut one page out of each copy, incidentally). I’m considering putting together a couple/few copies of the two audiobooks as a single audiobook-package of audio CDs; it would be 14 discs, and I’d have to charge at least $35 for it; it would also be a fair amount of work, and need to be done before Phoenix Comicon. I should probably also record several versions of audio promos for the books, to run on all my existing Podiobooks – I have no evidence that any ad I’ve ever run there has resulted in a single person spending a single dollar, but … I guess I just have to keep trying, eh?

There’s a stack of things I’ll need to do when the May 12th, 2012 release date rolls around, including uploading the eBooks everywhere, uploading the new Book Trailer, and updating a bunch of pages at modernevil.com to reflect that they’re out/available, and then there’s the “marketing” I’m “supposed” to do after that, to actually get people to be aware of the books’ existence… but the actual creation of the books is nearly complete, and that’s what I consider my real work. Then, over the following six months or so, I’ll also be podcasting the books on the Modern Evil Podcast, but since the whole thing will already be written, recorded, edited, and (probably) assembled, it’s just a matter of uploading the files and creating the posts. Which is good, because I really want to be working on my next 3-4 titles, and some art, too!