Around Christmas time, I converted my desk to a standing desk. I’d like to say that I did this for worthy reasons connected to reading up on the latest health news and deciding to up-level my life and increase my productivity. This would not be true. I did it (TMI warning, skip to the end of the sentence to avoid) because I had piles and it was not pleasant to sit down. I also had the feeling that it was too much sitting down which had got me into this situation in the first place.
At any rate, I grabbed a pair of speakers we had lying around from a now redundant hifi, laid them end to end on top of my desk and put my keyboard and mouse pad on them, like this:
I then had to raise my monitor on a pile of books, which is not entirely satisfactory, and it’s nowhere near eye level, but it’s not too bad.
A little while after I did this, I came across various posts from other people who were also converting their desks to standing desks, except that they were doing it for more impressively rational health reasons. I have to say that I scoffed at the idea.
My experience of working at a standing desk is that I tend to avoid starting big tasks, I walk off more often, and I can’t spend more than an hour in front of it without suffering from foot, knee and lower back pain. I have also been far more consistently tired for the last three months than ever when I was sitting down to work.
However, I recently noticed a funny thing. You know I’m on the Slimming World eating plan? I’ve been at my target weight for almost two years now, but I still go to get weighed every week so I can keep track of it and keep it under control. Before Christmas, I was having a terrible time staying in my target zone. I was sticking very strictly to my diet, not allowing myself anything at all in terms of treats – no chocolate, no bread, no alcohol etc, and I was barely holding on. If I slipped even by one chocolate biscuit in a week, I put on a pound.
Over Christmas, I ate like everyone does at Christmas and put on 5lb. Then I went back on the diet and I instituted the standing desk and I lost those 5lb in two weeks. Ever since then, I’ve been losing weight so easily there were times I was struggling to stay on target from the other direction – I had to make myself eat chocolate to avoid losing too much.
The mystery in the blog title comes from the fact that I can’t be sure this is the doing of the standing desk. At Christmas my husband lost his job and suddenly there was no money coming into the household except what I earned from writing. This undoubtedly put me under quite a bit of stress. So the stress might have caused the weight loss.
Except that normally stress causes me to comfort eat and put on weight, and I have in fact been mainlining chocolate biscuits for the last three months, which would normally result in weight gain. I’ve had stress before and it hasn’t ever caused me to lose weight before.
I have also, since Christmas, been going for a daily walk. This might be the cause of the weight loss, except that again, it doesn’t normally work that way. Normally if I exercise I immediately get extra hungry, eat all the food and put on weight.
Basically, I wouldn’t need to go to Slimming World if I wasn’t the kind of person who reacts to any and all situations by putting on weight.
So I don’t know… the one thing that’s different in all this from every time before is the standing desk. And the articles do say that among the benefits of the standing desk are an improved metabolism and a better ability to process fats and sugars. So who knows. It could be that it’s this standing up lark which is allowing me to reintroduce beer and chocolate into my life. In which case it’s well worth the foot, back, knee ache and exhaustion.
Has anyone else tried standing at their desk? How did it work for you?
Here is a lovely review of Captain’s Surrenderhttp://julian-griffith.livejournal.com/27644.html which makes me smile not only with the joy appropriate to a good review but with the additional joy appropriate to a review that really seems to get what you were trying to do.
I’m also hugely pleased and honoured to have The Wages of Sin reviewed in Wilde Oats http://www.wildeoats.com/review_WagesOfSin.html which is a lovely magazine to which I keep meaning to submit a story or two, but never seem to write anything short enough.
Thanks so much to both of you!
And on a completely different note, I was very happy to find both asexuals and the gender fluid on this list, but while the factoid about Captain Jack Harkness makes so much sense, I suspect they might be wrong on the osmosis front. At least, it’s never worked like that for me.
In fact, seriously, go to the tumblr for more Facts about Queers. I never knew the reason why I had such difficulty with computers was because I was non-binary, but that makes so much sense too 🙂
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I have a few ideas for some longer blog posts, hurray! But now it’s just a matter of sitting down and writing them. And as one of them is about the fact that I have converted my computer desk to a standing desk, this might be easier said than done 😉
I’ve been saying I should do this for a long time. Now I’ve finally bitten the bullet and done it.
In my time I’ve made a lot of book trailers, but I only have Windows Media Maker to do it with, which generally means it’s some pictures and some text with an unrelated soundtrack. I’m fairly happy with the videos of that sort that I have made. This one for Shining in the Sun still makes me laugh:
but I thought it was getting a little passe and I should do something different next time. The difference is me! Here I am reading into a camera, horribly nervous and amused about it. I had to cut off several minutes from the beginning where I just looked at the lens and said “I don’t think I can do this.”
Eeee! I have cover art for Too Many Fairy Princes! Or at least, I have seen a mock up of what the cover art will be like when it has finally been made. I didn’t really have a clear idea of what I wanted to see on this cover. Maybe a view of London with the two heroes on top of it? But I didn’t see how they would manage to get a good photo of anyone sufficiently elf-like to stand in for Kjartan (who looks a bit like this:)
Click on the picture to get to Ulrike’s gallery
But they did! I can’t reveal it yet, but I’m ever so pleased. Samhain’s art department goes from strength to strength.
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A second cause of squee is that I’ve also had the edits back on the manuscript of Too Many Fairy Princes, and in the “Coming Soon” section it says The Reluctant Berserker.
I hadn’t announced that The Reluctant Berserker had been accepted for publication by Samhain, because I haven’t yet had the contract, but I think that having it announced in the back of the book I’m working on now counts as official enough confirmation for me to go public with it. So look out for that one either late 2013 or early 2014 🙂
Elin Gregory kindly invited me to come and talk to her on The Armchair Reader about the dilemma faced by writers of LGBT fiction which is not erotica. It is a rant, but it is a polite one, I hope 🙂
Everyone has to do research. Even writers of contemporaries will occasionally have to look up police procedure, or how much a luxury yacht costs or what is the price of a room in the Waldorf, or what would really happen if you turned up in A&E with gunshot wounds etc etc. Writers of historicals know that research is essential and inescapable (and actually a great deal of fun). Even fantasy writers don’t get it all their own way. As I’ve said elsewhere, if a fantasy writer wants to convince me she knows all about dragons, she’d better get right things like how to lay a fire or shoot a bow – and that, if you don’t know it already, takes research too.
So, how much research should you do? How much is enough?
How long is a piece of string? On the one hand, no amount of research is ever enough. There will always be some little thing that you don’t know. There will always be something that some cunning reader trips you up about, because you thought you knew something that you didn’t, or you assumed something that turned out to be wrong.
Plus, of course, the more you know, the better. The more research you’ve done, the more embedded you are in that society and time, the more detail you can include, the more appreciation you will have for it, the more certainty and confidence you will have while writing, and the more authority you can speak with.
So on one hand you could research for ten years and not be finished. On the other hand, if you researched for ten years and never actually sat down and wrote the book, that would be too much. If you researched for two years and found, at the end of it, that you were so fed up of hearing about this subject that you didn’t want to write the book at all, that would also be too much.
I researched for two years before I wrote False Colors, but I was writing other Age of Sail stories at the time, and I was mostly ‘researching’ – by which I mean ‘reading fascinating books and learning new stuff which I really enjoyed’ for entertainment. I read it because I was interested and I wanted to know, not because I wanted to write a book. But of course when I did decide to write a book, all the research was there at my fingertips already.
This was a fortunate occurrence but not to be relied on to happen as a matter of course.
Research is a tricky thing. When I was writing Under the Hill, I thought I would research for a book set in WWII. This would be the book I wrote after I had finished the story in UtH. But the research turned out to be so interesting that I couldn’t wait to use it. It sneaked into UtH and made that a very different book than I had initially expected.
The conclusion I draw from this is that the timing of your research is also important. If you can research one book while writing another, well done you. If you can’t, that definitely puts a limit on the amount of time you have to do the research you need. If you’re trying to produce two or three (or four or five) books a year, and you have to do the research for each one immediately before you begin writing it, you’re probably limited to a month of deep immersion in research at best.
Of course, one way to get round this is to use a similar setting for several books. That way, you can research for six months and then rattle off three books on the strength of it, one after another without a delay.
If you have a strong attraction to one period of history, such that all you want to write for years is Regency romances, for example, then you’re set. You can learn as much as you need to write your first book in a few months or so, and you can continue to learn more and more as each book goes on, until eventually you will be a foremost expert on your period.
But if you want to do something different each time, you need to be satisfied with less research. It is simply not practicably possible to become an expert for every book. You need to become an expert in creating the illusion that you know what you’re talking about.
How to do this?
I suggest a short period of intensive immersion in reading anything and everything you can get your hands on about the era/subject you are learning. Give yourself a month to get all the books you can find out of the library, to read all of the websites and hunt down all the books in the bibliographies of the books you already have.
The first week is of necessity a week of the broad brush. Here you’re learning the shapes of what you don’t know – you’re learning where the gaps are that you have to fill. By the end of that week of indiscriminate reading, you will have an idea of where you need to look for more. I recommend that by the end of that week, you narrow down your century to an actual date. It’s much easier to find out what happened in 1742 than it is to find out what happened in the entire 18th Century.
Once you’ve got a grip on the basic details of the culture – what people wear, what they eat, what their houses look like, how they travel, what they live on, what they believe in – then you can begin to write.
Don’t at this point think that the research is over. It may take you four to six months to write your book. That’s four to six months more you have to read up about what you’re writing about. With editing and polishing and submission time, you may have a whole year to give yourself a crash course in your subject. By the end of a year spent reading up intensively on any subject you can usually know a decent amount about it, and until the book is actually being sent to the printers any mistakes can be still changed.
The reason I would start writing as soon as I had a broad overview of the culture in hand is this – you don’t know what you need to know until you know the needs of your story. Only if your hero is going on a carriage journey from Dorset to Inverness will you know that it’s vital to look up the state of the roads in Britain in [date]. If you did decide to research the roads on the off chance, and then he ended up taking ship from his home-town and spending the rest of the novel in the Bahamas, that would have been a waste of your time.
By writing and researching as you go along, you can make sure you’re focussed on the research which is most necessary to your story. Also, if you are writing at the same time as the research is permeating your consciousness, it will be most immediately in conversation with your muse. Your whole mind, intellect and creative powers alike, will be working together at what you’re doing, reinforcing each other.
To sum up, do as much research as you need to do to feel that you can create a reasonable simulacrum of this culture on the page. Then fill in the small details when you need to know them.
Or, do it in whatever way works for you, because if there’s one thing that’s become obvious while I’ve been writing this series of posts, it’s that there is no aspect of writing in which one fits all.
If you knew me in real life, you’d know that I was the one who sat in the corner of every meeting, listening and not saying anything. On rare occasions I might burst out with some wildly odd opinion on which I held forth for half an hour before realizing that everybody’s eyes had glazed over and people mainly wanted me to just shut up again. But mostly I would be practicing the shutting up and lurking appropriate to someone who is generally an outlier in any statistical curve.
Which means this whole blogging thing is very against the grain for me, and I have, yet again, run out of things to say. So I’m going to throw the floor open and say “ask me something! Anything!” Is there anything you want my opinion on? Post it here and I will answer it if I can 🙂
Tentatively relevant picture:
Asking for directions.
It’s either that or I go back to the idea of Sunday Snippets – posting an excerpt from one of my books every week – and does anyone really want that?
The Glass Floor is done. It is done, my precious 🙂 Or at least, it is done enough so that it’s ready to be given out to a small number of fantasy fans who are willing to read it and tell me what works for them, and more importantly, what doesn’t work and why not.
Of course, I’m not sure how to go about getting hold of this elite cadre of beta readers. Anyone else out there writing fantasy with whom I could enter into some kind of reciprocal beta-reading relationship? I don’t really want to send it out to complete strangers, so people I know from my friends list would be best. Failing that, anyone got any ideas as to how I can find some feedback on it? Are there websites or forums for this somewhere?
I must admit I’ve never taken the UK citizenship test myself and suspect I would not pass it. (I think it’s a silly idea. Why do we all need to know the same things?)
But I nevertheless passed this one with flying colours. See how you would do 🙂
The Boat of Small Mysteries - A cozy mystery aboard a narrowboat, in which a murder and a disappearance keep our aroace detective from fully relaxing into the idyll of country life.
