patrickstuff
Weight Tracking 'n' Word Counting
7 posts
  Keeping a small, very personal blog, to track weight loss journey and writing progress. I’ve fallen off the wagon a lot on both of these lately, and I wanted to keep more or less daily track of both of these in a small out of the way corner of the internet, where anyone who wants to keep me accountable can follow if they want to, but I'm not blasting it out somewhere more visible where people don't really care.
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patrickstuff · 3 years ago
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262 today, but I had a bit of End of Holiday splurge last night. Also woke up extremely thirsty for some reason, so drank a bunch of water before weighing in.
Back to work today. I set a 6am alarm, but woke up at 5. Had intended to write, but ended up watching videos about The Witness all morning somehow.
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patrickstuff · 3 years ago
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Creative Hour today. The one the other day, when I started this blog, was a sort of make-up one, since we missed a few weeks while in FL having the worst vacation of our lives.
Good to get out and do some writing. My sleep schedule seems to be normalizing. I got up at 7, which is late for me (I like to get up at 4), but the earliest I’ve gotten up since getting back from FL. 
Forgot to weigh myself, but I still on vacation until tomorrow, so I’m not keeping regular track yet. I’m supposed to have a call with a personal coach/trainer from Nerd Fitness today, to see if I want to sign up for the service. It’s a bit pricey, but may be worth it.
I’m at 914 words for the day, working on SB4. However only about 250 of those words are actually in the book. I’ve been writing scenes around this secretive group of bad guys, and I’ve always been pretty haphazard about how many are in the group, who they are, etc. Today I started locking them in, giving them specific names and personalities. I decided to create a new document to keep track of them. I decided how many there were, and came up with names/backstories/personalities for all but one (one to grow on, as they say), which was a fun exercise. 
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patrickstuff · 3 years ago
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Still on vacation, and sleep schedule is still very messed up. Haven’t written since going to the cafe with Grey the other day.
Weight was 259.8 today. Not great but at least it is under 260.
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patrickstuff · 3 years ago
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Writing Pipeline
My goal is to be able to self publish stuff regularly, and to be able to have a predictable release schedule/cycle. So I worked out a way to have overlapping drafts on multiple books. So I’m basically working on 4 books at any given time. A full cycle would look something like this:
Book E - Write 1st draft (brain dump draft) Book D - Write 2nd draft (get structure correct) Book C - Write 3rd draft (artistic pass -- make it read well, not worrying about structure since it should be good from 2nd draft). Send this draft out to alpha readers. Book B - 4th draft (incorporate notes from readers, final polish). Book should be ready to publish after the 4th draft.
This is where I am with all my projects. I will use initials to identify each work without spelling out its full title. I’m not sure I need to hide the titles, but it makes me feel better for some reason.
SB1 - Ready to publish SB2 - 3rd draft is done. Gotten notes from alpha readers. SB3 - 2nd draft done. DH - 1st draft is done. SB4 - Currently about 60% complete on 1st draft. This is my current project.
At some point I wrote and directed a short film called THE PALE OLDE THINGS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPbPhCN0i3U), which I did during my writing time. In 2019 I took a 6 month break from book writing to write a feature length horror script, which I would like to make, but I moved to London instead, and I haven’t had a chance to connect with a filmmaking community here yet.
On weekends I like to take the kiddos to a cafe and have a creative hour. I used this time to take a break from whatever I was working on during the week and write some silly short stories. However, as my writing routine fell apart around summer 2021, I stopped doing the short stories and have been using that time to work on SB4, as it wasn’t getting done during the week. The short stories I wrote are basically horror covers of old fairy tales, where everyone is a monster of some kind. So far I’ve written: SNOW VHYTE and the SEVEN GOBLINS (Snow White and the Queen are vampires, and the dwarves are goblins). REVENANT BEAUTY (Sleeping Beauty as a revenant and the other characters are witches and harpies, and the “evil faerie” character is an arch angel). I started on CORPSERELLA, which is Cinderella with vampires and werewolves. I already did a vampire-focused one, but did vamps again as it seemed to fit the wicked step-family, but this one is mostly focused on werewolves. But, as I said, I haven’t really been working on this one because I’ve been doing SB4 during Creative Hour.
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patrickstuff · 3 years ago
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Writing Intro
I started writing regularly in 2015. I would get up at 4am, and write before work.
Mostly I’ve been writing novels, though I did throw in a short film, a feature length screenplay, and and some short stories in the mix.
I was super regular about doing this every weekday, and short story writing on Saturdays, even when on vacation. The only exception was while I was working on Madden, when crunch got bad and I was getting into work by 6am I generally would stop writing for a couple of months to pour myself into work. So I would generally lose summers, but back into it by late August.
This started to fall apart somewhat by late 2020, due to pandemic and work stress. 2021 I was really bad, losing most of my weekday writing all together, and being sporadic about weekend writing.
I’ve got to go for now, but will write about my writing pipeline later today.
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patrickstuff · 3 years ago
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Weight Intro
I’ve been kind yo-yo’ing on weight over the years. I was one of those kids that could eat everything in sight and not gain anything, up until my early 20′s or so. By my late 20′s I was a fat dude. I’ve gone back and forth since then.
In 2018, I’d gotten up to 285 lbs. The most I’ve ever weighed was about 305. I’m 6′4″, so pretty heavy naturally, but really I should be somewhere between 200-220.
In late 2018, my wife and I both tried the Slow Carb diet. She lost around 20 lbs, and I eventually lost 55. Got down to 230 by August 2019, the lowest I had been in decades. This was strictly through diet -- I wasn’t doing any specific exercise, as I know nutrition is the key factor in weight loss. I don’t want my weight to be dependent on doing a ton of exercise.
Then I got a job in London, and had to move from Orlando, USA to London, England. This was very busy and stressful, and I got back up to 250 from stress eating and loss of routine.
Once I got settled in London, I was walking at least 2 miles a day just through my commute, and once I got serious about my weight again I back down to 230. 232 specifically was the lowest I got.
I joined the gym around March 10, 2020, ready to add muscle since I was in a good place with my weight based solely on nutrition.
Then, after exactly 1 week at the gym (doing the 5x5 routine from https://stronglifts.com/), the lockdown thing happened. I held on to the membership for a few months, but ultimately dropped it without having been able to go back. I learned about calisthenics at some point during lockdown, and got into that. Mostly I build routines from the progressions on http://www.startbodyweight.com/, though I use other resources. I kept up with routines sporadically throughout lockdown, but haven’t worked out for most of 2021. I’ve recently designed a program with squats, pullups, pushups, and handstand pushups (though I’m early in the progression and not actually into the handstand part yet).
For most of 2020 I was up around 245. In 2021 I stayed in the 255-260 range.
I spent the last 2 weeks in the USA, where I visited my mom a few days before she passed away. On the day she died, the person I was staying with got covid, and I spent pretty much all of my 2 weeks in lockdown taking care of sick people. I never got it myself, but I pretty much stayed in and ate American junk food for 2 weeks was extremely depressed and stressed out to the max.
I weighed myself last night and was exactly 266.0. Did not weigh myself today. Will start doing so regularly tomorrow. Obviously there are tons of extenuating circumstances, but 266 is too much regardless, and I’m going to start a better nutrition program tomorrow. Not today, because I just got back and I will be consuming scones with clotted cream tonight.
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patrickstuff · 3 years ago
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Intro
Keeping a small, very personal blog, to track weight loss journey and writing progress. I’ve fallen off the wagon a lot on both of these lately, and I wanted to keep more or less daily track of both of these in a small out of the way corner of the internet, where anyone who wants to keep me accountable can follow, but isn’t in something like my Facebook where random people I’ve connected with over the years have to see me keep popping up with specifics about word counts and weight loss.
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