Lilith Saintcrow

First, check out Nathan Bransford’s excellent post on tropes and originality. This is why I tell new writers “be honest and the originality will follow”. The ring of absolute honesty will shine through a tired old story and make it new again; when it comes through your uniqueness as a filter it will be unique.

If you’re bored with posts about weight, body image, and food, you might want to skip this one. Just warning you.

Last Labor Day I started an exercise regimen. Slowly and carefully, I’ve dropped almost five sizes. I’m shooting distance from a size 16; 14 is my eventual healthy goal. It’s taken me months, mostly because I don’t want to yo-yo. I want to steadily get into the habit of being healthier and more fit. And because, well, I love food and see no reason to set up the nasty boomerang of denial and binge. I have enough to feel bad and guilty over, I don’t need binge to add to it.

I suppose that I could cook low-fat. I really could. But why? Real butter, real vegetables, real cream, all these things satisfy in a way ersatz doesn’t. A very small bit of the “real” will satisfy more than a ton of the ersatz. For example, a small square of high-quality, very dark chocolate will satisfy me more than three or four Snickers bars. A small serving of pasta with this roasted red pepper sauce made with heavy cream (Oh. My. God. Worth the work, I SWEAR) will satisfy me more than a pound or two of fettuccine alfredo from that chain Italian place down the street. The real may be chock-full of Bad For You fat, but I end up eating less–and less chemical preservatives, high fructose corn syrup, etc. etc.

But this is only working, I suspect, because of the other half of the equation. It’s hard hauling my ass up on that treadmill every weekday. The weeks that I get in five whole weekdays of workout are few and far between. I get three or four days in every week, and my energy level has risen to the point where I’m also getting in a lot more playing with the kids and going for longer evening walks. Five days a week of treadmill and shovelgloving is the goal–but like the Pirate’s Code it’s more of a guideline.

Some days I hurt. Some days I’m sick or there’s an Event or some kid is throwing up or having a Bad Day. Some days it’s the story burning up inside my head. Some days I just plain don’t wanna.

But most days, I do. When I’m ill and I can’t get the exercise in, I feel it. I suppose I’ve reached the point of being addicted to running. And addicted to swinging a sledgehammer around for fifteen minutes or so.

Now, I am never going to be a supermodel. I love food far, far too much and I have a sedentary job. Besides, have you seen supermodels these days? They look like shit.

I’m sorry. I really am. But “starvation” is not something I find attractive. I like a girl with a little flesh on her, just like I like easygoing men with a little flesh on them. And I have all sorts of problems with the persistent message from mass media that women need to starve themselves to paper-thinness. Our place in the world is already small enough, for Christ’s sake.

The more I don’t watch television, the less I find I have in common with a lot of advertising. I never realized how pervasive this crap was until I took a year and a half off the telly (way back when I was first dating the Muffin, lo those many years ago) and found I didn’t miss it. Not only did I not miss it, but my sense of proportion (ha ha) came back in a big way.

Another thing that’s dropped by the wayside: fast food. Cheap fast food…isn’t. In terms of community cost, health cost, and my pocketbook, cheap fast food isn’t. Once in a great while I’ll take the kids to a local burger chain, and the little dears are always very excited. But burger-and-fries doesn’t taste as good, and even the fries–I have such a weakness for fries, you would not believe–don’t move me the way they used to. It’s like soda–once I was off it for a long while, all I could taste were the chemicals when I tried it again.

This is turning into a foodie post instead of a weight post. Which probably means I’m avoiding the subject.

So, I’m spitting distance from a size 16. Dropping steadily through clothes sizes has meant getting new clothes, which I absolutely hate. If there’s anything I hate with a flaming fiery passion it’s clothes-shopping. Just the thought of it makes me shiver. I will buy six of something at a time just so I have a “uniform” and I don’t have to pick clothes every day OR shop for them again. I mean, why spend time on that when I could be reading? Or cooking? Or playing with my kidlings?

Along with the steady weight loss has come an unpacking of hurtful assumptions and trauma from growing up. Food has been an anodyne most of my life, and grazing on trash-cooking full of preservatives and corn syrup was the only thing keeping me reasonably sane during a large proportion of my young years. Food didn’t mock and it didn’t judge, and when I felt empty inside it provided a type of fullness. Like any substitution, though, it had to be paid for. And I did. Over and over again.

I’m also beginning to unpack the sense of security having a fat layer gave me. You can hide inside a mass of yourself, you know. For a girl who equated fisticuffs with attention and any attention, good or bad, with the only approval I could get, the extra poundage was a blessing. It absorbed much more than punches.

Which means that, as I’m slimming down, I’m having to face parts of myself and my life I frenetically ate to avoid. It’s probably no accident that I’m writing YA through all this and really remembering what it was like to be young. On the one hand, I wouldn’t be between twelve and twenty-five again if you PAID me. There isn’t enough money in the world to put myself through that again. But on the other, I can’t hope to achieve any sort of peace within myself without looking hard and long at these things and Dealing With Them. Dealing is better than Drugging Yourself With Food or Frantically Avoiding Dealing With Things By Chopping Off Bits Of Self Or Engaging In Crazymaking Behavior.

I console myself with the thought that the most awesome and stunning people I know had Bad Young Years and didn’t Find Themselves until their late twenties. Being forced to find resources within yourself pays off, if you survive long enough and intact enough. The layers of fat were a survival mechanism, one I am trying to teach myself not to need. It was good while I needed it, but now I don’t–and the price of poor health, acceptable while I needed the fat to preserve some kind of psychic integrity, is no longer one I can continue paying.

It was a good cocoon. It kept me safe and it kept me sane, and I’m grateful. But now I’m almost out of it, and spreading those papery, wet wings. Sooner or later this girl is going to fly.

That, dear Reader? Is the very best revenge at all. I wish I was a bigger person and didn’t need that for motivation. But I realized a long time ago that I wasn’t. And I’m taking what I can get. There’s a certain amount of freedom in recognizing that you may not be a bigger person, but you’re going to do what you can with what you have.

Over and out.

A short run today–I’ve worked up to running five days a week, but two of those days are going to be short 20-min sessions (not counting warmup and cooldown). I was considering leaving the house today, but after yesterday’s cook-a-thon (we had MakeMe and her boyfriend over for dinner) I’m kind of nixing the notion. Besides, I need to get revisions out of the way so I can write, both on contracted stuff and on the New Shiny Project. After a long bout with revisions, all I can think of is creating anew.

I am waiting with bated breath for my next issue of Cook’s Illustrated. The kids love Scientific American and I like it too, but there’s just something about CI that makes me so so happy. I hear the next issue has a chocolate-chip cookie recipe. You can guess what I’ll be baking soon.

Someone asked me about cookbooks yesterday, so here we go. The first one–the one that started this whole thing–was Baking with Julia. After I actually started producing good bread, I got a couple other bread cookbooks too, the best of which is this one. Then I got Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, which actually goes into the chemistry of foods and why they behave the way they do. Just like CookWise and BakeWise, which I consider essential.

This was a revelation to me. I had viewed cooking as some weird alchemical art whose secrets were only given to the few with the proper handshake, kind of like some people view getting published. And after being told over and over again that I was no good at it, the way I was no good at anything practical because “your head is always in the clouds”, I’d given up.

But “cookbooks” that tell me WHY food behaves the way it does, and how to tweak recipes? ZOMG. The idea that I could learn how food reacted so I could put recipes together and get consistent results was a complete and very gratifying shock.

If I had to tell someone one cookbook to get, I’d recommend the McGee even though it isn’t technically a cookbook, because understanding how and why food behaves the way it does is way more useful than a list of ingredients. Then I’d recommend CookWise and BakeWise; then this vegetarian cookbook (since the UnSullen tends toward vegetarianism). With those you’re pretty much covered.

I do also occasionally rely on my faithful old red-plaid Better Homes and Gardens, and my old Joy of Cooking when I’m looking for something kind of fancy-dancy. And now I’ve started branching out–I did a cheesy-chicken-rice thing from leftovers the other day that vanished in a heartbeat. If I’d had sour cream it would’ve gone even more quickly.

So there you have it, my list of “essential” cookbooks. Still, all the cookbooks in the world won’t help without the willingness to get in there and make mistakes, experiment, and have some fun. (Just like writing. Okay, I’ll stop flogging that point…for now.) The kids love watching and learning and helping to cook, a valuable life skill that will contribute oodles to their adulthood. And I don’t eat out as much as I did now that I’m enamored of the process of cooking itself. Quelle disastre, right?

Right. All that money I’m saving is probably going to go toward some Le Creuset. I keep telling myself it’s quality cookware that the Princess can have after I’m gone, therefore it’s an investment…

ETA: Thanks for telling me about the broken code. HTML, she is trying to keel me…

See? I’m hopeless. Completely hopeless.

Page 133 of 335-or-so proof pages eyeballed. They’re nice and clean so it’s just the brute work of rereading and thinking very carefully about some of the issues that were raised last time someone went through. I like to make these things intentional.

The workout was effing hard this morning. But I am breaking barriers–at the end of my run today I went for two whole minutes at four miles an hour. This may not sound like much, but considering when I started this whole thing out I could barely run at 2mph for a whole minute, I think it’s awesome. I’m settling into 40-minute runs, which I think will be about my limit. I’ll up the speed/intensity from there, but I really can’t afford to spend more than that on the treadmill. I’m adding a nice slow walk in the evening and getting pretty good at the shovelgloving, too.

When the zombies attack, man, I’ll be ready.

For those of you wondering, the dye job came off perfectly. My hairdresser babe has been bugging me to get rid of my roots for a while. “Blonde roots with black hair just are SO NOT HAPPENING, Lili. And you’re using the wrong black, it’s got a blue undertone and makes you look jaundiced. Look, just let me fix it for you. SIT DOWN AND LET ME FIX IT.”

It’s funny–when I started working at an optometrist’s office I started noticing people’s spectacles. As a massage therapist, I was always looking at how people were moving and where they were holding their pain. (”Look, just sit down here for five minutes and let me fix that for you…”) Now as a writer I start flinching whenever I see misspelled signs, or misused apostrophes. I guess beauty-school students are the same way.

Anyway, my hair is now a neutral black instead of the blue-black, and there is a half-hidden blonde streak (very close to my natural color) at my right temple. It’s an amazing job, and Hairdresser Babe (aka Make Me) was very pleased with the results. “Now for Christ’s sake we’ll do up your roots in a month or two. DON’T ARGUE.”

It’s nice to have friends.

Anyway, there’s errands to run today and laundry to fold, and the rest of those proof pages to get through.

I’m thinking the laundry ain’t gonna get done. Anyone want to take that bet?

Today I got up late and cranky. It was my own damn fault for staying up to watch a Masterpiece Theater Jane Eyre last night. The Selkie was right–this is one damn fine Jane Eyre. My heart still belongs to Orson Welles as Mr. Rochester, but the Jane in the Masterpiece Theater one–Ruth Wilson–does a very good job and is lit wonderfully well. (Quick trivia–Lucy from the current Narnia movies is the young Jane. Which alone almost makes it worth watching.)

ANYWAY. I got up late and cranky and it was a horrid effort to push myself through the morning workout. The only thing that saved me was habit. Good intentions will fail; habits have a much better chance. The art of discipline, I think, revolves largely around taking control of one’s habits and making them your helpers instead of your master.

I can pretty much tell the only thing that’s going to get me through the wordcount I need to squeeze out today is habit, too. *headdesk* So, erm, off I go. Fifteen hundred words today or bust. I’ve got to get this book finished.