16 Months: My Transformation

While I usually talk about writing and books and word nerdiness here, this post is going to be a bit different. I'm hoping it will be of some benefit to others in their journeys.

A photo that amazing photographer Erin Summerill took of me at the recent LDStorymakers annual conference inspired me to put this post together. Even with my goofy facial expression and hand waving (I can't teach without using my hands), I've got great before and after pictures.

The really short version: 
For some unknown (then) reason, I got fat, sank into a horrid depression, and otherwise was miserable. Now I'm, well, not all that. The end. Oh, and this is what I looked like. The picture was taken at the 2010 UVU Book Academy conference. I may have gained a few pounds more in the following three months.








The longer version:
For most of my adult life, not counting pregnancies, my has weight stayed in about a seven-pound range. Ideally, I would have liked to have been around 10 lbs lighter and at my marriage weight, but I was at a healthy weight and felt decent about myself.

Then, a few years ago, the pounds began creeping on. I wasn't doing anything different in my life, as far as I could tell. Okay, I could have exercised more than I was (although I didn't stop altogether). And sure, I ate chocolate here and there. But that wasn't a change. Nothing significant had changed in my lifestyle.

But hey, I knew how to lose weight, right? I began watching my diet carefully, cutting here and there and eating much healthier. I exercised more.

Result: More weight gain. The scale just crept up and up. I'll clarify here that my weight gain wasn't in the realm of anything you'd see on The Biggest Loser, but it was still way more than was healthy, and I hated feeling like a beached whale. I hated not fitting into my biggest clothes and having to go to the thrift store to find stuff to wear. I rarely wore anything that didn't stretch.

At first I was in denial. Sure, the scale was up, but I didn't look that bad . . . right? I inherited my mother's frame, so I really can carry a little extra weight without it showing up. When my chocolate cookbook first came out, I had people asking how I could write it and stay so thin. That was before the weight gain. So when those comments stopped altogether, I had a clue what it meant. I was fat. I cringed at every photo of me. My usable wardrobe shrank and shrank.

I started to suspect I had a thyroid problem, but I didn't want to be one of those people making excuses for being fat. ("Oh, it's glandular . . .") I brought it up to my doctor, who ran a blood panel. My TSH and T4 were normal, so I was told not to worry about it; I wasn't hypothyroid.

But the results didn't sit right with me. I had plenty of symptoms of hypothyroid beyond unexplained weight gain, including a low body temperature (97.1), brain "fog," fatigue, depression, headaches, brittle nails, and a bunch of other things.

After doing a bit more research, including talking with a good friend who has a thyroid condition, I was convinced that something wasn't right. My original doctor, while a great guy, was a GP and likely didn't know how complex hypothyroid issues are and which panels to run, or how to read them. Finding a doctor to take me seriously and who knew enough to run the right tests took awhile, but eventually I did, thanks to the referral of a friend.

And waddaya know, but my T3 (the one that really matters) was in the toilet. So was my progesterone (which helps with stress, sleep, and mood), and a few other things, including Vitamin D, which was also contributing to my depression. I was indeed hypothyroid, among other things. My body was whacked out.

Almost as soon as I began taking the supplements I needed, my life, and my body, began to change. While the weight didn't come off in a flash, it did come off, slowly and steadily.

Here's a key point: I still had to do the work. 

I had to exercise, stay hydrated, and watch what I ate. But at least losing weight became possible, where before, it wasn't.

Something to note here: It's a horrid myth that to exercise you have to find something you like to do. I hate exercising, but I love having exercised. If you're waiting to like huffing and puffing and sweating like a pig, and you're using your dislike of exercise for not doing it, then you'll never have success. I often go running even when I hurt all over and I feel like someone's taking an ice pick to the back of my head. I go because it's something I have to do. I force myself to do it. I don't go to the gym when I feel good. I go to the gym and work my tail off so I'll feel good.

Another aspect in my success was that I started reading blogs of people who'd managed to lose weight and keep it off to learn more about how to fuel my body properly for weight loss (which takes more than cutting calories, of course). I grew up in a nutritious home, but there was still a lot to learn.

I'm now within (count 'em!) 9 pounds of my marriage weight. I'm solidly in the healthy range for what my weight should be, and on the low end of my old range. (I think I can actually hit that old marriage weight yet!) I sleep better (didn't even know how messed up my sleep was until it was fixed). I can exercise more. My chronic headaches are still around, but they're more manageable. My depression isn't the dark sink hole it once was.

No, life isn't all unicorns and rainbows. I still have chronic headaches. Depression of some kind just runs in my family. But things are so much better.

Losing the weight hasn't been an easy road. Like I said, it's still work. But now I can fit back into my skinny clothes, and my fat clothes are a thing of the past.

In my before picture up there, I hated myself.

But now? Well, this next picture was taken just over a week ago, at the LDStorymakers conference. I feel and look like myself again. Huzzah!

A Particularly Odd Writing Day

I've been splitting my time today between a freelance edit for a friend and my own revisions for my WIP. (Remember how I promised myself it would be ready to submit on May 10th? That's one week away, and I have two field trips I'm chaperoning between now and then, plus a book signing. YIPES!)

So I've had two windows up on my computer all day, and I've been swapping back and forth between them (and that's between attempts at conquering the mountain of laundry and dishes and other sundries).

Sometimes I'd click on one window, thinking it's my book but get confused when I'm reading about something totally different, only to realize it's my friend's book.

Can we say "brain fry"?

And then there's the fact that I'm pulling out stacks of critiques from my group (things I should have addressed and rewritten months ago but sorta didn't get around to because of other things like, oh, Whitney judging, reading Whitney finalists, preparation for the Storymakers conference, chocolate cookbook photo shoots . . .).

I've been grabbing a stack here and there of critiques and working through whatever's on top.

So far today, I've been at chapters eighteen and nineteen, near the end. Later I hit chapter fifteen. Then fourteen. The next stack begins on page 65. It's a bit of a time warp to be revising your work so out of order. I hope the story isn't getting all redundant or wacko in the process.

It works in my head, and yes, of course I'll do a thorough read-through from start to finish before turning it in, but for now, it's sure been weird to fix stuff that happens in the last fourth of the book and then suddenly be working on a scene from the first fourth and then hop to the middle.

Some of the changes are really small (extra adverbs, clunky phrasing, an inadvertent POV shift). But there was one scene in particular I dreaded rewriting, to the point that I was messing around on Twitter this morning to avoid it.

When I read it aloud, everyone in our group (including me) agreed that it just didn't work. On more than one level.

So I knew the scene would need a serious overhaul, and I've been putting it off. (Much easier to fix an errant comma or missing word.) The great news, though, is that I found a relatively easy way to fix that scene. Yes, a lot of it is new, but as fixes go, this one was easy. Best of all, the scene is much truer to the character, emotions, and events, and now I like it. Yay!

Other notables from the day that likely no one but me will care about:

• Made a great Costco run today, writing down what everything cost as I put it into the cart. This time, the total wasn't a surprise, and it was under what I wanted to spend for the trip. (I know! Call Ripley's!)
• I washed, sorted, and folded four loads of laundry. This is particularly notable. Plus, there's one load washed but not sorted. At least we have underwear.
• Bought kitty litter but didn't change the old stuff. I mean really, there's only so much I can be expected to accomplish in one day.
• Brought the vacuum to be fixed. It should be done tomorrow sometime. Fourteen and a half years ago, we splurged on a Kirby. For a long time, I thought it was a stupid thing we'd done, but in hindsight, I'm thrilled we did it. That's been the best vacuum ever. It really keeps the carpets nice and is sturdy. This is the first major repair we've ever needed. (And it's not on the motor or anything like that; the accordion tube split. Easy fix.) I didn't realize what a bargain it was until I realized that most people replace their vacuums every few years. Our Kirby will be running for years hence, I'm sure.
• Taught a daughter to grind wheat flour. She's decided that any time we need more, she gets to grind it. (Fine with me! One more thing off my to-do list.)
• Got to do some rewriting while eating cake with chocolate icing . . . made by my husband, not me. Oh, yeah.

And now I'm tired and want to read a little before bed.

A Life of Almost

This week there's been a lot of talk on the LDStorymakers e-mail list about teachers, English ones in particular, who beat down students' morale—students who have gone on to fight back and become published.

Several writers shared similar stories, some so dreadful I wanted to hunt down those evil teachers.

Other writers had the flip of the equation: a teacher who believed in them whole-heartedly and encouraged their writing genius, which led them to believe in themselves and try to live up to their mentor's belief in them.

It seems that both sides (major discouragement and major encouragement) can light a fire under a student to do well.

My journey has been a bit different. I didn't really have either side of that coin.

First off (for which I'm grateful), I never had an English teacher tell me I was terrible or anything like that. I always managed to be in the advanced English classes, where students took the subject pretty seriously and the teacher expected higher quality work. So I never had to fight against terrible opposition to prove myself.

On the other hand, I never had a teacher gush and praise over me, either. In third grade, Mrs. Mixa read one of my stories and told me to keep writing, but I was in third grade. I'm glad she gave me some encouragement, but I don't recall it being along the lines of, "You're brilliant. This is what you are supposed to do."

Throughout the rest of my school career, I was a good student. A very good student. But did anyone ever pull me aside or write on top of a paper about how I should really be a writer? No. I did write an essay my sophomore year that Miss Drummond thought was kinda funny (about our Drivers Ed teacher, whom we called Squiggy behind his back, and his orange polyester pants), but that's about it.

The other high point was my senior year, when I took College Prep with Miss Drummond (again) instead of the Advanced Placement class. I knew the AP English teacher was a bit of a loon. Plus, he insisted his students read an insane number of classics in preparation for the test. I knew the test was based on writing well-crafted essays to literary questions. If you had half a dozen or so classics firmly under your belt, you could do well on the test. Knowing more books than another students didn't help if you couldn't write a coherent argument to go with them. Miss Drummond taught us to write good essays.

So I took CP with Miss Drummond instead of AP, firmly planning on challenging the AP English test anyway. Around January, she slipped to the back of the room next to me and another student, and told us she thought the two of us ought to consider challenging the AP English test. I hadn't told her my plans, and it felt good to have her confidence. (I got a 5, by the way. Yay me!)

But aside from Miss D liking that essay in 10th grade and her encouraging me to take the test in 12th, I never got a real sense that I was a great writer or ought to pursue it. I ached for that kind of validation. Other students got it, and I always came close. Sometimes very close . . . but usually in second place.

Literally.

I took second place in a city writing contest my junior year. I was the English sterling scholar alternate my senior year. (Losing to the gal who took first place in that essay contest. That's actually a fun story. Read it here.) For the school literary journal, none of my stories got in, but a small little poem did. I didn't care about the poem. It was the stories that, in my mind, counted.

The "almost good enough" label applied in other areas, as well. All through high school, I was almost good enough over and over again. Several awards, positions, roles, etc. passed me by because I was almost.

The same thing happened years later when I started submitting to publishers. My first LDS-themed novel was rejected with a very nice (and long) letter from a big company telling me why they had almost accepted it. I got a phone call from the same company emphasizing how almost I was. I'm still not sure if the call helped or just rubbed salt into the wound.

I got similar rejections for years, with editors saying, "This is really good. You're a great writer. We almost said yes. But we're saying no. Good luck."

For a good chunk of my life, I've felt like the brass ring has constantly been just out of reach. (Whitney finalist, anyone?)

In some ways, even with my sixth book preparing to come out*, it still feels like that way. I'm not sure why; maybe I'm wired to be dissatisfied. But there's always another level, another place where I'm coming in #2. Now, instead of breaking into the market, it's trying to be at the top of the market instead of almost there.

There was a time I thought I should be happy with where I am. As a teen when I'd moan and wail over failing, my parents tried to make me see that for Pete's sake, I hadn't failed, I was second place. I was still doing great. I didn't see it that way.

As an adult, I can now see what they were trying to say. And, yes, today I'm happy . . . to a point. I'm really enjoying the publishing ride. It's gratifying to see how far I've come. But am I completely content? No.

I don't think I should be, either. If I were content, I wouldn't continue striving to improve my game. I wouldn't have a new goal to shoot for. My work would probably start going downhill, like some authors I've read who have "made it." To me, that's a horrific thought.

The way I see it, not being completely satisfied is a good thing for me. Someone, somewhere, knows that being almost, while frustrating, is what drives me to continue, to improve, to reach—which is why I'll probably continue to fall there.

So I'll keep trying.


*The release date for Tower of Strength has been moved up from April to March. Yay!

Drafted!

Final word count: 82,940

Working title: Band of Sisters

Time for: Happy dance!!!

Frickin' Brackin' ARGH!

So that's a slight exaggeration. But it is frustrating.

I've been slaving away at my work in progress, trying very hard to get it fully drafted by the end of this week. It's been a 12-week goal of mine to get it done, and I'm so close . . .

The goal isn't a random one. It's pretty important I get the book done soon, because of certain scheduling difficulties and plans I have for getting it critiqued by trusted people and getting it back and revised and submitted and . . . you get the idea.

Much of that stems from the fact that I won't be able to write for much of September, so time is of the essence here. (I'll explain why soon. It's a totally rockin' cool reason why I won't be working then. I'll blog all about it afterward. Let's just say it deserves a big huge "WOOHOO!")

Here's the deal: I have five women who are all integral to the book. Each one faces her own issue. Their problems intertwine, and the women help one another. It's been neat to see how they get along and work things out among them.

But, um, problem. Part of the story just refused to come together properly. One character's arc was misbehaving in the worst way, and I couldn't figure out how to knock the puppy back into submission. It's been bugging me for weeks. My poor husband has gotten an earful of me whining about it. I've been trying to ignore it for weeks so I could get work done on other areas of the story.

So . . . if you haven't noticed, the week and my 12-week goal end, oh, TOMORROW. And as of today, I still had no resolution for my poor character, J.

I spent much of today trying to figure her story out. Right around 6:30 this evening, the answer came to me. It's an easy fix, as fixes go. And it'll totally do the job.

Basically, I was trying to do too much with her in this book. Two scenes of hers really belong in a sequel, if I ever write one. So out they'll go. Cut. Delete. G'bye.

Yeah. That's 2,318 words that are no longer in the story. (Each and every one of them counts, people, yes, even the 18.)

The word count on my sidebar doesn't reflect the cut, however. I'm still counting the grand total of words I've written for the whole book. Because it makes me feel better. And because I'm not brave like some people who have folders to hold their cuts. (Hi, Josi!) The final count will be 2,318 words below whatever the rest ends up being.

2,318 is a lot of words. They represent two scenes I really, really liked and worked hard on. My goal wasn't just to get it drafted, but to write 60,000 words over the 12 weeks. If I delete those words wholesale, I'm a couple thousand (and 318) words in the red. If I leave them in my wordcount, I technically make my goal even though the story isn't quite done.

So here's the deal: I won't get too annoyed about hacking them out if everyone promises to buy this book in droves so there'll be enough demand for a sequel and I can use them later. (This is a contemporary book I'm working on, not my upcoming historical . . . wanna make sure everyone knows what they're promising.)

Deal?

Good. Now I can go kick something and feel better.