You are your own Gym

I picked up You are Your Own Gym because I have only a 110 barbell set.

The good: lots of different exercises you can do with just your body and stuff around the house, like chairs, towels, phone books, etc.  Lauren shows how to exercise nearly every muscle group, and how to vary the intensity for beginners to more advanced fitness levels. I've only tried a couple of the exercises so far, but they do seem to be challenging.

The bad: Lauren's statements about aerobic exercise and nutrition are totally wrong. Lauren states you don't need aerobic exercise to burn fat, just increase your lean muscle mass. Most people probably need to do both. Lauren also states that you need 2 g of protein for every lb of your target body weight. That's only true for competitive bodybuilders. The average person does fine with 0.8-1.2 g of protein for target body weight.

Using Lauren's exercises may help improve your fitness. But make sure to include some aerobic exercises, and get your nutrition information from a better source.

 

Update Feb 2023: Recent studies have  shown that walking within the first hour after eating lowers blood sugar, which is essential for burning fat and maintaining a healthy weight. So Lauren's assertion that  you don't need aerobic exercise to burn fat has again been proven wrong.

Lightning, A poor beginning

I've  started reading blogs about writing. One of the blogs I read said that the purpose of the first chapter is not to start the plot, but to help the reader become invested in the main character; get them curious or interested in what happens to this character.

Also this week, I start reading Dean Koontz's Lightning. I see that the first few pages are from the POV of a throw-away character. We need to get to the second chapter before the main character is even old enough to have a point of view. This was very annoying to me, and managed to hammer in the point of the blog I just read. I almost put the book down. But a lot of people like Koontz, so I'll try and read a little further to see if there is anything else I can learn from him.

Megamind

If I had known that Megamind was a Will Ferrell movie, I'd have never have rented it. Good thing I didn't know, because this was a thoroughly enjoyable film.

I've seen/read a lot of stories where the hero had to become as evil as the bad guy in order to defeat the bad guy. But this is the first story I've seen a villian has to become a hero in order to defeat a false hero. That alone, mades the story worth watching. But the well written satirical references to Superman and Lex Luthor made the story charming as well as innovative.

The animation and the acting were good. But it was the writing that made this a film standout for me. The film explored a couple of familiar themes:

• does a hero always have to be a hero, can't he ever retire?
• What's a person to do after they've finally succeeded in accomplishing their life long goal? In this case, it was the villian who finally defeated the hero.
• once evil, always evil?
• can love turn an evil villain good?

From my perspective as an aspiring novelist, I loved seeing these themes twisted and shown from the villain's perspective. It's so different from the super hero comic books which are predominantly written from the heroes' perspectives.

This is a good movie to watch and to learn from, especially if you're interested in learning a bit about writing satire.

Dancer of Gor

I am rereading Dancer of Gor as part of my research before producing a slave training hypnosis recording. I originally read this book when it came out in 1985. It was the first book I read about erotic slavery and I loved it.

Perhaps I just loved the idea of the book so much that I didn't notice how poorly written the book was. Or perhaps I've developed a more critical eye now that I am reading to learn how to write my own novels. But now that I'm trying to learn something practical from Dancer of Gor, I find it horribly written.

The main character is pathetic and whiny; hardly sexy at all. The language is flowery, the dialog overly verbose and repetitive. Lots of run-on sentences that digress into flashbacks. Plus the electronic version that I'm reading is rife with typing errors (or maybe they're OCR errors).

The poor quality of this book is a sharp contrast to the high quality of the first book in the series, Tarnsman of Gor.

Perhaps Norman was trying to match the voice of the narration to the personality of the viewpoint character. In that, he succeeded–if he wanted to portray a character who was whiny, had no self confidence, and viewed herself only as the lowest form of chattel. I wouldn't want this character as a slave in my house. Nor would I try to write from the viewpoint of such a pathetic and annoying character.

Tarnsman of Gor was a tightly written adventure novel in the Edgar Rice Burrows tradition. It had a strong hero, and solid adventure. A delight to read. But if I weren't trying to mine Dancer of Gor for ideas for my hypnotic recording, I'd chuck it.

Against All Things Ending

Stephen Donaldson's writing as seriously deteriorated over the years. When I read the first series, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant back in the early 80s, I thought the writer was brilliant. That series was a master piece of world building and character development. Even The Second Chronicles were in many ways brilliant. But in The Last Chronicles, Donaldson trips over his horribly-written female lead.

It's one thing to write a character that has a broken past and is full of self-doubt. It's another thing altogether to bludgeond the reader with constant repetition of those doubts.

Against All Things Ending, like the first two books in The Last Chronicles, is extremely, annoyingly  repetitive. That repetition and the frequent use of obscure words makes this book a chore to read.