Snack Attack! (and a Short Novel Update)

My book is making me fat(ter)

That’s right, I’m blaming the novel. It’s not that I insist on cramming junk food into my mouth, it’s the fact that I do it while I’m writing that’s at fault. Right?


And yes, I'm writing this in spite of the fact that I know my mother will bust my chops about it after she reads it. But I needed a topic to write about and this was all that came to mind. I'll regret it later.

The good news is that I haven’t really gained a lot of weight or anything. But I have what you might call consistent corpulence – I’m pretty much always right at 225, rarely gaining or losing any weight at all. So when I noticed that I’d popped up a couple of pounds, I knew that my mid-day snacking had caught up to me.

The difference is that I’m now snacking by routine. My daily process is to finish watching the morning news, then to grab a can of diet soda and a snack and head downstairs to write. That snack is almost always some sort of potato chip, corn chip, or perhaps some cheesy poofs.

When I first realized that it had become chronic, I tried to substitute fruit or yogurt instead, but it never seemed to dull my hunger. Some of which, I realize, isn’t hunger, but a need for comfort as I tackle my creative writing. Sadly, the result of my attempted substitutions was that I’d eat the fruit or the yogurt, THEN I’d eat the same snack I’d have eaten before. I was just adding healthy food on top of the other stuff.

So this week I’m making my first attempt at a change. I had my wife buy me some peanuts, some sunflower seeds, and some dried fruit. I’m going to try rotating those with popcorn and baked chips to see if I can find a happy medium between the urge to snack and the fact that I’m not really burning too many calories when I write.

I may also have to have a go at sugarless gum. That might keep my body busy while my mind is racing away.

 Meanwhile, the book is coming along reasonably well after a couple of frustrating weeks. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 are finally finished, along with chapters 1-4. Of course, “finished” is a relative term. Each time I re-read a chapter, I make changes, but usually once I get a chapter “finished” the changes tend to be fairly minor. I’ve rarely had to scrap a while paragraph at this point, but usually change a word here or a phrase there. Of course, that may change once I let OTHER people read it and give me feedback.

Which is also underway, as it turns out. I had set February as my target for getting early chapters out into the hands of some of my readers, but then I went to my local writer’s roundtable last week and caught some flack for not bringing new material with me. I decided that since I didn’t plan to make any major changes to the first few chapters, I might as well bring them in and get some feedback. If there are major issues with the early chapters, there’s a decent chance that I’ve got the same issues later on and I may as well find that out now.

So I printed out Chapter 1 on Sunday night and have my wife read through it. She found quite a few little issues, such as words that I inadvertently repeated (usually because I went back after and changed the word, failing to realize that I’d used it already in a nearby part of the chapter). She also made some broader suggestions, but generally felt that the chapter was in good shape. My wife’s pretty smart, and a writer, too, so if she says it’s good that gives me some confidence. I made most of her recommended changes, then put it together for Monday night’s group. I’ll have to report back on how that went later in the week (since I wrote this Monday afternoon and the chapter hasn’t been read yet).

So there we are – chapter 1 is getting some initial feedback, and chapters 1-7 are complete in a first- or second-draft state. Chapter 8 should get underway today (Tuesday), and I’ve already bullet-pointed some of the key concepts in the chapter that I want to be sure to hit. I hope to bang the whole thing out in one day if all goes well. And if the new snacks work out, maybe I can even do that without exploding.