2019 in Review

I’m in the middle of draft 7 of the book I’m writing called ‘The Great War, the Cruel War.’ I got back some criticisms from my beta readers for draft 6, and the majority pointed out some fairly major problems I didn’t even know were problems. As a result, I need to do a fairly major re-write. Cest la vie! I want to get to the submission stage by May/June, so I have a lot of work to do between then and now.

After draft 6 in November, I was left feeling burnt out. I’m still feeling burnt out, but not as bad as before. I’ve been doing some reading and reviewing, and it’s helped me recover somewhat. So for the new year I’m making the resolution of writing a minimum of 1000 words a day (except on Sunday). To keep this resolution, I’m going to start a new accountability post on my blog as well as tweeting my wordcount daily.

In December, because I was so burnt out on writing I basically did very little, maybe 10,000 words total. I’m fine with that. For 2019 as a whole I wrote ‘GW, CW,’ which is easily the best book I’ve ever written. I think I can get it published. I wish I got a little more done in 2019, but overall I can’t complain.

In other news, about my fitness accountability.

In December I went to the gym maybe five times, down from my usual ten to fifteen times. A lot of holiday stuff got in the way, which coupled with me feeling drained and kinda depressed kept me out of the gym. As a result my general fitness levels backslid a little. I’m upset about this failure, but at the time I just didn’t have it in me.

In 2019 as a whole, I’m disappointed with my athleticism. For reference, in 2018 I was in the best shape of my life and put on ~10-15lbs of muscle. So after that year of excellence in 2018, in 2019 when I basically maintained the status quo/backslid a good bit. Naturally I’m disappointed. Now there’s a reason why I backslid: I did a ton of hard work in 2018, and got burned out.  I didn’t really have it in me to do that much hard work two years in a row.

So in 2020 I’ve recovered from 2018’s burnout. I’ve made a manageable plan for muscle building and I think I can pull it off. It’s a 5-6 day a week, fully body workout plan. In 2018 I gained all that muscle doing a variation of nSuns where I focused on just one or two muscle groups a day and did a ton of volume, which is a very intense workout regimen (thus leading to burnout). I think this full body plan will be less intense and thus I can keep it going longer term, even though for nSuns I was in the gym for only about 45 minutes a day while for my full body plan I’ll be in the gym for about an hour and a half a day. I’ve been running it for a week and a half now and so far it’s going great.

And finally, I’m thinking about experimenting with vegetarianism/veganism/ plant-based foods for building my muscle this year. I’m having trouble finding a large database of vegetarian high protein recipes, so I’m thinking about writing up a few posts about my adventures in this area.

Overall, I have hope for this new year. Wish me luck!