Here’s a Facebook post from Tuesday:

Noting that, despite the weight training two to three times a week and the walks of twenty or so miles in total each week, my waistline has been getting no smaller, I’ve decided to fast. Since my last fast over a year ago I’ve tried on numerous occasions and failed at the finish line, gobbling down loads of food in the evening. Yesterday I finally succeeded and intend to continue today. I want to do something like the 5/2 diet. That strategy for a man is to eat 600kcals two days a week. My way is to take in my only calories on two consecutive days through the milk in my tea. I want to get into ketosis fast, and to continue limiting my eating on the five other days. If I do fail a complete fast on those two days, I’ll limit that failure to the aforesaid 600kcals. Fed up with this spare tyre!

My last fast was more than over a year ago. It was back in February of 2017. Here are a couple of my posts from that time: Burning Muscle and One Week Fast. Rereading those now I’ve made a few corrections, but still probably haven’t got it right. I still believe muscle wasting does not occur on the level claimed by some who want to sell their snake oil, but wouldn’t be surprised if some does on the basis of my logic there: to keep the most essential organ functioning, the brain.

Thursday 6th September:

Monday was hard, but I seem to have reclaimed that earlier mindset. It’s difficult to ascertain why. I take a lot of supplements and decided, as is my want, that there is too much bullshit out there on the subject, and that I would quit them. This caused a return of some anxiety, so I started them again, telling myself I would give them up as they ran out then see how I feel. My aim then would be (if I felt rough, tired or whatever) to take a more scientific approach: trying one at a time to see its effect. In the midst of these considerations I read about supplements, tiredness and anxiety and remembered something. I used to take B vitamins for mood, the most essential one being B12, of which my brother (so similar genetic makeup) suffered a deficiency. I started taking it and quickly felt an increase in energy. Placebo effect? Maybe, but I carried on.

Another thing might be that I am in a much better state mentally. My private life has vastly improved, I’ve written to (almost) completion the Rise of the Jain trilogy and have been belting along with the next book, called Jack Four (thus far), while it has also been well over four years since the death of my wife, Caroline. At a bereavement group I was told that on average it takes about five years to get back to anywhere near normal. What is cause and what is effect is debateable, and will remain so. Life has no easy answers.

Tuesday was not so difficult but, wary of my previous failures I kept a rigid mental grip on myself. I really wanted to get through the day, and especially the evening, without turning into a glutton. I did take in calories in the form of milk in tea and coffee, three small glasses of creamy milk in which to mix a lipophilic supplement and other supplements. The total would have been at most about two hundred calories each day. On Monday I hit the gym for 45 minutes, then on Wednesday I carried on with gym again and then no food throughout the day, then a 7 mile walk in the evening followed by food. The fast was effectively 3 days and the salad I ate was about 700kcals.

Difficult to ascertain weight loss since there is a huge water loss involved which despite drinking a lot, it doesn’t come up to normal when one is pissing like a race horse. I was averaging about 188lbs before and went down to 182.6lbs at one point. However, my deficit was about 2,000 + 1,500 + 2,000 = 5,500 and we are told that fat is about 3,000kcals a pound, which works out at, miserably, under 3lbs. Since I don’t feel particularly hungry today, haven’t eaten anything and it is now near midday, I intend to fast through till bedtime.

Wish me luck.

A little while ago some complained to me that this trilogy was not available on Audible in the UK. Bella Pagan investigated this and now tells me Audible’s licence for it had expired. Macmillan has now bought their audible file and the trilogy will be reappearing in all the usual places on 29th November this year.

I recently quit Twitter or, rather, I deleted it from my computer and Ipad so as to remove that temptation. My Twitter account is still linked to my Facebook account so anything I put on the latter appears on the former.

The social media have been promotional tools, or at least that’s what I told myself. They are also a support in a profession that is pretty introverted. I get to chat with fans, some of whom have turned into friends. I tell them what I’m doing, have exchanges about science fiction, science and politics but, as ever, it is this last that is a problem.

There’s a difference between Twitter and Facebook to me. It could be that Facebook has a more mature demographic than Twitter. It might also be that the latter is more amenable for the drive-by comments, the trolling and brief spats during which no one has the time or words to calmly explain themselves . . . or that the medium attracts those who don’t want to. However, as people have suggested, it is more likely that this is just a matter of who I allow to be ‘friends’ and who I either block or mute. This has some validity since for years I’ve been very selective on Facebook in cutting out those whose opinions annoy me. But the problem I feel is also me.

On Twitter I allowed more of the angry political stuff and vented more myself. Ranting has its attractions, it’s letting off steam, allowing oneself to blow . . . but as time goes on it becomes an addiction. I find myself scrolling through Twitter (I visualize myself staring at the screen with a moronic expression) just looking for stuff to be angry about; looking for stuff I can make cutting comments on. This is all very well if you have time to waste, but I do not. I have books, blog posts and other stuff to write, a website to update, a garden and a house to keep tidy, books to read, a life.

Anger is also a negative emotion, and I have had quite enough of those for four years now. I can go on Twitter, get only involved peripherally in some spat, and it still makes me feel sour. And what does any of this achieve on the political front (where most of the anger resides)? In the end our effect on the politics of our country is limited to one vote every now and again and, as has been demonstrated recently, that vote can be all but ignored. Some argue that one must make a stand on the basis of the old aphorism that ‘for evil to prosper all that is necessary is for good men to do nothing’, which I have to counter with the reality most sensible people have come to understand, that arguments on the social media change no one’s mind, they just leave people pissed off.

So I’m out of that. I’ll leave Twitter alone for a couple of weeks, then go back to do some muting and blocking. I’ll also adjust my settings to limit comments to my followers only. Thereafter I’ll check in only intermittently.

This is better for me. The sour political world of Twitter can bugger off.

This one was a no-no right from the start. Two reporters on a space ship, one of them turning a dial to tune in the radio, gave me difficulties with suspension of disbelief right at the start. People from the 50s supposedly in a future three thousand years away from us. Other things in the science and the narrative were appalling. A guy getting into a pressurized spaceship through the front screen was risible. Then there was a woman, after a 1,000 years in hibernation during which she was conscious, waking up and behaving as if she’s been a bit stir crazy for a few days and, incidentally, speaking the same language as the reporter who freed her. Nah. This makes me realize how much SF I swallowed with a naive hunger when I was younger.

After Syzygy (previous post) and a failed attempt to read With a Strange Device by Eric Frank Russell, I resorted to one who has never disappointed: A E Van Vogt. The Battle of Forever snared me immediately. Sure, published in 1971 it’s a bit dated, but I didn’t find myself cringing at any of the technology, just a little bit at the mores. Of course not: this is Van Vogt and right from the start it’s far future super-science.

Modyun is one of the thousand remaining members of the human race, incredibly long-lived, peace loving and totally rational. He doesn’t suffer much from all that emotional gland-related stuff because, well, as this starts out he hasn’t got very much of that icky stuff going on, being mostly a bloody great head with a negligible body. But then he must venture beyond the barrier out onto the rest of the planet, which is now occupied by animals uplifted into human form and intelligence. To do this he grows and eight-feet-tall body to support that head, and begins to experience its effects, especially when he discovers Earth has been conquered by aliens…

It’s the good old stuff.

Intertwined in this is a human story concerning a bereaved husband falling for the sister of his dead wife, along with a mystery about how she died – all resolved in the final scenes. I’ll go into no more detail about it than that. I found it all a bit prosaic and a struggle to get through because, really, I was after the sfnal hit. In fact, beyond the plankton minds, it all struck me as a bit lacklustre. This could all have been about mind-controlling plankton arriving at the coast of some US town in the fifties. While in science fiction one must suspend disbelief, in old SF one must extend that suspension to cover, in this case: fifty-year-old technology on a colonised planet, and the mores of that time. One just has to laugh a hollow laugh when only a woman is capable of properly cleaning our hero’s house, and when that same hero, upon sensing the thoughts of a pipe-smoking psychologist, has a homophobic reaction that would today have the writer strung up by the thumbs, albeit the reaction was that of the protagonist.