I drive about 10 hours a week to and from work. I also do about 4 hours in the gym during the week. The gym is the crux of the problem. Sometimes I find while running on the treadmill that I get bored and start clock watching, and when that happens every minute seems to take about 10 minutes to get through.

While I was working at IBM I decided to try and fill my driving time with
audio books. I tested Mort and On Chesil Beach – one that I had previously read and one that I hadn’t. Anyway it went well, I found I could drive and take in the story without problem, the only issue was that as I was using my iPod Touch I didn’t like driving while wearing earphones.

So, for the gym I bought some new audiobooks. I found that it so helps with the concentration. I can focus on the book and go through the motions of the gym work without any issue at all.

With the new found success of audiobooks at the gym and decided to by a FM Transmitter for my iPhone which allows me to listen to the iPhone through my car stereo. This combined with the gym, means that I can now listen to books for an extra 14 hours a week! I can *read* a decent size book ( 500 pages ) in about 10 hours.

So far I have listened to Coraline by Neil Gaiman and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse.

I like Harry Potter. I think the books are a good story well told. Yes, they might not be the best written books in the world, they seem to commit many writing cardinal sins, they often meander a tad, and they could definitely have done with a more strict editor, but generally
they do what they say on the tin. And you can’t argue with the amount of
pleasure they seem to have brought to readers around the world.
I have been reading the books to Rebekah, we just started Half Blood Prince over the weekend, and it has been interesting how more acutely aware I have been of aforementioned shortcomings this time around.
Still enjoying them though!
Since we had finished Order of the Phoenix during the week, we were able to watch the film on Saturday. I am amazed at just how much of the books Rebekah must absorb because she is so clued into the changes that have been made to the films.
I enjoyed the films Philosopher’s Stone, and Chamber of Secrets. Didn’t enjoy Prisoner of Azkaban, but did enjoy Goblet of Fire. I really didn’t enjoy Order of the Phoenix. It just didn’t work for me. I would love to have watched it without the back knowledge of the books, because it seems to me that in order to work, you have had to read the books.
I understand the process of adapting books to films and am not adverse to changes that are made in order to make a film script work. As a general
rule, good film makers understand what their audience want and how best to twist a story to make them fulfilled. Yes sometimes they get it wrong, but often just minor issues.
It felt to me that in order to make Order of the Phoenix work, the script writer or director decided to remove all the soul of the story and leave in the hi-lights, the visual bits, knowing that the majority of their audience could fill in the missing parts. Thus the film could move from scene to scene without much explanation or motive, a bit of a collage really.

Really disappointing!

I watched Captain Correli’s Mandolin last night. Firstly and importantly, I enjoyed it. It did everything I want from a book adaptation – it made me want to read the book.
It’s obvious from the viewing that there has been a lot cut from the book to make the film, but that said, from a story point of view, I never felt I was missing anything that I could not piece together by reading between the lines. So by that measure the film holds its own as a story, if not necessarily the same story as the book.

What I did take from the film is – just how shit Nicolas Cage was. His attempt at being and Italian was really so poor. There were moments when I thought he was going to turn into Borat. I have never been a cage fan, although I admit there are films where he seems perfect in, but I thought he was particularly badly cast here. I guess he’s just one of those actors that grate on me, a bit like Jim Carey. However, by the end of the film he starts to become acceptable as the film enters the final action stage.

I’m four weeks into my lose weight regime. My gym work has been good, and my eating has been mostly good. Actually my eating is not too dissimilar from normal, however I have managed to cut out the hunger cravings that normally lead me to chocolate and crisps and rubbish. And my quantity control is better. So I kind of feel balanced.

One major milestone for me is drinking water. As a rule I don’t drink much water – as I don’t like it. To drink water it has to either be ice cold sparkling water on a hot day, or flavoured sparkling water. So at home I drink Bottlegreen cordial with sparkling water. But I generally only drink one large glass with my evening meal; that and a couple of coffees over the day is all I drink.
I don’t go in for the mantra of how much water you must drink, I think everyone is different. I’ve gone 38 years without problem and I can count the number of water infections I’ve had in that time on 1 finger…
That said, I decided that I needed to force myself to drink more during the day as I no longer drink coffee while on my current contract. So I now take a litre bottle of made up flavoured sparkling water to work every day. The thing I’ve noticed is that I grab the drink quite frequently during the morning and I wonder if previously that would have been an urge to eat, which often meant I would get to lunch having already eaten my lunch!

Anyway, 4 weeks ago I was 94kg ( 207lb/14″ 11) approximate BMI of 27.3 ( overweight ). I use approximate here because the BMI calculation is a croc really, because it doesn’t take into account physical size rather than height. A tall muscular person is going to show as overweight based on their BMI, despite the fact that they are relatively fat free.

First week I lost 1.5kg ( 3.3lb ), then 0.1kg ( 0.2lb ), then 0.4kg ( 0.8lb). I was a little dissapointed after week 3 that the trail off had occured as I wanted to lose about 2lb a week. However I knew that over those 2 weeks I had gone to the pictures and had a meal with friends. Which although by my standards I had done very well (2 bottle beers and 2 glasses of wine, and a more than wanted but less than previous, quantity of food), they were nevertheless still potential blips. I took solace in the fact that my stomach ( not waist ) measurement and gone from 41 inch to 39.5 inch. So every movement down was good no matter how small.

Weigh in this morning – 91kg ( 200.5lb ) down 1kg ( 2.2lb ) on last week.
So in four weeks I have lost 3kg ( 6.6lb ). I am below target but very much happy with that, it’s not just that the weight is going down, but I already feel better for it; I no longer have the hunger which means I am less likely to fall off the wagon!

Many years ago my dad told me a story about one of his friends Billy (
William Black ). He told me about him taking part in a race where he had
to run up a very steep road/hill/lane while carrying a sheep over his
shoulders.

Not long after that conversation I got to thinking about a story “The
Legend of Billy Black”. It never really formed into anything it was just
this concept about this kid who was remarkable at everything he did,
generous to a fault, and extremely well liked by everyone who ever met
him. The story would follow him as he grew up.

I did an amount of searching on Google to see if I could find any high
profile people with the name, especially anything written or filmed. I
didn’t want to create a character that was already prominent. Nothing came up. Yes there were plenty of Billy Black’s but nothing that I felt
concerned about.

As part of my Dreamgate novel I decided to weave Billy into the story in
order to have some form of cross over. I like the idea of connecting my
short stories and other works with Dreamgate. I even toyed with the idea
of giving Blacks identity to one of the mysterious main characters ‘The
Traveller’.

Anyway, I started listing to the Audiobook of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. I listen while at the gym, it’s so much easier to get through a workout when you are distracted by something else; I clock watch less…

To my horror, very early on, a character called Billy Black appears…
re-doing my google search, the results are filled with Billy Black from
the book and film of Twilight… and in that moment I saw the death of MY
character.