Woah, this is blowing my mind right now. I hadn’t actually
thought about using writing as a means of burning calories! But this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eml6f9g_Yhw&feature=player_embedded
shows weird ways to burn 200 calories. Since for some weird reason I’m drawn to
math problems in these blog posts, here’s how long it would take to burn an
entire pound of fat by hitting the keyboard. It takes 4,800 words to burn 200
cals. Since there are 3,500 calories in a pound, that means we just need to
multiply 4,800 by 17.5. If I wanted to drop some weight, I just need to write a
84,000 word story.
I Googled it to see how roughly long a story that would be. I
had to do a little sorting through an organization named 84,000 that was
dedicated to translating the works of Buddha. Weird, but I found that this is
close to the length of George Orwell’s 1984, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,
or your average mystery novel. My first thought was “holy crap, if I have to
write a book as large as that, I better be burning calories.” You could
probably get a better work out just carrying those books around than writing
them. Alas, though I would like to think that I could combine two of my hobbies,
I will probably have to keep my work out time and my writing time separate.
My writing has taken such a strange turn lately. I wind up
writing during breaks in classes (or sometimes during classes. Sorry profs,
sometimes 3 ½ hours is just too long for a lecture). Or start writing at
eleven, looking at the clock and realize it’s 3 AM and I’ve ruined the rest of
my day tomorrow. Now that I have a dedicated writing journal, I’m going to try to
be creative as I pull my night shifts at work. I wonder what on earth I will
write at four in the morning after two cups of coffee and still falling asleep.
Maybe there are other ways to kick start my writing. I have
a couple stories I want to write, like my magical girl plot, my fantasy setting
zombie plot, or my virtual reality horror plot. But I either get bogged down in
the details or start to lose interest. In my previous word count search, I found
a post by a guy named Brian Keene. In three days, he wrote 85,000 words. On his
best day he wrote 40,000 words. Yeah, think of that second Harry Potter book
again. He does say in his blog that other writers do this kind of work, and
that the products of writing sessions like these are usually unpolished turds
(or first drafts if you’re kind), and that at the end of the day the word count
doesn’t really matter. But that’s still really, really impressive no matter how many asterisks he tacks onto his
claim.
As I eagerly turn towards August, I have a small chunk of
time at the end of the semester I could dedicate to a huge write session. I
think that if I write as much as I could for one story then bounce to another,
I wouldn’t get as bored and still feel generative. Perhaps I’ll be able to get
more work done in one big burst rather than trying to write every day *awkward cough*.
But hey, thanks for the idea Keene. And you’ll be glad to know after your three
day ordeal, you were one whole pound lighter.
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