erikbuchanan

Time flies and one gets busy, but I have dropped 15 of the original 20 I wanted to lose. 5 more to go, then time to take stock and see if more needs to come off.

Then I started training the muscles in my back with pull-ups (done lying on the floor and pulling your body up to a bar, keeping your body straight). Doesn’t work the muscles in the same way, but when I could manage 50 of those, I could do a chin-up.

The best advice I’ve heard for chin-ups is to start standing on a chair. Use your legs to asist you at first, then try using them less and less. Take one leg off the chair, then both, and you’re doing a chin-up.

As a note, my best, when I was 25, was 3 sets of 18, with three different grips (hands close, hands wide, chin-up behind head).

Fifteen years later, I can still do 13, and I’m working on getting them back.

It’s a cool trick if you can do it, and I recommend it.

I had this down as one of my five things, but the truth is, I do write for a living. What I want is to write fiction for a living, but I was the only one in that group, so I joined this one.

Right now, I’m the article writer and content manager for Manage My Home, a spiffy little website recently bought by Sears. My first novel, Small Magics is coming out this year from Dragon Moon Press (www.dragonmoonpress.com and I know it’s a shameless plug, thank you). And long term, that’s what I’d like to be doing.

Now, getting there takes large amounts of luck and even larger amounts of work, but I’m enjoying it immensely, and having a great time.