Jay Lake: Writer

[personal] More sick

Well, I laid down about 5:30 yesterday, and went lights out at 7:00 pm. Woke up at 6:15 this morning when the alarm clock went off. I didn’t know it was set, and was sleeping soundly, over eleven hours later.

That’s some serious sick for me, when I sleep like that, given my usual fare is six hours a night. NyQuil certainly helped, and I did wake up a lot, but just briefly before rolling back to sleep. Fever and chills as the night went on, and very strange dreams. The one that stands out this morning was me crawling on hands and knees through a very low-ceilinged attic to negotiate with Paris Hilton for the placement of a short story in the online market she edits. Ahem.

I am going to head into the office shortly, but if I start to delaminate, I’m right back to the hotel and my various nostrums. Taking ginger ale, Ricola and zinc tabs to work with me.

Oi.

Tags: Omaha, Personal, sick, work

Posted: 5:32 am Wed September 30 2009 | Comments(3) |

[photos] Your Wednesday moment of zen

Your Wednesday moment of zen.

Taken by me in New Mexico. © 2006, 2009 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tags: Photos, zen

Posted: 5:28 am Wed September 30 2009 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad is sick, comes to the Internet anyway

More classic and pseudoclassic National Parks poster art — (Thanks to .)

Ornithopter madness

How to Truck 66 200,000-Pound Antennas to 16,000 Feet — Which reminds of this US Navy land tug, used to hauld decommissioned nuclear reactors from barges on the Columbia to their open grave at the Hanford site. (Via Jalopnik.)

NASA’s Version of Star Trek Replicator Ready for On Orbit Test — Ooooh. (Via @JStevenYork.)

America’s Next Great Pundit — It could be you. A strange contest. Wonder if I should enter it…

JK Rowling lost out on US medal over Harry Potter ‘witchcraft’ — Ah, yes. Conservative “thought”. (Via Scrivener’s Error.)

How the iPod became a tool of war — (Via Scrivener’s Error.)

?otD: Which way did he go, George?

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9/30/2009
Body movement: n/a (sick)
Hours slept: 11.25! (sick)
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a (traveling)
Currently reading: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman

Tags: Art, Cool, Links, music, Personal, Politics, Publishing, Science, Tech

Posted: 5:26 am Wed September 30 2009 | Comments(0) |

[personal] Siiiiick

This afternoon I have come down with all the harbingers of a solid fall cold. Scratchy throat, a bit of postnasal drip, mild to moderate headache, burgeoning lassitude, and a serious drop in both attention span and IQ. I finally had to leave a major meeting at work and stumble back to the hotel, with a stop for sickie supplies. This has me missing a big business dinner tonight.

Been poking email and blogging until it feels sane enough to try to sleep. Which would be, erm, just about now, give or take another ten or fifteen minutes.

(It’s so swell, being sick and alone in a hotel room in a distant city.)

Tags: Omaha, Personal, work

Posted: 4:37 pm Tue September 29 2009 | Comments(0) |

[books] Madness of Flowers gets a star from PW

Madness of Flowers has received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

Readers unfamiliar with 2006′s Trial of Flowers will be baffled by this sequel; those who have read the former are likely to be both delighted and flabbergasted by the latter. The City Imperishable is the decadent relic of a magical empire in which human and numinal forces struggled until the Old Gods were almost forgotten — but this familiar-sounding background doesn’t set up a predictable heroic fantasy yarn. The city’s diverse inhabitants, including demigods and manmade dwarves, are subject to violent physical and moral transformations, and Lake’s lushly energetic writing pulls readers through startling developments. Major concerns this time include bloody political intrigue, a blockade by corsairs and an expedition to the North that may lead to the city’s rebirth or its doom. The result is exuberantly odd, melodramatically ironic and dangerously wonderful.

Tags: Books, Cool, Madness, reviews

Posted: 4:31 pm Tue September 29 2009 | Comments(6) |

[photos] Portrait of the author as a young man

Me at almost nine years old, with my Granddaddy Lake, front porch of the Gainesville, TX house, May, 1973. Photographer unknown, probably my dad.

© 1973, 2009 by Joseph E. Lake

This work by Joseph E. Lake is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tags: family, Personal, Photos, Texas

Posted: 4:24 pm Tue September 29 2009 | Comments(0) |

[cancer] An interim update, in which our hero does nothing much

has pointed out that I haven’t mentioned the cancer lately. He’s absolutely right. This isn’t me in denial or hiding, it is truly a case of not much going on. As regular readers know, I had a set of scans back in July, when we were expecting to head into chemotherapy. Those scans revealed that the masses in my liver and right lung had not grown as expected, which makes the diagnosis of metastatic disease more uncertain. Unfortunately, there’s no alternate diagnosis yet.

So I’m on a three-month scan-and-hold cycle for now. What this means is that I have a PET/CT scan on 10/22, which happens to be ‘s twelfth birthday. I’ll have my oncology consult on 10/27, which will most likely result in another three-month scan-and-hold, or possibly trigger chemo. This situation could prevail for quite some time, unless and until we come up with an alternate diagnosis. Or maybe not. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that the whole cancer experience is remarkably fluid.

I haven’t posted about it lately because there hasn’t been much to post. The Fear is back on the horizon, like a coming storm, but this time it’s a squall. All the scary stuff is still out there, in spades, I’ve just grown used to it. The East African Plains Ape is an adaptable beast, and can become accustomed to anything. Even this. I’ve also become a lot less annoyed about being unsure of my forward planning — basically, I’m at risk of dropping most or all of my balls in any given six-month period with little warning. Well, ok then.

So I’ll be going back to my therapist in October, to help me handle the Fear, and leaning all the more on as the scan and consult dates approach. Watch this space for more details.

Tags: Calendula, Cancer, Child, health, Personal

Posted: 5:22 am Tue September 29 2009 | Comments(0) |

[photos] Your Tuesday moment of zen

Your Tuesday moment of zen.

Photographed by me in New Mexico. © 2006, 2009 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tags: flowers, Photos, zen

Posted: 4:22 am Tue September 29 2009 | Comments(2) |

[links] Link salad for a Nebraska autumn morning

Fort Marion WPA travel poster — I just love this art. From Vintagraph.

Why women have sex — Um, really?

Photo of Samuel Cody, 1911, ready for flight — Now that‘s aviation. From x-planes.

Commercial Supply Rocket Ready for Lift Off — Woo hoo!

Notes & Queries 09/28/09 — Centauri Dreams with a fascinating roundup of space science tidbits.

Short-term stress stops cancer — In mice. Maybe. Still…

This Modern World on the Obama is a Nazi riff — It would be funny if it weren’t so sadly true. The American Right has lost what little it had left of moral authority and intellectual consistency to stupid rhetorical games.

?otD: Who done it?

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9/29/2009
Body movement: 65 minute suburban walk
Hours slept: 5.75
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a (traveling)
Currently reading: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman

Tags: Art, Cancer, Cool, Culture, healthcare, Links, Personal, Photos, Politics, Science, Travel

Posted: 4:03 am Tue September 29 2009 | Comments(1) |

[travel] The skies, they are not so friendly

Such a day. Oy. In Omaha now, working the Day Jobbe from the head office, but a journey it was.

When and I got back from Potlatch Foolscap yesterday evening, I went to double check my departure time and print my boarding pass, and my flight had disappeared from my account on the United Airlines Web site. Two hours of phone calling ensued. Airline reservations. Travel agent. Airline customer service. Airline Internet support. Travel agent. Airline customer service. Lather, rinse, repeat, beat with sticks.

The long and the short of it is that due to a recent TSA rule change, United Airlines did something in their database that trimmed the “Jr” off my full name, which (as anyone who has a book of mine can see on the copyright page) is “Joseph E. Lake, Jr.” So a ticket issued in that name, which matches my photo ID and my frequent flyer card, is no longer valid for my frequent flyer account in the United Airlines system. This, they have explained to me twice, is because I “must have changed my name in the system.”

Um, no.

So far, this remains unresolved. (Though I did get on my flight.) I’ve been told repeatedly nothing can be done, that this is my problem. I have pointed out repeatedly that I didn’t create this problem and I have no power to fix it. So far, the airline remains unimpressed with my position.

United Airlines’ customer service philosophy can best be described as “poisoning the well.” In ten years as a high status frequent flyer on American Airlines, I never had as much trouble as I’ve had since switching to United last spring. I’m a hairsbreadth away from switching back to American. United has better planes, and better routes (at least for my needs), but their customer service is so abysmal it’s not worth the freaking trouble.

So I get to Omaha, and lo and behold the Hertz Gold counter, which is designed to be a fast transaction where you pick up the keys to your waiting, reserved car, is being used as a walk-up booking service by the two people in line in front of me. The clerk is happy to help. There is no other clerk. There is an entire counter full of clerks just inside the airport whose job it is to do this, but no, this is not good enough for the people in front of me, who have gone rather out of their way to tie up what is supposed to be the express lane. This is the equivalent of going through the 12 item lane at the supermarket with $250 worth of produce in your cart while the adjacent full service lanes are open. So I spend ten minutes waiting to spend fifteen seconds retrieving the keys with my name on them I can see over the clerk’s shoulder.

Then I get out on the highway, and I-680 is closed down due to what I later learn is a fertilizer spill. Meanwhile, I have to keep cycling my iPhone in and out of airplane mode to reboot the radio because the AT&T voice and data network keeps locking up and going into la-la land. I know AT&T likes to say they have the least dropped calls, but I’m pretty sure that’s because their network doesn’t seem to be able to connect the damned calls in the first place.

However, having broken the air travel, car rental, Interstate highway and cellular telephone infrastructures with the mighty powers of my mind, I managed to get through the rest of the day without significant further mishap, culminating in a nice dinner with and .

Tomorrow, more work.

Tags: Calendula, Conventions, Omaha, Travel, work

Posted: 7:56 pm Mon September 28 2009 | Comments(4) |