[cancer] Watch out, you might get what you’re after
So I’ve been complaining about sleeping too much. So I woke up around 11:40 pm last night, and did not get back to sleep until about 3:00 am. So I was startled awake several times after that with the notion there was an intruder in my house. So I woke up for good at 5:00 am. So I am going to have a truly miserable day, as with the exception of 4-5 straight days of constipation, lack of sleep is probably the single most destructive thing that can happen to me on chemo, speaking from experience.
Sigh.
Tags: cancer. health, Personal
Posted: 5:54 am Wed May 26 2010 | Comments(1) |
[photos] Your Wednesday moment of zen
Your Wednesday moment of zen.
(age 9) aboard a helicopter. © 2006, 2010, 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: Child, Photos, zen
Posted: 5:50 am Wed May 26 2010 | Comments(1) |
[links] Link salad sleeps like the undead
Welcome home, Atlantis
A doctor talks about medical billing — is the procedure worth it even if you need to default on the hospital bill and declare personal bankruptcy? Well, if it means the difference between life and death, I think it probably is, and I don’t know who wants to argue that it isn’t. Or, if you’re a Republican, you can barter chickens.
Fingerspitzengefühl — Language Log on the Netherlands, Switzerland and language integration.
From ships to bits — Common carriage is an ancient idea being applied to a modern problem—internet access. A squib on the history of regulation. (Via Scrivener’s Error, complete with the usual interesting comments there.)
Are You Straight If You’re Celibate? — More on the Right’s darling little obsessions with forcing government ever deeper into your private life.
?otD: What? Huh?
5/26/2010
Writing time yesterday: none (chemo exhaustion)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 4.5 (badly interrupted)
This morning’s weigh-in: 230.4
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 8/10 (fatigue)
Currently (re)reading:
Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold
Tags: healthcare, Language, Links, Personal, Photos, Politics, Science, sex, Tech
Posted: 5:46 am Wed May 26 2010 | Comments(1) |
[cancer] Another voice heard from
is brave and honest about our chemo experience. Go read. I’ll still be here when you get back.
I don’t talk so much about her end of it, or ‘s, or ‘s, or the rest of my family and friends. This is my journey, and it’s not for me to expose their fears. I will say that , after months of anger and denial, has been asking detailed questions in a very mature manner. Others in my circle are coming to terms, one or two are not.
As says, this round is almost over. I may wind up sleeping through most of the rest of the process, the way things are going. By coincidence, I come off the needle on infusion session number 11 on June 6th the day of the 46th birthday. (This is why my birthday party is July 3rd, so I can stay awake for it — you are coming, yes?)
So much to celebrate, so much to fear. So much love, so much trauma. Cancer sucks.
Tags: Calendula, Cancer, Child, family, health, JayCon, Personal, shellyrae
Posted: 5:59 am Tue May 25 2010 | Comments(4) |
[fiction] Catching up to this and that
Two sets of books arrived yesterday here at Nuevo Rancho Lake, The Book of Dreams…
…edited by Nick Gevers for Subterranean Press. In which I have a story. It’s a book about the power of oneiromancy, and the images that live in our subconscious.
Also the first tranche of signing copies of The Specific Gravity of Grief.
This one is about the internal emotional experience of cancer. Rather different from my other work, though still strongly genre-inflected. If you have any interest in this topic, pick up the book. It’s a limited run.
Finally, “Permanent Fatal Errors“, my story from Is Anybody Out There? is being published in four parts on the editor’s blog. This is a teaser for the anthology, which is themed on the Fermi paradox. Read the story, buy the book. Also, for those interested in my Sunspin project, this is deep backstory for the novels.
Tags: Books, Cancer, Fiction, health, stories, Sunspin
Posted: 5:51 am Tue May 25 2010 | Comments(0) |
[photos] Your Tuesday moment of zen
Your Tuesday moment of zen.
The potato from hell. © 2010, Shelly Rae Clift
This work by Shelly Rae Clift is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Tags: Food, Photos, zen
Posted: 5:48 am Tue May 25 2010 | Comments(2) |
[links] Link salad wants to go to Mars
A reader reacts to Mainspring — Interesting, positive review.
Little Dog — Oi, robots. (Thanks to and .)
NASA Lunar Analog Testing in Moses Lake, WA — I’ve been to Moses Lake. I believe this. (Thanks to .)
Looking Back Across Mars — Opportunity’s backtrail, on Mars.
Toward an Abstract Courage — Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Civil Rights era. In that sense, Goldwater is the more appropriate hero for today’s generation of blissfully ignorant (“How did that ‘White slavery’ sign get there?”) non-racist Republican. It’s not so much that they hate you, it’s they are shocked–shocked–to discover that some of their fellow travelers hate you. I can never understand why this sort of thing surprises conservatives. Their entire worldview is based on fear of the other, the new, and halting change. Not much more other and worldchanging that brown people getting some of what white people have.
Mark Souder’s downfall shows virtue knows no ideology — Enough with pretending that personal virtue is connected with political creeds. Enough with condemning your adversaries, sometimes viciously, and then insisting upon understanding after the failures of someone on your own side become known to the world. And enough with claiming that support for gay rights and gay marriage is synonymous with opposition to family values and sexual responsibility.
The ACORN Case and the Bill of Attainder Clause — Yep. Principled consistency on the American Right, assuming that by “principled consistency” you mean “media fraud” and “counterfactual paranoia.” As Scrivener’s Error says: “…it is impossible to foresee Congressional action being taken during the reign of George III, and under a Heffalump majority, against a pro-Tea-Party group that expended similar efforts and used similar tactics to (a) prevent them newcomers from registering to vote and/or (b) did the same thing in Appalachia… among folk of Northwest European descent.”
?otD: Would you have sat in at a lunch counter, back in the day?
5/25/2010
Writing time yesterday: none (chemo exhaustion)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 8.5 (solid)
This morning’s weigh-in: 230.4
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 8/10 (fatigue)
Currently (re)reading:
Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold
Tags: Books, Links, Mainspring, media, Personal, politis, race, Religion, reviews, Science, Videos
Posted: 5:45 am Tue May 25 2010 | Comments(1) |
[process] Some notes on dialog
Had a constructive conversation the other day with the delightful about the uses of flash fiction as a personal development tool. I’ve commented on this before at length, how flash serves as a laboratory for focusing on specific aspects of craft. Character in a setting with a problem: “The cop stumbled over the body in the apartment door.” What cop? Whose body? Whose apartment? But also, focusing on characterization, blocking, action, background detail, dialog, etc. Any one of those things, in the framework of a very short story. Might be salable, might not, but good practice nonetheless with the cardinal virtue of being closed-ended and therefore a rewarding activity that can be concluded over a single writing session.
and I got on to flash as dialog. I pointed out we all have a tendency to write who we are. I write lots of middle aged, over-educated heteronormative white guy dialog when I’m defaulting. And one thing that drives me bats in fiction is overuse of dialog tags.
Which are necessary if you have two middle aged, over-educated heteronormative white guys talking to one another. On the other hand, if you have a stuffy old closeted professor of Classics talking to a newly-immigrated Somali cab driver, you could get away with almost no tags whatsoever, other than a little blocking assistance. These two characters will have very different speech registers, and very different assumptions about the world.
One of my more extensive experiments in flash was working on integrating dialog with characterization, blocking, setting and other story elements so I could get away from “Jane said”/”Aaron said” tennis matches. Finding ways to signal the speaker through their actions or context or placement in the scene allowed words to do double, treble or quadruple duty, all while cleaning up the text. This makes the story world both economical and interesting.
What’s a favorite example from your own work, or others, of how to embed dialog like this?
Tags: Process, Writing
Posted: 5:54 am Mon May 24 2010 | Comments(10) |
[cancer] Sleeping my way through chemo
Yesterday was day three of infusion session ten of twelve. Came off the needle a bit after 2 pm. A lot of emotional distress around Nuevo Rancho Lake, and I developed a tendency to fall asleep randomly all day long. I didn’t count it up, but I am guessing at least three hours of random, unplanned napping across at least half a dozen episodes. Weird. Then I slept 9.5 hours last night, thanks to the Lorazepam tango.
Almost done here. I come off the needle for the last time four weeks from yesterday. It will take me several weeks to see my energy curve begin to trend up. Likewise for the cytotoxins to metabolize out, both of which will materially ameliorate some aspects of my chemo-challenged sexuality. My immune system has held surprisingly strong, per the biweekly bloodwork, so hopefully I’ll come off the immunosuppressed restrictions in a framework of a few weeks as well. I’ve been told to expect some side effects to last into September, and the peripheral neuropathy may persist for up to two years, or possibly permanently.
But still, the tunnel, she has light. Lots more to do. This summer I’ll be having a CT scan, possibly a PET scan, a colonoscopy and day surgery to remove the chemo infusion port in my right chest. But those are all acute events, so to speak, not the pseudochronic journey chemo has been.
People have asked me how we’ll know if this was successful. The only answer is we’ll know when and if the treatment fails. The point of this course of chemotherapy was that we could reliably infer from my metastatic colon cancer of the lung that the original cancer had found a pathway through my body, via my bloodstream or my lymphatic system. Cancer has been present in undetectably small amounts the whole time, and that’s how the lung tumor became established. So with chemotherapy, we’re shooting at a target that’s undetectably small. We’ll never know if we succeeded, we can only keep looking for failure in the form of further tumor formation.
In other words, cancer in abeyance, not cure. Still, I’ll take a few more years of health and a life raft of tests. But I have to say, I dread the possibility of another round of this.
Tags: Cancer, health, Personal
Posted: 5:40 am Mon May 24 2010 | Comments(4) |
[photos] Your Monday moment of zen
Your Monday moment of zen.
Oregon coast from a helicopter. © 2006, 2010, 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: Oregon, Photos, zen
Posted: 5:29 am Mon May 24 2010 | Comments(0) |
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