Jay Lake: Writer

[child] Basketball, in which a parent on the sidelines sustains a game-related injury

Yesterday afternoon, the_child‘s basketball team won their game 38-22.

The teams were pretty evenly matched, and the game was a lot better than that somewhat lopsided score implies. And she slammed in two three point shots, for a 100% completion rate in this game. So good on my kiddo!

However, I sustained a game-related injury during the course of play. Go figure.

The gym at her school has regulation sized basketball court, but not much sideline. The bleachers are against the north wall, and if you’re sitting on the bottom row, your feet are about twelve inches from the north boundary of the court. Our little group — me, Mother of the Child, Dad, (step)Mom and tillyjane a/k/a my Mom — were seated almost perpendicular to the basketball goal at the east end of the court, in effect to the left of the backboard and just a few feet toward the center.

For whatever reason, play of game kept running right up into our faces. Dad caught several balls that had gone out of bounds. We all flinched back more than once when charged by a player from one team or the other. But the coup de grace came when a knot of defense and offense careened right toward me and I had to lean back avoid feet and elbows, and slid right off the bleacher bench and into the footwell of the row behind me.

I got stuck there and had to be pulled out. My back hurts, I’m pretty sure I bruised it right on one of my lower spinal knobs, and my left hip aches.

It’s all part of the business of being a dad, and a price I’ll cheerfully pay. But really, when did watching middle school girls play sports become so dangerous?

Photos © 2012, 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, family, Funny, Personal

Posted: 6:37 am Fri February 03 2012 | Comments(1) |

[art] Dreaming Cat, by the Child

the_child made a get well card for Lizzy Shannon (who’s recently had surgery), and I loved the picture she drew so much I asked her permission to put it on my blog. She told me not until Lizzy had seen the card first. Well, card has been delivered, and so now the rest of you get to enjoy the image.

Dreaming Cat, by B. Lake

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

Tags: Art, Child

Posted: 6:38 am Thu February 02 2012 | Comments(2) |

[conventions|personal] The SFWA Portland Reading Series, other miscellany

the_child and I attended the SFWA Portland Reading Series last night. Mary Robinette Kowal introduced, John Pitts hosted and read, while Ken Scholes and David D. Levine rounded out the bill. It was a lot of fun, and we heard some great fiction.

I also had a lot of fun watching the_child work the room, both at the pre-dinner and during the pre-show and intermission breaks at the reading. She was cruising around being friendly and articulate both to old friends and to new folks she’d never met before. Whatever life has in store for her, this girl’s ease with people will be a big part of it.

Due to the various time commitments yesterday, I barely squeaked in an hour of Sunspin revision. Still, I am drawing close to being done with these — perhaps another week of effort, I’m not certain. I’m beating the bushes for another few first readers, because I’d like one more reality check before submitting this to la agente for send-out.

Today I’ll be fairly busy, and most of the weekend will be taken up with supervising the_child‘s labors on her eighth grade project, about which more anon when the time is right.

Tags: Books, Child, Conventions, friends, Personal, Sunspin, Writing

Posted: 6:31 am Wed February 01 2012 | Comments(1) |

[personal] Dreaming of Japan, and other updates

Sometime in the last few days, in conversation with someone (I cannot recall who now) I made the observation that I am very rarely lost. I don’t always know where I am when walking or driving in a strange-to-me place, but I always know how I got there and how to get back to wherever I started from. I really do have a very good sense of direction.

So naturally last night my subconscious decided to serve me up some humble pie. I dreamt that Mother of the Child and I were in Japan, walking through a Tokyo neighborhood that looked suspiciously like Portland’s West Hills, admiring the classical architecture. We wound up being invited into one of the houses, which was the home of an absent yakuza crime lord. For some reason, I borrowed one of the yak’s cars — a tiny, ancient Subaru — to head back to our hotel to pick something up, leaving Mother of the Child behind. I got to the hotel, a Best Western in a location that looked suspiciously like Nebraska, and realized I had no idea how to get back to the yakuza mansion. Not only had I lost the_child‘s mother, but I had in effect stolen a car from the Japanese mafia. I had a rented Japanese cellphone, but no matter what I did with it, I couldn’t seem to make an outgoing call. Panic ensued.

Anxiety much? I don’t find that dream so hard to interpret.

In other news, the_child‘s basketball team lost last night 43-28. It was only their second loss of the season, and they fought hard, but the other squad were demon shooters, not to mention quite a bit taller.

Also, I’m making a lot of progress on Sunspin. I expect to have Calamity of So Long a Life out to my last few first readers in another week or so, well ahead of schedule. This will give me time to work on Little Dog, I think, given my production scheduling.

This evening, the_child and I are going to the SFWA Northwest Reading Series. David Levine, J.A. Pitts and Ken Scholes are reading:

Tuesday, January 31
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
McMenamins Kennedy School, 5736 N.E. 33rd Ave. Portland, OR 97211

Note they’re also reprising, with a slightly different cast, in Seattle tomorrow night.

Wednesday, February 1
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Wild Rover Restaurant and Pub, 111 Central Way, Kirkland, WA 98033

If you’re in the area, turn out and support live, local literature!

Tags: Books, Calamity, Child, Conventions, dreams, family, friends, Japan, Personal, Sunspin, Writing

Posted: 6:27 am Tue January 31 2012 | Comments(1) |

[cancer] Updating the ink, general progress

This morning I am off to have the tattoos on my wrist updated. (See here [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] for the original discussion of the tattoo process, along with photos.) mlerules is coming with for moral support and documentation purposes.

In general, at the moment I feel pretty healthy. I’m not quite back to baseline, but I’m very close. That’s with me only about five and half weeks out of the FOLFIRI chemo series. This is a sharp contrast to the months of recovery time from the 2010 FOLFOX chemo series. I still struggle a little bit with fatigue and sleep issues, and my lower GI is even more eccentric than usual, but that’s about it. Given that my next CT scan is in two and half weeks, I’m just enjoying what I have right now, and hoping not to be plunged back into the medical mixmaster right away.

After the ink, and probably lunch out, I’ll be hanging with the_child this afternoon. Late in the day, I may go visit a friend who just got sprung from the hospital, if they’re up to company. And there will be some Sunspin revisions at some point. That’s what’s going on.

Tags: Art, Books, Cancer, Child, friends, health, Personal, Sunspin, Writing

Posted: 7:45 am Sat January 28 2012 | Comments(2) |

[conventions|travel] Epic ConFusion Day Three, going home

Day three of Epic Confusion was very abbreviated for me, as I had to leave the hotel at 10:30 am in order to make my flight home. Still, I managed to attend a very nice breakfast, courtesy of cathshaffer and various concom folks, and say good-bye to a bunch of people by virtue of loitering in the lobby while my airport transportation ran 40 minutes late.

Which, yes, gave me a bad case of the “oh crap”s.

Nonetheless, I made it into DTW in a timely fashion. The flight down to DFW was uneventful, and I got the first part of what would eventually be 2.75 hours of editing on Sunspin done. I spent the rest of my time divided between Charlie Stross’ Laundry books and Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon, both of which I’m enjoying immensely. I don’t normally split my attention between two books, but I have Stross in eBook and Ahmed in dead tree, and the exigencies of air travel caused me to have to switch modes periodically.

In Dallas, we took a long time landing due to the 50 mph cross-winds on the runway slowing air traffic down severely. That also slowed down the arriving flight that would become the equipment for my Portland connection, to the degree of being almost two hours late. So much for my plan of flying through Dallas to avoid winter weather delays in Chicago or Denver. So much for a good night’s sleep, as well.

Anent Sunspin, I got through the first revision pass of the first half of Calamity of So Long a Life, and began embedding the comments for an initial pass through the second half. Right now, I’m actually a bit ahead of schedule for what I expected on this book. I think that’s a good thing, but it might also mean I have been skimming work when I should be digging deeper. We shall see…

Also, I forgot to mention that at Epic Confusion adelheid-p gave me a very nice gift. I need to thank her, and will post photos and a description some time in the net few days as time permits.

This afternoon is another girls’ basketball game, though the_child has been down with a respiratory infection the last few days, so it’s not clear if she’ll be able to play. She gets sick so rarely, this is unusual.

And of course, now that I’m home, Day Jobbery.

Tags: Books, Calamity, Child, Conventions, Sunspin, Travel, work, Writing

Posted: 6:42 am Mon January 23 2012 | Comments(0) |

[art|child] Idea of a Bird

© 2012 B. Lake, reproduced with permission

Tags: Art, Child

Posted: 6:11 am Wed January 18 2012 | Comments(0) |

[writing|cancer] The horse continues

Yesterday I finished “You Will Attend Until Beauty Awakens” at 13,300 words, by writing a final 4,400 words. It’s the first piece of fiction I’ve written since chemotherapy put my right brain into vapor lock this past October.

You can imagine my profound relief. It doesn’t really matter if this story is good or not — well of course it does, of course, but not in this context. It matters that I wrote and finished it. I started last Monday, and seven days later on Sunday I was done. With two days off along the way.

I produced it, start to finish, at a respectable rate of output, and I like it.

This is me, back on the horse, and the horse continues.

The manuscript is out to first readers now. I’ll have to find some time to revise sometime in the next few weeks. But tomorrow, or possibly Tuesday, I’m on to Sunspin revisions. (As it happens, the_child has a basketball game tomorrow, which is why I may have to wait til Tuesday to get going.)

This is who I am. A writer, writing. Damn, am I glad to be back.

Tags: Books, Cancer, Child, health, stories, Sunspin, Writing

Posted: 6:38 am Mon January 16 2012 | Comments(3) |

[personal] Weekend update, a bit of mortality

Yesterday was fairly good in some ways. I got another 2,500 words in on “You Will Attend Until Beauty Awakens”. the_child made substantial if rocky progress on homework with an assist from me at several key junctures. She and I had lunch with my parents, as well. We also wound up rewatching the first Harry Potter movie on DVD last night. As an added bonus, my overnight dreaming included kylecassidy talking at me from a television, his head shaven and horky black hipster glasses on his face.

At the same time, my dinner date cancelled due to the flu, which was a mild bummer for me and a much bigger bummer for her. More importantly, yesterday I learned of two recent deaths. An old friend of the family — of my parents’ generation — died of complications from a severe stroke. And a young writer friend of mine died of complications from metastatic breast cancer, leaving behind her infant daughter. In neither case was the death especially surprising in a larger sense, but in both cases it was unexpected by me.

I don’t walk around in a depressive fugue or anything like that, but I find myself a lot more sensitive to mortality issues these days. As I said to another friend recently, talking about personality changes under extreme stress, the biggest change I see in myself over these past 3.75 years of dealing with cancer is that I’ve utterly lost my once boundless optimism. I don’t think I’ve become sour or withdrawn, I just have no faith in my future. I’ve been shot down way too hard too many times in the past few years to feel like flying high any more. Neither of these deaths are about me in any way, and I wasn’t especially close to either of the women who passed away, but I still feel them like a leaden cloak upon my bent shoulders.

Tags: Cancer, Child, family, health, Personal, stories, Writing

Posted: 7:52 am Sun January 15 2012 | Comments(3) |

[personal] Home, doing stuff

Flew home yesterday. Got 2,500 words written in the process, along with some napping. Spent some quality time with the_child in the afternoon, then she went off to a school dance and I went to thirdworld‘s housewarming/birthday party. Thanks to chemo and its discontents, I’m pretty sure that’s the first party I’ve been to since my birthday party last June.

This weekend I want to finish, or at least make serious progress, on the current short story project. I’m aiming for 10-12,000 words. Also, planning to spend a bunch of time helping the_child with math homework and a paper she’s doing for her eighth grade project. I did have a dinner date tonight, but my friend has come down with the flu, so we have postponed.

That’s about it. Writing, parenting and relaxing this weekend. What’s a weekend for, anyway?

Tags: Cancer, Child, health, Personal, stories, Writing

Posted: 8:46 am Sat January 14 2012 | Comments(0) |