Jay Lake: Writer

[cancer] Sacrifices made for me by the petty gods of chemo

I am finding that every chemo infusion cycle is different. I don’t suppose I should be surprised, but somehow I am. Lower GI pattern during after session three has been broadly consistent with sessions one and two, but the details have varied a lot. Less painful and difficult so far, for one, anent which I am deeply thankful. On the other hand, peripheral neuropathy in my feet is just getting silly.

Time management is slowly becoming a larger issue. I’m not having too much trouble holding on to core daily commitments — sleep, exercise, time with the_child, Day Jobbery, writing time (during the phases of my infusion cycle where my right brain unfreezes). Nor my larger social and emotional commitments to calendula_witch, shelly_rae, my family, my friends, my online community. But when individual tasks or habits fall away, reinstating them is damned hard. I’m becoming canalized. Oddly, my left brain seems to go almost manic as my right brain is frozen, hence all the blogging. I rather wish it were the other way around, but I don’t know how to flip that switch.

I don’t leave the house so much now. There are days when driving is tough, and I virtually never drive at night any more. (Nor do much else at night, since I zone out so early due to the ongoing exhaustion.) This is disconnecting me from my long term practices of social lunches, errand running, and so forth. Which since I live and work alone have been pretty critical to me. Not sure what to do about this, except continued to tough it out. Even the few social plans I do make seem to cancel often as not due to the illness of others — I can’t be around sick people as my immune system continues to falter in the face of chemo. I do expect to catch lunch with kenscholes today for the first time in over a month.

Likewise, the focus to read. I managed to finish John Burdett’s Bangkok 8. Both Elizabeth Bear’s Bone and Jewel Creatures and Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey are waiting for me to pick them up. But the narrow bandwidth I have to work on Endurance plus my few other writing and editorial commitments completely consumes the same brainspace that reading does.

That might be my greatest regret, that I’ve essentially lost books. And I simply don’t have enough time left over to make time for them. Writing cannot be sacrificed. Neither can sleep, nor exercise, nor work. Maybe I can peel in a few hours on the non-infusion weekends, but it will take me months to read a book at that pace.

I feel like these sacrifices are being made for me. The choices essentially don’t exist, once I’ve bowed to the core inevitabilities. I don’t mean to sound fatalistic, I actually continue fairly cheerful and optimistic through this process. I just don’t have nearly as much control over my time or my life as usual. At least I’m keeping on deadline with my fiction, and keeping up with my core commitments.

This will not go on forever.

Tags: Books, Calendula, Cancer, Child, Endurance, family, heath, Personal, Process, shellyrae, work, Writing

Posted: 5:16 am Wed February 10 2010 | Comments(2) |

[links] Link salad wakes up in the land of Tuesday with a lot to say

Good cancer news: [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]

A reader reacts to Mainspring [ Powell's | Amazon thb | Barnes & Noble | Borders | Audible ] — Not with the liking. No sir, not at all. In fact, they disliked it so much they compared my work to Neal Stephenson.

Amazon Kindle doomed to repeat Big Brother moment — Legal angle on Amazon’s recent Orwell flap. DRM FTW!

Criggo is on a roll with the classic sexist advertising here and here — Wow. Mid-century kink. Who knew?

Bathing in the Casino: 1889 — Shorpy with a photo of how the other half used to live. Wow.

Galactic Life in Context — Centauri Dreams with some very mind-expanding stuff on treating the evolution of life as a galactic phenomenon rather than a planetary phenomenon. All you hard SF types, word up.

A Supernova Blossoms In A Neighboring Galaxy, And The Shockwave Is Aimed At Earth — As tetar says, “Now we know when and how.”

Science Is in the Details — Religion at the NIH. (Snurched from Pharyngula, who explains this much better than I can.)

pecunium on healthcare finance — He says it very well. BTW, if you don’t understand the difference between “single payer” and “single provider”, shut up about “socialized medicine” and go learn something about the terms of the debate. (Thanks to lt260.)

More stone cold bastard GOP moralizing hypocrites — Remember kids, character counts. That’s why we always vote Republican. [And because some of my conservative readers seem to consistently misunderstand my point, I'm not twitting the sex. I know all about Clinton, Edwards, Kennedy, etc. I'm twitting the hypocrisy of building a political career on publicly condemning the immorality and sexuality of others, while privately being just as fallible.]

?otD: Where did Lefty get the bread to go?

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7/28/2009
Body movement: 10 minutes of meditation and stretching, 40 minute suburban walk
This morning’s weigh-in: 224.4
Currently reading: Diplomatic Immunity by Lois McMaster Bujold

Tags: Books, Cancer, Culture, Funny, heath, Links, Mainspring, Personal, Photos, Politics, Publishing, reviews, Science

Posted: 4:44 am Tue July 28 2009 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad for a hump day

Don’t miss the upcoming Borderlands Books events in San Francisco on 7/18: [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]

In the same vein, there’s an open dinner in San Francisco next Monday: [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]

The blog subtitle poll

Real life cartoons — This life portrait of Charlie Brown makes my head hurt. Wow.

Death by lightning for giraffes, elephants, sheep and cows — Finally, a potential explanation for why cattle are so vulnerable to electric shock. Something I’ve wondered about for years. (Some moderately disturbing photos of injured and dead animals at this link.)

Fast Orbiter to Haumea — Centauri Dreams with an interesting squib about dwarf planets and the outer solar system. Also, learned a new astronomy term from this article – “frost line“.

Co-opting a Cancer Treatment to Spur Fat Loss — An intersection of two concerns of mine.

Get Fuzzy on BDSM — Sort of. Heh heh.

Conservative Hypocrisy on Race & Sotomayor — With documented examples, for those of my readers who consider me a liberal whiner.

A rat done bit my sister Nell. — The Edge of the American West on conservative idiocy and textbooks in Texas. Repeat after me: just because you believe it, doesn’t mean it’s true. It sure as hell doesn’t mean you poison textbooks for a generation of schoolchildren, you stupid bastards.

?otD: Omawhere?

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7/15/2009
Body movement: 40 minute suburban walk (Big Papio Trail in Omaha)
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a (travelling)
Currently reading: Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold

Tags: Books, California, Cancer, Conventions, Funny, heath, Links, Personal, Politics, Polls, Science, weird

Posted: 4:40 am Wed July 15 2009 | Comments(2) |