Peeking into the rock

I am writing this month, but I can't do Nanowrimo for reasons. One: I don't seem able to focus on very large projects at this time. I'm just grateful I can write at all! Anything longer than a short tends to get lost in the underbrush of a no-longer-chemo-brain. So I'm writing shorts, cleaning up old stuff, submitting a bit. I decided that since it's really unlikely for me to make enough money to be thrown off of Medi-Cal in the near future, it's dumb not to submit. Actually--did I explain this?--being thrown off Medi-Cal is not the thing I fear. What I'm afraid of is getting put into the grey category where they don't throw you off Medi-Cal but they require you to pay several hundred dollars (for some people, thousands!) before they will pay for anything. It would be better to get thrown all the way off and pay the (newly) normal subsidized premiums and copays, but that doesn't happen immediately. Worse, I have no idea what would trigger which alternative. So, just as in the case of facing up to cancer, etc., I just have to live my life.

I already submitted two things--one at the end of last month, but I'm counting it in this month. That was a near-future sort-of fantasy about a woman who is being moved out of her inundated neighborhood to find that her new neighborhood is pretty watery itself. And also pretty strange. The other is "John Brown's Body," which is ten years old and looks it, but it's going to a reprint market and its datedness might be interesting in the light of how things are working out, politically, these days. I mean it's sort of the opposite to everything!

I wrote a flash piece but my first reader (you know who you are) said what I was feeling--that the story felt like the unshot gun on the mantle. So now it's turning into a novella. I think it's kind of a time paradox story, but maybe not: some mysteries are not to be understood by the author. An old lady returns to the mysterious coastal village she spent a summer in during her childhood, and finds things to be somewhat different from how she remembered them, but some things are entirely too similar. The best part is the setting, of course. I think, despite what I said about my brain not being able to handle longer projects, that this is not too much for me to handle. Again, there are parts of the story that can't decide whether they are near-future sf or fantasy.

During the summer I was working on two short novels, but due to chemotherapy I could only move them forward a bit. One was about girls who save the world by means of their special relationship with crows and pigeons respectively. Honestly, the hardest part of that one is working out a believable mechanism for them to save even a shred of the world. And yet, parts of the world do get saved on a regular basis.

The other is low-fantasy in that it is set in the same fantasy world--but a different corner of it--and it is unlikely that much of the fantasy elements will come to bear on the story. It's an enemies-to-lovers story happening in the interstices of a larger drama of bandit freedom fighters and also referencing the earliest days of the motion picture industry as experienced by eager innovators in other corners of the world. But not our world. Informed by the last years of the Ottoman empire but in no way an analog for it.

On other fronts: I am a third of the way through radiation therapy. The only bothersome effect is my own body's ridiculous response to any postural demand, which is to spasm painfully somewhere. I have to lie in a comfortable position on a well-constructed individualized support for less than half an hour a day, and my body's response to this is to develop stiff painful areas in my neck, back, and arm. Not the side being radiated. The other side. My radiated breast is a little red, and maybe a bit sensitive, but not so as I'd care, especially with this other crap going on.

Continuing with the health care theme, I've restarted physical therapy. I'd gotten de-conditioned and I'd gained weight during chemo, because I spent a lot of the day sleeping or lying in bed reading. Now my energy level is back to its normal (kind of low) levels, and I'm getting more exercise, but there's some damage to undo. Also, I've been using the BiPAP machine for two months and it is not creating as dramatic a difference as one might expect. However, the doctor has some suspicions about my oxygen uptake which we're going to measure next week & discuss next month.

AND last but not least in this theme, today I got cortisone shots in both thumbs to fight severe trigger finger. It's the second round. The first wore off two months ago but the PA's not willing to give me shots more often than every six months. So if this happens again we're looking at surgery. I'm not afraid of surgery. I'm afraid of being the little old lady who collects all the surgeries, and also the fact that I've been enjoying my surgical experiences feels a little perverse to me, so I drag my feet for that reason too.

It's time to go to radiation or I'd expound about Zluta and the state of my house, but that will have to wait for another day, because after radiation Zluta and I will take a walk and after that I will want to clean house a bit before time for dancing.

Reading The Global Pigeon by Colin Jerolmack. It's research for the girls who save the world from fascism through their magical connection to urban birds book. It was recommended to me by none other than Donna Haraway who I met through Katie King at FOGCon. It does not have in it what I intended to be looking for but it has all sorts of other things that I didn't know I needed. That last category is a mark of a felicitous reading choice, I think.


Other than that, I'm trucking along. I find it is better for me to work on a bit of this and that right now because I can't concentrate very well what with the sleep deprivation and the chronic intestinal issues. Oh yes and now I have a very mild neuropathy too, so that takes some of my focus away as I obsess over its progress--if it gets to a certain level we have to stop chemo to prevent its becoming permanent. As it is, my dose has been dropped. This phase of chemo is just to be sure anyways: there's reason to think that in many cases the first round withn the adriamycin/cytoxan is all a person needs. But survival rate is higher and recurrence is lower for people who've had both, so that's where we're going. But yesterday was 6 of 12 doses, so the light is at the end of the tunnel either way. The oncologist says most of her patients make it to dose 9 or 10, but some make it all the way to 12. I would like to get to 12 just to be sure (and also quite honestly so I can feel so very tough, but I don't admit to that often), but I'm fine with following her advice.

We've been repairing the outside of the house and clearing foliage because the painters are coming on Saturday. I probably shouldn't own a house because I'm not houseproud enough to do what needs to be done. Honestly when stuff gets broken or dirty I don't care enough at all. It's weird because I used to take pride in just doing what needs to be done and in mechanical competence. But I'm kind of broken a bit myself, I guess.

While at the library I also picked up a Tobias Buckell book because I keep bouncing off his writing and I want to like his work. And another book called Watermind by M.M. Buckner that was near it on the shelves because it looked interesgting and I've never heard of it or the author. I want to read more genre stuff that's more recent but it's hard at the library because most of the requests for material seem to be coming from the grognards.

Emma told me there's a magnificent petrified forest in Chemnitz and now I want to go there more than ever. My dream itinerary for next spring is: Eastercon, a couple weeks with Frank and Hana in Loughborough, some days in Paris with Andrea, and then on to Chemnitz, Prague, and maybe a bus tour of Poland and if my bro-and-sis-in-law are in Langaland, a few days in Denmark. I imagine it would be summer before I got back home.

I would also like to travel in the States some: to Portland to see my aunt and a friend or two, and maybe the Woodstock Memory Hole if anything is going on there right now: to LA to see my other aunt: to Houston to visit Nancy Zeitler, a friend who's been living there for years & I've never visited her there: to Silver Spring Maryland to visit Katie King, who I visited over a dozen years ago: to Chattanooga to visit Sharon Farber, who I visited 29 years ago: to Philadelphia, just to see it again after 50 years gone from it: to New York, to visit Phil Josselyn, who I've never visited & when he visits me I realize how much I miss him: and to Boston, to visit Mary Porter, who I visited 26 years ago but never in the house she lives in now.

That's a lot.

Today's blood test results came shockingly fast. My blood counts have been only just barely out of the normal range, and today they are almost all just a wee bit closer to normal.My last dose of adriamycin/cytoxin was a little less than the doses before, because of my hands and feet bothering me, so maybe that's why I've started recovering already (it hasn't been very long).  Which doesn't explain why I'm so tired and have so little stamina. I'm starting to think that's in my head and maybe I should ignore it.Even the shortness of breath when I climb stairs. Maybe that's from indulging the tiredness. So maybe I should push myself more. I've already started making myself go for more walks instead of just taking Zluta to the dog park every time and sitting on the bench while she runs around.  But the walks have been shorter. And I missed a couple weeks of dancing and then  only danced a couple-few times because I felt like I'd run upstairs after each dance.

So maybe this is a self-created problem and I should power through it  I'll play around with it and see how I feel.

On Wednesday (five days from now) I start Round Two of chemotherapy--taxol. I'm taking it at the "less dense" option because the side efffect I'm trying to avoid is neuropathy, which I am more bothered by than nausea. But the less dense option is a weekly dose for three months instead of a biweekly, stronger dose for two months. So we'll see how that goes.

While I'm complaining: my tastebids have not returned to normal. Currently green vegetables mostly taste bad except for broccoli, starchy food mostly tastes weird and half-tasteless, and sweet things have no taste except for a hint of bitter. I end up only wanting protein foods with a fair amount of fat in them. Well, and porridge, which has a comforting mouthfeel even though it doesn't taste like much of anything. I just don't bother to sweeten it any more. Shredded wheat is okay too.

It looks like I'm writing again, slowly  but surely, one good day a week and several less sterling ones with some wordage in them. Also still researching, because I don't know enough about crows and pigeons. Though I know a lot more now. Yesterday I fell down a sartorial rabbithole trying to determine what some comfortable working class teen boys would wear in almostlike the thirties in almost like Central Europe and even though Google failed me egregiously (somehow returning every decade but the thirties, and no, I didn't put a minus sign there), I did finally find a vintage photos site whose tagging system worked for once and finally saw enough children and teens to form an opinion. Plus fours were a thing, apparently, and therefore, I can use them to differentiate class identification. I don't have to research the Sokol this time because I fell down that rabbithole a few years ago doing military history in Czechoslovakia and I still have my notes.

It's maybe going to be a darker book than the previkous one, buit I have to remember that these girls are going to save the world. So that's all right, right?

On another front, as Zluta matures she has decided that it is positively her job to chastize abnormalities in the night. Unfortunately she believes that if she can hear it, it is abnormal. Fortunately she seems to think that her barking is only effective if she performs it downstairs, so barricading the stairway caused her to give up and go to sleep.  She's pretthy insistent about me getting up pretty regularly, which is what I got her for. But for some reason she's letting me lounge and write as the case may be this afternoon.

Had my first infusion today. It went very smoothly. Every time you talk to someone they have you say your name and abirthdate over again. Maybe ten times over the course of the morning? I undersand why and I appreciate itt ( no mistakes is a good thing!)m but it's still hilarious.

But I'm sleepy, so I will nap soon. Gosh, maybe right now...I just had to clean up a bunch of gibberish from where I fell asleep with my hands on the keys.

Still struggling with a story about weird doings in a freezer plant, but that'll have to wait till I wake up.

This surgery wasn't quite as entertaining as the orthopedic ones, but I didn't expect it to be. There was some problem with the wire locator insertion. This is a thin wire, the size of beading wire but stiffer, that they thread through a fine hollow needle (lengthwise, not through an eye), and ine up with the titanium marker that they put in when they did the biopsy. I had two markers because I had two biopsies, and the doctor had to confirm that it was the cylinder and not the hourglass one-I knew that! but the techs answered, of course. By the way, the techs are great. They are so competent and professional and considerate, you couldn't ask for more.

It was hard for the doctor to get it to line up properly and then it kept bouncing out of position before the confirmation photos could be taken and the wire could be taped down on the outside. And then there was also some problem with the mammorgram machines, one of which wouldn't take pictures at all reliably. So a half-hour procedure took two and a half hours and we had to move three times (once because of the racalcitrant machine, once to change to another type of machine so I could lie down and gravity wouldn't be affecting the wire or something, and finally back to the original machine which the techs were told had recovered from its sulk, though I noticed that it two three tries to get the machine to taken the final picture). But that wasn't too bad from my perspective. Just for a while there my toes were complaining about standing in a fixed position for a long time while encased in ohmydear shoes.

The dye injection wasn't bad. It was supposed to happen first, but there was some issue with being able to get the nuclear medicine room (btw: recall how all the right-wing people you meet on the internet are always raging about how MRI had to have its name changed because ohmydear nuclear couldn't be in a medical name? But--here I am, going to the fourth floor to the Nuclear Medicine department, and later I'll be going to the Radiation Oncologist, so what's with that theory?) and they sent me downstairs to radiology/breast imaging first. Then when we finally got the breast wire taped down we went back upstairs and got the shots.

By the time we got to the hospital proper it was the time I was supposed to already be under anasthesia in the operating room but nobody was upset about it. One of the nurses said it happens all the time, which I can clearly imagine.

I had a different anasthesiologist, which would have been a mite disappointing but I liked him a lot too. He read me the Act about getting myself checked for sleep apnea (because of how I stop breathing when I'm given sedatives), so somehow I have to get that squeezed in between the hand therapy and the cancer therapy (& by the way, the cortisone shot in my right thumb has all but cured it, so it's not so bad that I haven't gotten the hand clinic lined up yet, I guess: I might ask for a repeat in the other thumb as it's getting pretty bad too).

As I said, the surgery itself...well, what do I know, I was unconscious, but to all accounts it was unremarkable and I certainly feel fine now. One good thing I wasn't expecting is that the incision for the lymph node removal isn't in the armpit but a couple of inches below. This way they don't cut the arm muscles, they just retract them, and the area is dryer than the armpit so it heals better. It might be why it doesn't hurt.  I haven't had any pain medication because I honestly don't need it, and so therefore instead of being woozy and tired from that, I'm having the same kind of happy rebound I get from giving blood.

On another front, I had an entirely pleasant revelation. I can submit to non-paying and token-paying markets this year, instead of piling everything up for next year (I'll still pile up some stuff, and my main writing time is going to two books I swear they will be short enough to write in a year). But it does mean I don't have to completely lose momentum. Not that I had much.

So therefore I am writing short stories about Crow Girl and Pigeon Girl! (Libiena and Mily, respectively)

Also, yesterday there were entirely too many yellow wild oats and foxtails for the end of March and there is no rain on the horizon  and this is a blot on my otherwise sunny mood. It is way too soon for summer to start.

The chapter I am working on is maybe the penultimate chapter of the book, depending on how many words it takes to write the things that are happening now, but it is more likely the chapter before the penultimate one. Oh, I'm sure it is, no matter how long this stuff goes, because certain things need to be in their own chapters.

( oh how I do go on about writing insecurities )

I kind of read Octavia Butler's Fledgling this week too. I skipped ahead to the trials because I am a wuss. It made me wonder just how much of her work is about blending. I will have to read more and re-reading more and figure this out. Also I read Emma Bull's Finder, which was fun enough that I inhaled it but I was also annoyed by its callowness.

On another front, I'm cleaning up the yard to make it pleasant for Frank and Hana when they come later in the month and also so I can see just how much progress I've really made back there. Which is a lot. I have planted a line of coreopsis along one side of one section of the brick path from the garage to Zack's, and parsleyalong the rest of it (and it's still not quite enough parsley for all Zack's and my needs). The front yard is almost cleaned up. After my hand heals from the carpal tunnel release surgery I'm having on Monday, I'll plant the two different abutilons and the one salvia I have in the corner by the almond tree. I have a couple of California milkweeds to plant--they have mousy looking litttle white flowers but they haven't, unlike the other milkweeds, been sprayed with BT to fight light brown apple moth. It's the law, but it makes the milkweeds toxic to the Monarch caterpillars too. So if I had bought one of those pretty ones I would have had to put a net over them for some time--a few months? I forget--to keep from poisoning the animal we're planting it for...

( and I also go on and on about my new knees )

On the Zluta front, even though I don't know what I'm doing, we're reaching a place with the backyard barking that is bearable, I'm able to let her go out there freely for many hours a day before she decides to try to provoke the killer dog next door. My current method of breaking that up is to almost silently head her off, distract her with thrown apples, and herd her or carry her inside. Less shouting--which ramps her up-- and no hose spray--which excites her and is actually a reward, However, when I water the yard, I let her play in the hose as much as she likes. Yes, it is still warm enough for her to get wet outside. Though I turned the heater on today. It's set in the low sixties: I think 66 for a period in the afternoon.

Speaking of communication, she is using the wiggle method of communicating her needs much more than the open-mouthed, toothy swarm method. I try to respond immediately but sometimes I'm in the middle of a thing and she has no patience. I've had to exile her only once every couple-few days this last two weeks (it was getting to be two and three times a day, which is too much). Of course, part of this is her general greater contentment now that I am driving again and getting her to the dog park five days out of six.

She has an unfortunately tender stomach, apparently, and apparently I guessed wrong about her food, so that's a work in progress.

So downstairs I am still plodding through The Island of the Day Before: I have 148 pages left. The experience is mixed but it does reassure me about a couple of things. Like the idea that there is an appropriate time and place for huge great lumps of information. And the idea that a story doesn't have to live right under the skin of the main character, and that the narration and the point of view do not have to be one and the same. Or that there doesn't have to be just the one point of view in the narration.

So there's that.

Upstairs I am zooming through The Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin. This morning I suddenly realized what's going on. It's like--you're in a Zelazny type of world, but seeing it from the point of view of the populace who have to put up with the grandstanding bastards Zelazny writes about so entertainingly. This is the second book of a trilogy but you know how libraries are.


On another front: Zluta's been sleeping today, which probably bodes ill for later or for tomorrow, but I've been pretty good about getting work done in the meantime. I wrote the bit where Yanek reaps several fields of wheat in literally no time for reasons he doesn't understand, and now I'm about to write the part where he raises the dead. Well, I wrote the bridge to it once, and wiped it, because the first way I wrote it I thought he was going to look at where he's ended up and know why he was there, but once I saw that on the screen I decided it would be more consistent and more enjoyable to write if he is surprised.

Yesterday my writing was a bit interrupted by the sudden need to know at least something more than I do about using a sickle and binding wheat sheafs without a combine. I was unable to find very much but I'm hoping to find at some point a beta reader who does know about pre-in dustrial and early industrial agriculture. I almost had a combine in that field, but after I did some research and laid out the logistics I decided it was better not to. The analogous era in our world had a complete mishmash of automated and non-automated harvest techniques. Even the tools could be bought from modern factories or cobbled together by your uncle.

I'm feeling a bit more cheerful today because I have apparently found my brain again. I spent a bit of time discouraged, and then a bit of time on a deliberate writing vacation, and then I had no thoughts whatever in my brain and that was frightening: I was actually empty. It was so weird. Anyway, I just chose a project at random and now I'm back to producing, slower, but a few hundred words a day is okay. The project I ended up working on is the amorous haunted nightstand one. I'm feeling tentatively optimistic on it.

( more about the last couple weeks than you want to know, probably )

Oh! It's Wednesday. I should talk about what I'm reading. Um, Growing Gournet and Medical Mushrooms by crazy man Paul Stamets. Today I'm picking up another of his books at the library. There's a lot of information in this tome, and it's superficially laid out in a sensible and accessible way, but in reality when you go to read it, the information is scattered around in all of the places you don't expect it and also there are a lot of frankly odd bits of hyperbole and strange claims. But I am figuring out some stuff from reading it, and the occasional blurry black and white photo of his cute kids holding mushrooms as big as themselves is amusing too.

All of my friends who never had dogs are getting them.

I'm going to need a story checked over for stupidity in a week or so. Let me know if you have any experience with mechanics and their workplaces, and especially with automitve electrical.

There's been a nice healthy conversation going on lately about how editors can recruit marginalized writers to submit to their magazines, websites, and anthologies. Tonight I hit head-on to a barrier that I don't believe has been discussed lately: the actual language of the submission guidelines. I seriously had to guess and google several terms, including one that simply didn't appear anywhere until I input the whole phrase it was in. Well. The string of letters showed up, but in every result they pointed to cell phone technology, and I was pretty sure that wasn't the thing at issue.

I'm an old-timer, which means I know a lot of jargon but also that a lot of jargon sprung up while I wasn't looking. I'm also a lot more bullheaded than I was when I was younger--I might have given up after the second paragraph, even though there were sentences meant to reassure the potential submitter that they didn't have to be a particular type of person. But. It was quite clear that when the guidelines were written, the editors had simply assumed that anybody who fit their desired demographic and was interested in these issues just would know these words. They hadn't questioned themselves at all on what being inclusive means, in the larger sense.

Imagine this: you're a young person and your pockets are burning up with that great new passionate story you've written that seems like it maybe fits that anthology you stumbled on. And there's a whole pile of stuff in the guidelines you think you can guess at the meaning of, but you're not sure, and oh well crap, they probably only want somebody who can use those words correctly anyhow. What next? What fantastic new writer will not be submitting to that anthology?

Don't assume that everyone who wants to submit to your publication is a Tumblr or facebook activist or has had queer theory classes in a high-tone liberal arts college. By this I mean, don't use buckets of jargon and words which mean one thing in context and another thing in general language without defining them for the newcomer. Assume that you might be interested in very young or very old working-class writers who might even be new to the internet, let alone your specialized vocabulary. Welcome them by giving them a bridge. Define those terms in a casual, friendly, accessible way.

I definitely do not mean "don't use the vocabulary your cohort has been carefully developing to make it easier to talk with precision about things that matter to you. I mean do enrich your prose with embedded definitions so you don't make people do crazy google search term gymnastics just to know what the hell you're talking about.