jack_yoniga

May 22, 2013 Progress Notes:

On Roadstead Farm

Words today: 1000.
Words total: 68,500.
Reason for stopping: Iron Man 3.  It's P.'s and my first anniversary tonight, even though we're both on deadline.

Darling du Jour: The lieutenant's discipline sagged; just enough to speak of long miles, and a hope wasting on wintering branches.

Mean Things: Realizing your best friend is kind of cutthroat; doing a terrible thing to a poor opportunistic cat who was motivated by nothing but snacks.

Research Roundup: Common Lebanese family names; actual shape of a pinafore.
Books in progress: matociquala, Range of Ghosts.

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That's the rest of Chapter 12, and a scene and a half of Chapter 13, and a bunch of debris and bits of wrong turns thrown out of the file to fend for themselves.

I should just retitle this book YE OLDE TALE OF PEOPLE GETTING INTO EACH OTHER'S BUSINESS (ALSO MONSTERS).  That's all anyone seems to do around here, possibly due to the Margaret Lawrence/Sinclair Ross side of the genetic code.  I'm sending them all to an effective counselor for communication training.  And I will try to make this conversation pass the Bechdel Test in the next draft.

Tomorrow morning, bright and early, I'm heading out for Phoenix Comic Con! And though the trip itself will be long and boring, the weekend promises to be a blast. So come out and see me! Here's my schedule.

Also, here's my Twitter feed. I link it here, because the odds are very high that I won't be doing any blogging - just snapping selfies and other assorted shenanigans, and uploading it all for your amusement.

So! Tune in, show up, be amused. That's my suggestion.
And for now ... I'm outta here!

[:: zoosh ::]

Sorry we're so late with the new books this week: we were busy trying to pry last week's new books out of the warehouse. But we're pretty much caught up now.

Hardcover
The Human Division, John Scalzi
Rithmatist, Brandon Sanderson
Mending The Moon, Susan Palwick
Necessary Evil, Ian Tregellis
Extinct For A Reason, Scott Cooney
Tarnished, Rhiannon Held

Trade Paperback
Face Like Glass, Frances Hardinge
Confusion of Princes, Garth Nix
Flora's Fury, Ysabeau Wilce
Island of Doom, Arthur Slade
Song of the Quarkbeast, Jasper Fforde
172 Hours On the Moon, Johan Harstad
Death of an Empire, M.K. Hume
Star Trek: Into Darkness, Alan Dean Foster
Red Plague Affair, Lilith Saintcrow
Gateway of the Saviours, A.J. Dalton

Mass Market
Long Earth, Stephen Baxter & Terry Pratchett

Regorafenib

I've spoken to the specialty pharmacy, and my Regorafenib should be arriving in Portland today. To my mild surprise, they are treating this as a pharmaceutical co-pay in line with the insurance company formulary. This is often not the case with specialty pharmacy prescriptions, I'm told. I'll start the medication next Monday when I'm back in Portland. Apparently, the side effects are a real treat.

The Nebula Awards Weekend

I'm still parsing the Nebula Awards Weekend from an emotional perspective. I'm not hung up on losing the Best Novella Nebula — that's just the way the game is played. Rather, as I said the other day, I'm struggling with my sense of being on a farewell tour. It really was a terrific weekend in a number of ways, but the reality of my foreshortened mortality is starting to grind me down.

Tension

That same reality of foreshortened mortality is grinding down the people around me as well. This is creating drama among my immediate circle of family and friends. I am very ill-equipped to handle that sort of drama. I dislike it in general, and right now my reserves are stretched so thin that dealing with such things is a profound distraction. There will only be more of this down the road as well all respond to my deepening illness.

Reserves

Those aforementioned reserves really are an issue. I have no depth these days. Anything small can upset me. I don't have the bandwidth to do everything I want. I frustrate easily, and have trouble tracking and staying with both emotional issues and projects. Right now I cannot tell if this is stress from the new diagnosis, which at some point I'll integrate, or if this is my new reality. I resent every step of loss.

More critique yesterday. More food. More fun. My Aunt M—, who lives in Colorado, turned up with pies. @dratz of Waterloo Productions arrived last night to shoot some Lakeside footage here at Rio Hondo.

My METAtropolis: Green Space novella "Rock of Ages" is being critiqued tomorrow. This means I don't have to do any critical reading today, so I'm cooking momos [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] for tonight's dinner.

Still struggling a bit with the altitude. Had a terrible night's sleep last night. I did okay the night before, thanks to my friend Lorazepam, and will probably have to do that again tonight. And I regret not being able to go out hiking here during the day, as my UV issues from Vectibix linger on.

All that being said, I am very glad to be here.

Your Wednesday moment of zen.



Washington state woods. Photo © 2008, 2013, 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.

Cloned video GIFs — This is so cool. (Via threeoutside.)

The Phosphorous Atom Quantum Computing Machine — An Australian team unveils the fundamental building block of a scalable quantum computer that could be embedded in today’s silicon chips.

New Efforts to Overhaul Psychiatric Diagnoses Spurred by DSM Turmoil — (Via Marta Murvosh.)

If the Earth had rings — (Via Lisa Costello.)

Red Sprite Lightning with Aurora — A strange photo from APOD. Well worth reading the write-up.

Had the Cookie Crumbled Differently: East and West Dakota

Pat Robertson shrugs off adultery, CBN regrets the misunderstanding — Robertson said the “secret” was to “stop talking about the cheating. He cheated on you. Well, he’s a man. OK.” So glad religious conservatives had this viewpoint during the Clinton years. Imagine the political circus if they'd taken adultery seriously back then.

Asked by Wolf Blitzer if She Thanked God for Surviving the Tornado, Oklahoma Woman Responds: ‘I’m Actually An Atheist’ — Heh. It's a stupid question on the face of things. If we're supposed to thank God for surviving such an event, aren't we equally blaming God for the lives lost? (Via shsilver.)

Anti-Sandy-relief Oklahoma Senator: Aid for Oklahoma is “totally different” than Sandy — The only difference is that the tornado victims vote in Oklahoma. Just like government support for hard working farmers is totally different from food stamps for the lazy urban poor. Ah, that justly famed conservative intellectual consistency.

Oklahoma GOP Sen. Tom Coburn Will Seek To Offset Tornado Aid — At least he's being intellectually consistent in his conservative cruelty, unlike Senator Inhofe cited above. Unusual for a Republican, that.

Fisheries could be in hot water due to climate change — Warming waters are altering the distribution and abundance of fish species. Amazing, the lengths liberals will go to for their global warming hoax. Even to warming entire oceans. Thank god for Rush Limbaugh and the Republican party, otherwise we might have to do something about this.

Will Republicans Screw Up Again? Some Are Already Overreaching — Republicans allowed themselves to look as if they were primarily interested in scoring political points and overturning the results of the 1996 election, even if it meant paralyzing the government. That same danger exists once again for the GOP. "Look as if…" That's remarkably kind to a party whose top legislative priority was ensuring that Obama was a one-term president. Not jobs. Not the economy. Not healthcare. Not our foreign wars. No, overturning the results of the 2008 election. And now, the 2012. They're practically built their entire brand and message around it.

QotD?: What did you read yesterday?

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5/22/2013
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (workshop)
Hours slept: 5.5 hours (fitful)
Body movement: n/a
Weight: n/a
Number of FEMA troops on my block scamming disaster aid slush funds: 0
Currently reading: Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

( Health TMICollapse )

In equally annoying health news, I went to an allergist today and described my reactions to perfumes and flavorings. Her conclusion is that I'm essentially getting contact dermatitis on my tongue and throat when I inhale/ingest things I'm sensitive to. I noted that the problem had gotten a lot worse since I started taking the Zoloft; at first I thought it was related to the Zoloft-induced dry mouth, but that side effect has mostly gone away. However, upon Googling "contact dermatitis artificial flavor", I find this note in a case study of a woman who developed an allergic reaction to artificial cinnamon:

Contact allergies are common in the skin but rare in the mouth due to the protective role of saliva against the accumulation of allergens

Welp.

It's true that my mouth is still dry; it's just not dry enough to really bother me most of the time. In addition, the Zoloft continues to cause a bit of acid reflux, which is probably making my throat more sensitive to other irritants. Hooray! Bodies are fun.

Conclusion: once Readercon is over, plus a week to make sure there's no post-Readercon fuckery this year, I'm going to get my doctor and therapist's approval to go off the Zoloft. It's definitely been helpful, but I'm feeling a lot more settled, and most of my anxiety these days is related to--surprise!--being scared of food because I don't know when it's going to make my throat feel like it's swelling up. I keep being glad to have the Zoloft to help me deal with that, but it would be even better to not need to deal with it. In the meantime, lots and lots of peppermint candy (and a search for lemon or other citrus candies that have no artificial flavors or sweeteners, since citrus is naturally mouthwatering), and probably going back to taking Pepcid with the Zoloft.

Also conclusion: the allergist was not entirely useless, but pretty nearly. I mentioned the Zoloft dry mouth and she didn't say "It might be worth taking a closer look at that". She expressed surprise that Claritin appeared to help with the reaction but offered no suggestions for alternatives. Bah.


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May 21, 2013 Progress Notes:

On Roadstead Farm

Words today: 2050.
Words total: 67,500.
Reason for stopping: P. is home, with both shrimp and pasta.  Dinner is coming.

Darling du Jour: Liars, I thought, with not a little scorn. And then reconsidered it. Perhaps this was what Heron had meant: farmhands and soldiers, wanting to see their hero so badly that they conjured him, passed around stories of such sighting or such passing-by, because then someday that grace might touch them, too.
Mean Things: The tentative web of bullshit is starting to unravel at a really inopportune time for everyone involved.  Using sex as a weapon in a totally unconventional way (certain people around here are almost disturbingly calculating.  And yet?  Good guys).

Research Roundup: Whether rabbit is halal; more map stuff, which is ever-present on this project; the copyright status of the song we did in choir in grade 10 or 11, for an unofficial soundtrack Easter Egg.
Books in progress: matociquala, Range of Ghosts.

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This be Chapter 12; at least most of it, and some of Chapters 13 and 14 where they suggested themselves.  No brilliance today, structural or otherwise: just knowing where I'm supposed to go, and taking it there one step at a time.

I also made challah.  But that's the sum of my output today.

It's been a while since I sold any signed books on eBay. Just listed five new auctions: WRONG THINGS by me and Caitlín R. Kiernan, TRIADS by me and Christa Faust, GUILTY BUT INSANE, and the chapbooks CON PARTY AT HOTEL CALIFORNIA and THE SEED OF LOST SOULS. As always, I'm happy to personalize the signatures.