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Mind/Body

Saturday NOT In the Park (WABWM)

by Holly Lisle on November 7, 2009 · 17 comments

in Big Courses, Books, Dreaming the Dead, How To Revise Your Novel, Mind/Body, PARANORMAL, Personal, Write A Book With Me

The Brain Mass Issue

The news on my brother-in-law, by the way, is there is no news. He’s in a holding pattern now, where the hospital with the doctor who WANTS to do his surgery suggested he go to a bigger medical center, and the bigger medical center said he’s not a county resident and he’s self pay, so no chance.

At this point, he’s controlling the seizures pretty well. In theory, he may be able to get the surgery in January.

My Writing

Last week went OVER seventy hours working on Hot To Revise Your Novel, including working all morning today.

Next week, I think, will be more sane. A lot of what I’ve been doing is one-time stuff associated with setting up the How To Revise Your Novel course software, the course forums, adding a NaNoWriMo forum to HTTS, testing things, creating workgroups….

A lot, of course, is writing the course and interacting with my two beta students, so even once everything is set up, I’m still going to be logging some serious hours. And once the Early Birds hit How To Revise Your Novel at the end of November or the first part of December, that’s going to require some additional time, too.

But, to get to the point, I wiped out around 3 AM last night without ever getting to my fiction.

I’m not going to write tonight. Today is my Official Weekend, DammitTM. :)

But I’ll be back tomorrow night. With fiction.

How did you do yesterday? How are you doing today?

{ 17 comments }

Brain Tumor Update

by Holly Lisle on October 28, 2009 · 13 comments

in Mind/Body, Personal

My brother-in-law’s surgery has been pushed back two weeks to allow his surgeon to do it after his vacation, which starts Friday, and to allow the department chief to scrub in on the surgery.

This will also allow my brother-in-law to get his Dilantin levels up, to decrease the odds of further seizures, to get his blood pressure down, and to otherwise improve the baseline health that would affect his surgical outcome.

Tomorrow would have been better, I think, but not with his surgeon halfway around the globe for a week or so immediately afterward.

{ 13 comments }

No Words Tonight

by Holly Lisle on October 27, 2009 · 27 comments

in Books, Dreaming the Dead, Mind/Body, ON SPEC, PARANORMAL, Personal, Write A Book With Me

Just got back from the ER.

My brother-in-law had a seizure, and ended up back there again, and we were there all night waiting for news.

The story has an up-side this time.

A neurologist came to see him who has done the procedure he needs, who is willing to do the surgery for him, and who will work with the family and deal with the payment issues after the giant tumor is removed.

He’ll have surgery this Thursday.

I did not, however, do any writing tonight.

{ 27 comments }

Needed: Teaching hospital to remove 9cm intracranial cavernous hemangioma

by Holly Lisle on October 25, 2009 · 18 comments

in Mind/Body, Personal

Here’s the news. My brother-in-law is now back home because the hospital where he was cannot do anything else for him.

The tumors in his brain are benign. That’s the good news. The diagnosis is intracranial cavernous hemagiomas.

The bad news is, he needs to see a neurologist. He needs to have at least the largest of the hemangiomas removed from his brain—it’s 9cm in diameter, about the size of a baseball.

Because it has been slow-growing, his brain has rerouted around this mammoth tumor, so that until about a week ago, it wasn’t apparent that anything was going wrong. Last week something—we have no idea what—changed, and suddenly he had right side weakness, periods of incoherence, and what has become evident as short-term memory loss.

Now the tumor has become something that, if he is to survive, must be fixed. There are only a few places in the country that can do the surgery required, which involves threading a catheter through a blood vessel in his leg up into his brain, breaking up the tumor, and sucking it out a bit at a time.

The process is nightmarishly risky. Unbelievably expensive.

Not having the surgery, though, is a sure thing, in the worst of all possible ways.

And he has no health insurance, though he might yet be able to get it through work, and it might yet cover this condition. That remains to be seen.

Assuming he can’t, he and his folks are left hoping that a 9cm cavernous hemangioma in the brain, along with smaller hemangiomas, in a 34-year-old patient with few neurological symptoms (so far), and a history of leukemia as a kid, would be a rare enough and tempting enough case to interest a teaching hospital into taking him on for the education he would provide its medical students.

{ 18 comments }

Family Emergency Update

by Holly Lisle on October 22, 2009 · 39 comments

in Mind/Body, Personal

Matt and the Possible MI

After going to a local doc-in-the box with the symptoms of racing heart (tachycardia), palpitations (feeling of pounding heart in the chest), and catching in his breath when taking deep breaths, and getting an artifact-y and questionable 12-lead EKG with some possibly bad signs on it, Matt was admitted to the ER Sunday morning. Admitting diagnosis that we knew about was possible inferior MI (heart attack, for folks who don’t do medical jargon).

Other admitting diagnosis—the one we did NOT know ended up on the chart…”Chest Pain.”

“Chest Pain” was a CFU (clerical fuck-up). Someone—ER doc, triage nurse, ER nurse, admitting doc, ward secretary…—SOMEONE who wasn’t listening put that on his admitting diagnosis in spite of the fact that Matt had never had chest pain, had never complained of chest pain, and was at the time of admission not experiencing chest pain. This would prove to be a problem in what was to come.

I stayed at the hospital. Did not go home to get things—just stayed. Hospitals were my gig before writing was, and one of the things I know as an RN is you never leave someone you love alone in the hospital in the hands of strangers. You stay. Period.

All day Sunday and all day Monday, we ruled out heart attack with bloodwork, chest X-ray, EKGs, and an echocardiogram. By Monday night, all of his tests were negative for any sort of heart attack, but he still had the atypical symptoms that had taken us to a walk-in clinic on Sunday morning.

Palpitations. Tachycardia. Occasional catching in his breath.

After telling us Sunday night that all Matt’s tests were normal, and telling us that he was going to write the “clear to discharge” order, the cardiologist went out to the nurses’ station, checked the chart, and spotted the “Chest Pain” admitting diagnosis. And instead of writing “clear for discharge,” ordered a cardiac stress test (treadmill test) for 9:45 the following morning “because your chart says you were admitted with chest pain.”

Matt again emphasized that he had never had chest pain. Palpitations. Tachycardia. His breath catching sometimes on deep breaths.

Too bad. It was on the chart. We were told by the cardiologist and several nurses that our two options were for Matt to have the stress test, or to leave the hospital AMA (against medical advice).

We were there self-pay (no insurance), and having a treadmill stress test to check further for the MI he hadn’t had was like having a doctor order a fetal stress test on a woman who had been admitted for possible pregnancy AFTER she was found to be not pregnant, because her admitting diagnosis was “complications of pregnancy.”

You ruled that out, assholes. Move on. Patient is still having symptoms, and it isn’t what you first thought…so stop checking what it isn’t, and figure out what it is. But that wasn’t going to happen. This was socialized medicine in action.

We left AMA around 11:30 PM, and the next morning made an appointment to see a doctor recommended by his mother, who also goes to this guy. Yesterday, Matt saw him in his office, talked to him for about an hour, and is now being treated for stress. By about 3 PM, no more palpitations, no more tachycardia, no more catching of his breath.

So we’re all good, right? Life will resume its normal routine.

Not so much.

What happened next

About 10 PM last night, we got a call from Matt’s folks, who were in the ER of a different hospital with my brother-in-law, who was admitted with aphasia (inability to speak), loss of motor control, and a couple of other things.

Our first news was that it could be nightmare blood sugar (very high). We were sitting in the ER with the rest of the family for the next news, which was was that it was malignant cancer of uncertain origin which had metastasized to his brain, and which included one 9cm tumor.

Third news was that it was probably benign, and related to previously diagnosed hemangiomas.

And that’s where we are now. Up in the air, waiting for something definitive.

I’m taking the rest of the week off from everything, in order to be available for family. If things go well, I’ll be back Monday.

{ 39 comments }

Men, Women, Writing, and Getting Laid

by Holly Lisle on June 25, 2009 · 61 comments

in Articles on Writing, Mind/Body, Personal, Writing Life, Writing Neep

Matt has assured me on more than one occasion that the reason men choose to do anything is, first and foremost, because they think doing it will get them laid.

Design the Eiffel Tower? Compose a magnificent concerto? Do a hundred pushups a day? Write a novel?

The man thinks “This will get me laid.” And he’s right. For a man, the secret to getting laid is to stand apart from other men—to be really good at something valuable, or admirable, or cool, to be competent, to be different than every other man a woman knows. Men don’t have to be young or gorgeous, to have great hair or a square jaw or a perfect body to get a woman or women. They have to stand apart.

If you’re a woman, on the other hand, breathing will get you laid, and sometimes even that’s setting the bar too high.

Doubt me? Think you aren’t pretty enough, young enough, whatever enough?

If you’re a woman and you’d like to test out this theory, walk with a female friend into any place where men gather to buy manly things (Home Depot, Best Buy, auto parts store). Carry a stopwatch. In an empty aisle, one of you will say, a bit too loudly, “God, I need to get laid. I want to meet someone.” The other one of you will start the stopwatch. I’m saying this line will bring at least one man into your aisle within thirty seconds. He’ll amble in casually, looking at something in your aisle…only not. He’s checking you out.

If he looks up at either of you and smiles, you have just met someone. Remember saying you wanted to meet someone? If he’s an employee and appears as if from nowhere, and asks if you ladies need help, you probably also have just met someone. (Well… he could just be the one guy working that day who isn’t avoiding working and who wants the challenge of figuring out what “one of those bendy thingees that go on the inside of the square thingee in the car” is. But what are the odds?)

Ball’s in your court.

A smile from a man is usually an invitation to explore possibilities (in public places, to smile back or to say hello), something women learn before puberty. Men smile when they see things they like. Doing so, they’re expressing interest.

The automatic female reaction to being smiled at by an unknown man is to look away or to frown. This is so automatic it’s almost instinctive, and if women don’t realize they’re doing it, they end up believing that there are no men in the world who would want them, because they’re turning down all sorts of invitations without acknowledging they’ve even received them.

Clearly, no matter who you are, not every man will test the waters with a smile because all men have different attractiveness filters… but as many men as can do so without getting shot or fired will find an excuse to amble over to the Romantic Comedy section where you’re standing to see if what they just heard might translate into something they might want.

The basic (not unbreakable) rule between the sexes is that men put together their best offer, based on their skills, talents, interests, and abilities, and they broadcast the offer—and women select from what’s offered. Women get offers by fitting into any given man’s classification of “Yeah, I could go for that.”

So what does this have to do with writing?

Men can get laid by pursuing writing and doing it well (or at least well enough to impress women.) God knows, it worked on me. I met not one but two future husbands because they wrote.

Women will NOT get laid by pursuing writing. No woman will ever get a man by casually mentioning that she writes novels. This is not a workable female pick-up line. The ONLY workable pick-up line for a woman is some variant on “I might consider sleeping with you,” or any action apart from words that would allow a man to think this.

Smiling. Blinking.

Breathing…

I need to take a moment to throw in a caveat here. Crossing gender attraction lines, I’ve noticed that in general, gay men seem to use the same filters for selecting men that straight men use for selecting women—appearance, not accomplishment. And that gay women seem to use the same filters for finding other women that straight women use for selecting men—accomplishment, not appearance. So a lesbian writer might very well attract a mate with the “I’m working on a novel” line.

This is an observation at second-hand, so I may be wrong. But I did not want to ignore this part of the discussion, and would be happy to entertain comments across the complement of gender variants in adult human relationships.

But. WRITING.

When we are sane and not self-destructive, human beings do things because they improve our chances of survival. For men, survival is wired to be broadly procreative, and while the male selection criteria for choosing a mate runs along varying lines of “breathing, healthy, would have sex with me,” attracting a mate or mates requires accomplishment. “I’m working on my next novel,” is a good line, better if you can back it up by presenting something you’ve written that’s really good.

For women, who cannot parent two hundred kids because women’s bodies devour themselves in the making of each one—Angelina Jolie being the exception who proves the rule—survival is genetically wired to being as narrowly procreative as possible—to having the best possible mate we can attract (by being young, pretty and healthy…or at least receptive), and then keeping him around for protection and to take care of food and shelter while making the occasional baby.

So writing does not fulfill the ‘attract a mate’ survival need in women—women don’t need to be accomplished to procreate.

What survival need does writing fulfill for us?

I didn’t start writing as a pursuit of self-actualization, that’s for sure. Or to find my inner self, or to change the world, or to find a mate. I wanted to write because my income mattered to our survival, and I wanted to find a way of making money that would let me stay home with my kids. I’d read that Anne McCaffrey had started writing for the same reason, and I thought, “I could do that.”

Writing for me was not a love-at-first-sight pursuit. I got to know it, and fell in love over time. Like the other relationships in my life that have lasted, there was an initial attraction, followed by a lot of work, with the big payoff (true love) coming only with knowing each other well. :D

But how representative is my experience to the experiences of other women? To you as a female writer? How valid is what I’ve observed and been told about men to you as a male writer?

I don’t know. But I want to know.

Dig deep. Be honest. What do you hope the end result of your writing will be?

P.S. Why is this on my blog?

Well, I’m working on this novel…

Seriously, though, it’s topical to a part of the book I am working on, and something about which I’d really like to get other views.

{ 61 comments }

Stress, Migraines, and Stuff You Love

by Holly Lisle on June 19, 2009 · 14 comments

in Articles on Writing, Big Courses, Books, Dreaming the Dead, How To Think Sideways, Mind/Body, NONFICTION, ON SPEC, OneMoreWord Books, PARANORMAL, Rants & Observations, Thinking Sideways, Worldbuilding Clinic, Writing Life, Writing Neep

As noted elsewhere—I hauled ass like nobody’s business for eight months to create a way for me to write the novel I wanted to write without having to do it to anybody’s specifications but my own.

My mad plan worked, and for the first time since I was an RN, I had a regular, reasonable income that did not depend on me writing at a hard run in order to keep us all fed.

I got started on the Dreaming the Dead—the novel of my passion—and I was having a wonderful time with it, sitting down late at night every night and getting as many words as I got before I fell asleep. No pressure, no specific deadline (a vague one in the back of my mind only), and not even any dedication to the idea of writing to a market or marketing the book when it was done. I was writing for the sheer love of writing—to spend time with characters I could not find anywhere else, to explore a fascinating problem, to uncover mysteries and wonders.

Yes, I fully intended to send it to my agent. When it was done. When I was damn good and ready.

And then…

And then…

Brief aside here: You might have noticed, if you’ve been around here or in Think Sideways, that I … ah … am not a good relaxer. I am very good at deadlines, very good at pushing hard toward goals, very good at driving myself.

Taking my time? Taking it easy? Doing things just for fun? Not my best skill. I know this about me, but I sometimes forget it. End Brief Aside.

I forgot why I had worked so hard last year and part of this one. I forgot that THIS book was supposed to be special, different, NOT the same ferocious race to the finish line, doing the absolute best I could in the absolute least time humanly possible so that I could get paid and we could eat.

I forgot. And I set what seemed like a reasonable deadline for myself. 2000 words a day, more or less.

I also forgot that my life is different now. When writing fiction was all I had, writing fiction WAS all I had. I could put the rest of the world aside for long stretches and just push for the finish line.

I wrote, I got frustrated and guilty because I wasn’t getting other things done. When I got other things done, I got frustrated and guilty because I wasn’t writing. Over the last couple of days, I got hammered by headaches, stress, and guilt, my productivity on everything dropped to miserable levels, and I started hating life. In one week. From one change: the decision to write Dreaming the Dead to a “publish it” deadline.

I sat down this morning and took stock of what I have going on that is NOT the novel—stuff I love and am thrilled to be doing and want to complete.

You can look at the mindmap I did here, or the outline version here.

The fact is, my life is full of cool and wonderful work. And writing fiction is the cool and wonderful play I had planned for the end of each day.

I need to get back to my original plan.

{ 14 comments }

My daughter is in the ER right now

by Holly Lisle on November 26, 2007 · 58 comments

in Mind/Body, Personal, The Film School Kid

8:29 PM: She sounds like she’s going into shock, and it’s crowded so no one is seeing her. If you have prayers, any religion, please pray them now.

UPDATE

7:22 AM, NOV. 27: Here’s where we are this morning. It took until 11 PM for the hospital to see her. Something is wrong–some sort of post-surgical complication–but they don’t know what. At 4 AM they gave her morphine and sent her home for a few hours of sleep, but she’s to be back in there this morning. The good news I’ve had is that her temperature, which had dropped from normal to 96.5 over the course of about an hour right before she called me at 8:10 PM, stabilized, and her blood pressure is within normal limits (info that I didn’t have until 11 PM).

The one possibility that my daughter could tell me they’d mentioned was an abcess–she’s not medical-tech oriented, and she was in bad pain, and her stress level was high. People in those situations don’t catch medical terminology and jargon thrown at them at high speed, so there are other possibilities, but she doesn’t know what they are.

At this point, I’m waiting for a call from her to let me know what’s going on.

Thank you for prayers, good thoughts, candles, anything you’ve got. I’m deeply grateful.

UPDATE

1:00 PM, NOV. 27: Not answering her cell phone, not answering her messages. Still waiting to hear something.

UPDATE

1:58 PM, NOV, 27: Finally heard from her. She’s been readmitted. Abdominal pain, vomiting, chills. They don’t know what’s wrong. They’re going to run tests.

Thank you so much for your prayers and encouragement. I don’t do religion, but I know prayer and focused thought work, and I’m grateful for every one of you holding her in your thoughts.

UPDATE

5:55 PM, NOV 27: She’s having “something radioactive with injected dye” done in radiology. Tony–her guy–didn’t get the specific name of the procedure, and I’m not up to guessing. This hospital she’s in seems so far to be pretty short on patient teaching and pretty long on nurses eating hamburgers at the nurses’ station. No idea when she’ll be out (but this, sadly, is Standard Operating Procedure—tests take forever). Still no clue what’s wrong, but maybe after they have have her back from this.

I’m trying not to remember all the things I’ve seen go wrong with radioactive dye and patients.

UPDATE

9:05 PM, NOV 27:Still waiting to hear anything.

UPDATE

8:00 PM, NOV 28:Things are kind of up in the air. They’ve found the problem, after a bunch of really nasty tests; the surgeon didn’t get everything closed off the first time in, and her liver is leaking bile into her abdominal cavity. She’s going to wait a couple of days in the hospital to see if the leak closes off on its own. If it doesn’t, there’s an esophageal treatment that might fix it, and if that doesn’t work, more surgery. She’s had nothing but ice chips since she entered the ER, and will probably have nothing but ice chips until Friday.

But she hurts less, and there are a whole lot of worse things this could have been. Her very best outcome is that this problem will resolve itself between now and Friday, without any further need for anesthesia or invasive procedures or surgery.

I told her you folks were keeping her in your thoughts and praying for her, and she told me to thank you. Huge thanks from me, too, that you have made time in your lives for my kid. We’re both so grateful.

Another update when I know more.

GOOD UPDATE

11:44 AM, NOV 29: Just talked to her. She’s feeling much better, though very weak. She’s having much less pain, and she managed to sleep pretty well through the night. There’s a chance she’ll be able to have something besides ice chips today, and if she does all right with it, she could go home tomorrow.

Thank you so much for keeping her in your thoughts and prayers.

UPDATE

12:32 PM, NOV 29: Her doctor was just in, and she gets to go ahead with the food trial, to see how she does. If she doesn’t start leaking bile again, she’ll be out of there soon.

FINAL UPDATE

9:58 AM, NOV 30 She did well all through the night, kept the food down, didn’t go back to the horrible pain, and she gets to go home today.

Thank you so much for hanging with me through this, and for keeping her in your thoughts and prayers. This is the absolute best outcome we could have wanted, and it happened. It was wonderful to know that she was never alone, that there were, throughout the day, other people who cared about her and what happened to her. Thank you so much, from both of us.

{ 58 comments }

Still too sick to work

by Holly Lisle on April 24, 2007 · 3 comments

in Books, Create A Plot Clinic, Mind/Body, NONFICTION, Personal, Writing Life

Thanks to those of you who have posted comments on the Plot Clinic. I’ve figured out from what you’ve said that I have to add an additional section to While You’re Writing that includes editing pre-existing manuscripts, that I need to discuss dream journaling in a bit more depth, that Structures has to go in front of Tools even though you use them in the opposite order, and that the description of the clustering tool could be clearer. I’ve also learned that the things that work for me are indeed working for other people, and from the sounds of it, working well. (This part is particularly exciting for me, because until you’ve dissected and explained how you do something to someone else, and seen them get it, you always have a faint suspicion that your method for doing things is bizarre and probably should be kept hidden in a dark corner somewhere, lest you be found out as a lunatic.)

I’ll be reading additional comments today and taking notes, as well as reading and taking notes on the material from the beta testers. But I’m not feeling good enough to work. Being self-employed and having to live on what I make, I have a deep and passionate bias against sick days, but this one can’t be avoided. Going back to bed, but please comment if you haven’t yet. Your results and experiences with the clinic mean a lot to me, and will help make the final version better.

Thanks.

{ 3 comments }

The World Looks Brighter Today

by Holly Lisle on July 26, 2006 · 0 comments

in Books, Mind/Body, Night Echoes, PARANORMAL, Personal, Writing Life

After 13+ hours of sleep, the migraine is gone. My blood pressure, which had spiked due to all the stress (though not up to the 160/110 range it was traveling in before I fixed it—just up to 140/84), has worked its way back down to normal levels. The air conditioning is fixed. The water isn’t, which meant that I got yet another shower in ice water this morning. Yowza—standing in ice water is much less tolerable now that the air conditioning is fixed, by the way, and the house isn’t 98 degrees inside. But we’re going to see about replacing the water heater today, and hope that homeowners’ insurance will cover some or all of it.

I did not get my words yesterday—the first day I’ve missed it quite some time, in spite of everything going on. But I feel human again today, so I’ll make them up, or at least the ones that can’t be pushed back just a bit.

Thanks for the encouragement and good wishes. And the comment on feverfew. I’ll look into that; I’ve never heard of it being good for migraines before. Would be fantastic if it helped.

{ 0 comments }