Dinner & Drinks

Jenn and I did dinner and drinks with James & Ysa last night. It was the first social outing (Wiscon doesn't count) I've done since I got sick, and if I didn't like James and Ysa so much, I probably would have bailed. I've still got a lot of strange fear bundled up inside of me.

I've been passing again and again on the multitude of Mary Anne's functions (brunches, buffets, writing get-togethers, dinners, teas, discussion groups, readings, etc), and was just too tired to get to Jennifer Stevenson's this weekend for a backyard pig roast (yea, yea, I know. I totally would have had fun, I'm sure).

But it was time to get myself out of the house. I had no excuses. James & Ysa live within walking distance, for fuck's sake.

Also, they have good cheese, good sausage, and good beer. I have discovered the greatness that is cheese curds (I like cheese, yes. Also: it's a low glucose food, which makes me happy).

I think the best part about finally being halfway normal for the first time in a year is that I get to drink beer without worry. Sure, I can only have *one* beer, but that's a huge improvement over the last six months.

So, slowly but surely, things get better. I get less fearful. The idea of shooting up insulin in someone else's bathroom doesn't weird me out anymore, cause it's a done deal. Now I can stop chewing over all this shit and just... well, live.

It's funny, the little things you worry about.

"Will it look weird if I only have one beer?"

"What if I get blood all over the bathroom?"

"What if they serve stuff I can't eat?" (which is dumb. I can eat anything, just not much of it)

Perhaps the weirdest thing of all was this morning. I insisted that Jenn and I leave James and Ysa's by 10pm so I could get to bed and be up by 5:20am. I was dreading the whole thing, because I knew how exhausted I get if I'm not in bed by 9pm. 10pm on a weeknight really pushes it...

Well.

When you've got super high blood sugar, you *do* need to sleep a lot more. Toward the end, I had to get 9 to 10 hours. The last week in Indy, I was going to bed at 8pm and getting up at 7am. Barely getting up, because I was still so groggy.

Last night, I went to bed closer to 11pm, and woke up at 3:30am and tossed and turned for awhile before finally getting back to sleep and jumping up again with my alarm.

No problem.

All of a sudden, all of these restrictions I've had for the last year - in bed on weekdays by 9, making sure my water bottle is full before my commute, making sure I go to the bathroom before said commute, carrying three different drinks and a full water bottle on plane rides as short as 36 minutes, making sure I got a drink for the ride home after every shopping trip, stocking up on bottled water, getting up three or four times a night to go to the bathroom, avoiding all liquor for fear that it exacerbated yeast infections, $30 a month in heavy medications for yeast infections, nightly baking soda bathes to soothe said yeast infections, an inability to wear my contact lenses because of poor blood circulation in my eyes - are gone.

All gone.

God, I was so sick.

You know, I could sit around and complain about the insulin, but it's the insulin that's helped make me stronger and healthier than I've been for an entire year.

You know what the best part is, though (after the beer)? I accomplished a lot of shit last year. Not nearly as much as I wanted to, but quite a bit just the same, and I did it while my body crashed and my health deteriorated.

Imagine how much ass I'm going to kick now that I'm a functional human being again.

heh heh heh

Pencils Made From Human Remains

There's so totally a good story in this.

TOTAL HOSPITAL BILL:

For the luxurious digs at Weiss Hospital, with the fine view of the skeletal in-progress parking structure and the oh-so-helpful nurse "Mary" with the fantastic "wash yourself" bedside manner and the neurotic young doctor who got down on one knee and apologized every time he ruthless dug into my arteries and splashed great rivulets of blood all over the bedding:

$27,318.58

Amount of piecemeal physician's costs still trickling in:

About: $1500

Amount I've spent out of pocket for medications to date:

About: $600

Amount of every check up with Doctor S., every three months for the rest of my life:

$178 (amount included in above total)

For a Grande Totale of:

$29,418.58

Or, roughly, about how much it cost me to get a Bachelor's Degree in 2001.

Not bad, for saving a life.

Still:

I've rather be living in Canada, thanks.

P.S. At least I know how much my book advance(s) need to be! Oh yay.

In Which the Protagonist Completes 20 Minutes on the Elliptical Machine & Doesn't Die

So, it turns out I can work out (you know, doing more than walking) and not die. Which should have been a no-brainer, but you know, after a lot of low sugar days the week before last, well, I was pretty primed for the possibility of failure.

I'm also really liking having biceps again. When my body was eating itself alive, the muscle was going right along with the fat, despite my regular morning free weights routine. I didn't realize just how much said muscle had been eaten until I posed the other day and discovered how kewl my biceps look.

Also: 68 pages of GW to go. When I have a fucking draft of this book, there's going to be a BIG PARTY.

I would invite you all, but I think we'd run out of beer.

From the Trenches Anthology, Cover

Hopefully available at WFC in November, containing a nice little brutal women piece of fiction from yours truly.

LeGuin, Boys’ Own Adventure, and the Fine Art of Genderfucking

Are there not enough good SF/F storytellers? Not enough good storytellers writing about radical feminism/gender/body politics?

Or, you know, is feminism just so five minutes ago that we’re all content to write about strong female heroines who are just assumed to be “equal” in whatever made-up society we throw together - where men are men and women are men, too?

Cause if that’s radical feminism, I’d love to see what we’d call a body of work today that was written in the same angry, brutal vein as Russ’s fiction.

We’d probably call it terrorism.

Blogging Break

Well, that does it!

I'm going to take a short break from the blog to sort out some personal stuff and avoid allowing BW to become a morass of random postage.

See you all on Monday.


“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
- Franz Kafka

"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."
- John-Paul Sartre

"I worshipped dead men for their strength,
Forgetting I was strong."
- Vita Sackville-West

"Life isn’t about finding yourself. It’s about creating yourself."
- anon

Your Ideal Pose

Find your own pose!

Oh, god, now I'm doing a quiz. This really IS becoming an LJ.

I need to write something quick about blood, fighting, abortion and the lack of women authors in SF&F.

Sweet fuck.

(via bond)

Ah, Solitude

Well, Jenn's out tonight, which is actually nice, because even though I love her, we've spent a lot of time together since I got sick, and I know she's been avoiding social stuff.

Bah.

I'm not an invalid.

It's also good for me, I think. I'm reminded of why I both love and hate living on my own (a state of being which will soon come to pass once again). I love having space to myself, having time to breathe and think without worrying about how someone else is reading everything I'm doing, and trying to come up with ways to make sure they're happy. I hate it because, well, it's easier for me to sit around feeling sorry for myself. I spent all those lonely hours in South Africa drinking bottles and bottles of Laborie pinotage and chain smoking. But, you know, I also finished writing a 200,000 word novel. 60,000 words of which were worth keeping.

Eh. I'm going to go read something, and drink some diet Coke.

I Really Need to Stop Buying Books

This is getting ridiculous.

But you know what? I can't stress or comfort-eat anymore. I mean, about the best I can do is be like, "Whoooo! I'm going to go all out tonight and have three graham crackers after dinner!" or "Oh, man, I'm *totally* going to live on the edge and eat a 1/2 cup of those honey roasted peanuts instead of a quarter cup!" Rockin'.

I'm also limited to one alcoholic beverage a day, with meals (maybe two beverages, if I eat some extra bread at dinner).

I don't smoke. I don't do drugs. All I shoot up is synthetic insulin.

Reading and writing are the only vices I have left.

Why do books have to cost money?

Preying on Human Curiousity

How to hack a bank. It's a lot easier than you think:

We figured we would try something different by baiting the same employees that were on high alert. We gathered all the worthless vendor giveaway thumb drives collected over the years and imprinted them with our own special piece of software. I had one of my guys write a Trojan that, when run, would collect passwords, logins and machine-specific information from the user’s computer, and then email the findings back to us.

People are fascinating.

Nick, on Wimmin's Work

Nick's got a post up about.. basically, how to actually make money writing fiction.

And yea, it means stepping out of the ghetto.

I remember getting a ton of very nice rejections from various SF/F mag editors for my story "Two Girls." The most frustrating rejection came from an editor who suggested I send it to a feminist magazine. I raged for at least ten minutes. I already fucking write in the ghetto! I don't want to further ghettoize myself!

But you know what? Bitch Magazine's got a higher circulation count than any of the "big three" genre mags.

Personally, I want to be a regular writer for Oprah Magazine.

Because I'm like that. Then maybe I can move on up to National Geographic....

As much as I'd like some in-genre recognition because I'd really like some decent novel advances and sales, the more shit that goes on in my life, the more I realize that what I should really be doing is trying to make some fucking money.

I've got credit card and hospital bills up to my ears, and medication alone for the diabetes shit is going to cost me an extra $2500-3000 a year. That doesn't include the every-three-months visit to the endocrinologist and the yearly visits to the optician and the podiatrist.

Other people get paid to write stuff that's far less interesting than some of the blog posts I shoot off in the course of an afternoon.

Fucking Sweet

Interview with Christopher Priest in this month's Locus.

Christopher Priest is my hero.

I recommend this (I've read it four times) and this (ah, my inspiration for war and bug tech), to start. It's fantastic mindfucking fiction.

In a totally literary way.

Wow, I Hate My Job

Really, really hate it.

Respond to my resumes, oh Google corp, oh Starbucks Corp, oh Various Businesses Downtown looking for coordinators/admins/assistants/secretaries/receptionists - I will even bring you coffee! Yes! I will stoop so low!

Anything but this disaster, this lowering of the bar one cell tower at a time...

Feminism Is Not A Fucking Dating Service

This whole "nice guy" thing is really making the rounds on the internets.

What's a poor, well-meaning young male to do?

The thing is, Pete continued, I don’t think girls want feminist guys! You know that whole thing where girls aren’t into nice guys but would rather have bad boys? It’s like they say they want one thing, but in reality they want another. If I want to meet girls and have fun, I have a lot more success when I don’t try and be pro-feminist. I mean, why should I be more feminist than the women around me?

And, as we all know, feminism isn't about being a decent human being and adhering to ideas of basic human rights. It's about getting laid.

McBoing gives our intrepid hero some much better advice than Hugo's gentle chortling about how difficult it is to be nice and get laid.

Nice guys do get laid. Trust me. But that's got nothing to do with feminism.

I could tell you that I really wanted to be a smart, strong woman, but men just aren't attracted to strong, smart women. So it wouldn't be in my best interests to be strong and smart, cause then I wouldn't get laid. So I'd make myself less of a person in order to make other people feel better?

People would tell me I was nuts.

And smack me upside the head.

Not chortle coyly.

Some Feminists at the "Feminist Fiction is So Five Minutes Ago" Panel

Rebecca Maines Kameron Hurley Susan Marie Groppi- Feminist Fiction is So Five Minutes Ago
Originally uploaded by tiellan.

I'll be damned. Sombody *did* get a photo of me at Wiscon.

Oh, SUCK IT UP

Arg.

I REALLY don't want this to become a whiny LJ, dammit.

ARG.

Twenty-One Steps to Writing/Publishing a Novel

Yea.

Just... yea.

On Fear, and Being Stronger

"I'm through accepting limits
'Cuz someone says they're so
Some things I cannot change
But till I try, I'll never know!
Too long I've been afraid of
Losing love I guess I've lost
Well, if that's love
It comes at much too high a cost!
I'd sooner buy
Defying gravity
Kiss me goodbye
I'm defying gravity
And you can't pull me down"

- "Defying Gravity," from Wicked: the Musical

"Look before you leap. Then leap."-anon

Jenn suggested that we go out for dinner to celebrate the fact that I've been out of the hospital for a month (this then prompted a long discussion about what should "count" as the date of my "defying death" anniversary. Should it be the 14th, when the paramedics arrived and I got to the hospital? Or the 15th, when I was actually brought into the emergency room [just after midnight], or when I was stabilized, which would have been a few hours after that. But then, I took a turn for the worst and don't remember much of anything from the 15th. So should it be the 16th, when I was finally fully conscious? Or the 18th when I was released from the hospital? Oh, who cares? It's just an excuse for a decent meal).

It feels like it's been a lot longer than a month, mainly because about a hundred significant things have happened between now and then. It's been a busy month, without a lot of time for thinking. I've been doing a lot of... doing -

- visiting friends, Wiscon (including my first panels!), tDW rewrites, insulin routine maintenance, relationship maintenance, movie watching, book reading, contract signing, note writing, long-mad-email-fiascos, weird emotions, low blood sugar nights (again, and again, and again to the point of exhaustion), doctor's appointments, weight lifting, cleaning, sorting, ordering, filing, writing letters to shitty healthcare providers...

I've put on a little weight, which is a relief. When I first got out of the hospital, I'd just spent four days without eating followed by two days of hardly eating because the nasty case of thrush I had made swallowing unbearably painful, to the point where I'd thrash in bed every time I swallowed. At some point that first day back home, I was talking to Jenn and put my hands on my hips. I've got pretty big, wide hips, and I've always had at least an inch of cushioning between the bone and the surface of my skin. But when I posed with hands on hips, I didn't even have to squeeze to realize that I was mostly just skin-over-bone there.

My deep fear of out-of-control weight gain, however, doesn't seem to be materializing. I wasn't eating all that bad before I was sick, but "eating well" and "eating in moderation" is now an enforced state of being. My blood's been high all week, mainly to do with the fact that the doctor cut my noon-day insulin shot. I see him next week, and we'll likely either adjust my Lantus or bring back the noonday shot, which I'd like. I hate the high sugar. It's why I measure what I eat and why I've cut back a carb serving from breakfast and lunch, to try and get it more manageable. I'm trying desperately to keep the sugar levels low because 1) I feel better 2) I don't want to get my feet chopped off

Over the long run, it means keeping me from losing my legs. In the short term, well, having high sugar all week means more problems with my feet, the return of the yeast infection, and a much longer sexual response time.

And that really sucks.

Overall, things are much better: the blood will get sorted out with the doctor again next week. I've been doing my weights routine regularly, and today was the first time in - I dunno, months - that I've been able to add reps without feeling like I'm going to die. I feel a *lot* stronger. Jenn and I are going to make a pilgramage to the local sports store and get me a 50 lb free weight (just one, for now), which'll mean upping the weight, lowering the reps for a couple of my morning exercises.

Jenn also suggested I go back to yoga this Friday. It's been a month, afterall. I'm mostly as "better" as I'm going to get.

I've been putting off a lot of things, like getting back to the gym.

A lot of that has to do with fear.

As much as I want to not be afraid, or just pretend I'm not afraid, I am.

But life goes on (unless you die. ha ha). I can't just keep coming home and reading books. Not that that's a bad thing, but I realized the other day that I've been hiding a lot at home lately. I've gotten better. I took a couple long walks on my own this weekend (with some hard candy in my pocket, just in case), and I walk a lot at the nature preserve across the street from where I work, which is how I get in my hour of walking every day. But mostly, I've been afraid.

Jenn's going to be gone several weekends and a couple of weeks this summer for various business psych conferences. I'm looking forward to it because there's a secret part of me that's really terrified of being by myself in the house again. I need to spend time by myself just to get my confidence back, just to convince myself that I'm not going to fall into a coma and die alone and get eaten by dogs.

Back when I was 19, I decided to change my whole life. I wasn't going to rely on anyone else. I wasn't going to become attached to anyone else, and I sure as hell wasn't going to be dependent on anyone else for the rest of my life.

And I still want those things, even now. I still find strength in it.

I have some traveling coming up as well. I'll be flying out to Ohio for Thanksgiving with my buddies Ian and Stephanie, and in October, my parents are flying the whole family out to Florida for a trip to Disneyworld. And all of that will be good for me, too.

It's a bit like being in a car wreck. Afterward, you really, really don't want to drive a car again. And the best thing to do is drive yourself home again right afterward.

Yoga on Friday will be good for me. If I collapse, there's a whole roomful of people who can call 911.

Heh.

And I think that there's still a small, secret part of me that worries now that the summer's spinning out and Jenn's going to all her conferences and getting ready to start the job markets process (her whole last year here will basically be sending out applications and flying out for job talks), that worries about What Happens Next.

I've started brainstorming the module I'm writing for the gaming job in Edmonton, and if I *do* get the job, I'd like to take a couple weeks and do some traveling between the end-date for Chicago and the new-date in Canada. I want to scream a big fuck you at the world and do most of it on my own.

But buried deep in me, as well, is the idea of moving on past this life and into the new one and figuring out who the hell would want to hang out with somebody like me. It's not a big thing, but I think about it. Sick people aren't terribly attractive. I worry about my limits. I worry about my restrictions. I planned an 11-day Macchu Pichu hike for my 30th birthday. I'm wondering if I have to postpone that until my 40th. I'm wondering what I can do. I won't know until I try.

I think I'm afraid I'll find limits.

I think about all the things I want to do. Things that I *will* do out of sheer stubbornnes, but... but I think about it.

Because as much as I try to stand up straight and get my shit together, things are harder. I knew they would be harder, and now the anger's starting to get to me, the anger everybody said would come.

Mostly, I'm angry at myself.

I'm angry at my fear, my self-loathing. I'm angry that I spent so many years figuring out how to be strong and live on my own only to be hit with a dependency. I've worked very hard to do what I've done and be the person I am. It's why I react so strongly when I'm with people who want to change me, who say I'm emotionally distant, too aggressive in my speech, too straightforward, too intimidating.

Oh, fuck you.

I was not always this way. I know that better than anyone. I've been the screaming, crying, blubbering housebound who kowtowed to an overbearing boyfriend, back in the day. I hate that person, and anybody who wants me to go back to being her can kiss my ass.

I remember that when B and I broke up, he spent the following days and weeks writing terrible stuff to me and about me. He insulted my friends. He said I "disgusted" him. He insulted my writing. He said I'd never make it as writer (one of the greatest things about allowing somebody to get close to you is that they know *exactly* where to hit you when they decide they never really loved you). He insinuated that by breaking up with him, I was giving up on love. I didn't understand love. I would never be in love. I would always be alone, exploring dead cities. He said I wasn't a fighter. If I was really a fighter, I'd have kept pushing through our masochistic relationship, which was killing us both.

Oh, fuck you.

I'm not a perfect person. Strong emotion scares me. Getting out of bed in the morning scares me. Going into a coma and dying scares me.

Not living the life I want because I'm afraid scares me even more.

At a certain point in my life, I realized I couldn't blame anybody else for the way I lived my life. I couldn't blame my parents because I overate. I couldn't blame my parents because I was bad with money. I couldn't blame crappy boyfriends for my terror of committment (Me: "I don't want to get married. I mean, being with Crappy Boyfriend #1 pretty much put me off that. He kept pushing and pushing, like a ring was a collar, like once I say yes I'd never be able to leave." My buddy Ian: "So you're basically avoiding marrying other men or forming strong committments because of some high school boyfriend you had." Me: "Yes. It was a bad experience. It formed my conception of what marriage meant to most guys." My buddy Ian: "Well then, he wins, doesn't he?" Oh. Shit). I couldn't blame a lack of physical activity on my historically sedentary lifestyle. I couldn't blame teachers for convincing me I was stupid, or assholes who told me "you can't." And I can't blame my pancreas for exploding and leaving me to figure out how to live my life without it.

Instead, I'm caught in this neverending loop of fear and anger, anger and fear. And it drives me, it drives me, because if I stop too long to think, if I think too much, I'm going to feel sorry for myself. I'm going to spend too many nights crying for no reason at all and saying, "I can't" when I don't even know what's possible.

But you know what? It fucking occurs to me that the sorts of people who cry and say I can't every night and never get out of bed because it scares them, they aren't the fighters. They're just tired, because it's too hard. I understand that. I understand how hard it is. But it's not the life I'm living, nor the one I want to live.

So what the fuck does that make me?

I've been called some pretty terrible things in my time. I've called myself even worse.

I remember my mom telling me once that she could never do the things that I've done or am doing because she'd be too afraid.

There's a false assumption in those sorts of statements.

It assumes that people who "do stuff" aren't afraid. It assumes that when you step into a ring, that big motherfucker in front of you doesn't - just for a moment - scare the living shit out of you. It assumes that I never have a crises of confidence, that I don't sit around fighting myself, my own assumptions, my own fears, everyday.

But I am afraid, and I do fight, every day.

I am getting better. I will be better, if only through sheer determination.

Because that's pretty much all I'm running on right now -

Blind faith, anger, fear.

And maybe a little hope.

Hope that I made myself into the sort of person who can get up and push back. Hope that I already know myself and my limitations (none), and that where I can go from here, what I can do, will surprise even me.

"You're the only person I know who can leap off a cliff into empty air and fly." - Jenn

Oh!

A brand of yogurt with only 8 carbs!

It takes so little to make me happy these days.

OK, back to work.