Chemo session six of twelve (or, two of eight from this subseries) starts in a couple of hours. I’ve got a bit more noodling (not in the Oklahoma sense) to do here around Nuevo Rancho Lake, then Dad is picking me up and we’re off to the infusion center. Expect continued light blogging with heavy bouts of unconsciousness between now and Monday.
I did alter my Zyprexa dose this time, lowering it enough that I also felt comfortable cutting out the Lorazepam. I slept fairly well last night, though getting up was a bit tougher than normal. Hopefully this reduced Zyprexa regimen will still be effective against nausea, which is pretty much the whole point. Just don’t want to oversleep so freakishly this weekend, and more to the point, I need to be able to wake up and focus next week. Last chemo session, the Zyprexa/Lorazepam combo kept me looped for days afterward.
Once I come back to myself after this weekend’s chemo festivities, I’ll be revising Kalimpura, which I’m currently estimating at two weeks’ effort, with a third week budgeted in reserve. By the time I’m done with that, and a couple of short fiction commitments, I will likely not have the brainspace to deal intensively with Calamity, which means serious revision work on the last third that I just finished drafting may have to wait til spring. Somehow I failed to account for that needed time when setting my work goals for the second half of this year, tailored around my chemotherapy schedule. I’m usually a bit smarter than this about productivity planning, grr.
With all that in mind, I had a very productive telephone conference with la agente yesterday. We have a production and marketing plan for Calamity of So Long a Life, a/k/a Sunspin volume one, that takes into account the book’s length, current state of editing, and my likely available time to make changes in the near future.
She was also very supportive of At the Mountains of Madness, the Antarctica project. We talked about positioning and concepts for a nonfiction trade book, and the fact that I’d almost certainly derive a novel from the project as well. As I said to her, I’m still at the taffy-pulling stage of thinking about this. Sadly, I’ll have to set the taffy aside over the weekend as chemo, like Calgon, takes me away.
That’s the news from Lake Jaybegone, where all the ideas are above average.
Originally published at jlake.com. You can comment here or there.