It’s been a rough week. Began with the horrendous lower GI problems. That segued into difficult therapist conversations. Then the immune system crash and the postponed chemotherapy session. The the CEA levels thing. Really, I feel like cancer has been banging my skull against pavement all week, trying to shake the loose change out of my ears.
I’m out of pennies, dude. And parasites that kill their hosts are not evolutionarily successful.
In the middle of all this I got Kalimpura finished, but since then, a combination of post-novel ennui and cancer stress has kept me away from the keyboard. Today my plan is to work on one or more of a list of smaller projects I have committed to. In no particular order, these are:
- Transmit Kalimpura to my editor for formal turn-in
- Respond to an email interview
- Draft a script on metastasis for a science podcast
- Participate in a podcast interview
- Revise and submit a short story currently in draft
- Write a committed short story I haven’t yet been able to focus on
- Doing some editorial work on an anthology proposal
- Make initial notes on a proposal/outline for a mooted collaborative novel project with urban fantasy author J.A. Pitts
Besides all that, I have some Sunspin feedback to review, I want to start working on collating my last 3.5 years of cancer blogging into a book proposal, and I have a difficult blog post to draft on cancer, coping and terminal diagnoses. (No, that’s not code for something bad I haven’t admitted to yet. Don’t worry.)
Not that all or even most of this will happen today. It’s just the landscape immediately before me, at least pending feedback from la agente on Calamity of So Long a Life and what we need to do to finalize that book to market.
Also, if you’re expecting something from me and don’t recognize your project/commitment/whatever on the above list, this might be a terrific time to write and remind me. My attention to detail isn’t quite what it could be these days, thanks to chemo brain, and I expect to completely run out of capability and attention span sometime in the next 3-5 weeks as my chemo fog deepens.
Originally published at jlake.com. You can comment here or there.