Jay Lake (jaylake) wrote,
Jay Lake
jaylake

[writing] Chapter one of Going to Extremes is in draft

Chapter one of my sample chapters is in rough draft. This thing is raw, in several senses of the term. And it's a real challenge to write in a nonfiction voice. I'm basically treating this like a giant blog entry. Almost conversational. This as opposed to my usual rather stylized fiction voice. Which in turn produces the odd sensation that I'm not really writing, not really working.

Interesting problem to have.

Meanwhile, a tiny bit of WIP:
I want to touch on another aspect of my treatments and personal health history. So far, my oncologists and I have been working towards a cure, as opposed to managing for life extension. The odds of my full cure drop with each recurrence of the cancer. Mine is not aggressive in the technical sense of that term, but it is a persistent little bugger. As of this writing, my five-year survival odds are somewhere south of 30%. That means there’s a better than seven in ten chance of me not surviving to see my daughter finish high school.

Think about that for a minute. This child, whom I have loved beyond reason since I first learned of her existence, whom I have gone through fire and hell with, who is even now struggling with all the vagaries and challenges of female adolescence along with her own personal burdens, this child of mine might lose me when she perhaps needs me most. Chances are more than even that I won’t live to see her take her first steps into adulthood. That I won’t be there to see her begin dating, fight her way gloriously through the pitfalls and triumphs of high school, launch on her own.

I might leave home before she does. And there are no summer vacations from the country of the dead.


Tags: cancer, extremes, health, personal, process, wip, writing
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