Technical Difficulties

1. On the meat front:
( health stuff: interesting if you're fighting similar issues; otherwise, probably not )

My GP agreed with me that the next logical step may be a referral to the UW Sleep Clinic. If so, I will blog that for posterity, too.

2. I promised a report on Noodler's Old Dutch Sepia, ergo:
( ink geeks click through )

5. The awesome Simon Tofield has a new and seasonal Simon's Cat short: "Santa Claws."

Last night was Lovecraftian: unspeakable, abyssal, and possibly squamous. Maybe batrachian. Not so much with the eldritch, though.

The RLS teamed up with my insomnia, so I was uselessly awake until four. I hate the fact that all the drugs and supplements and everything else have really been able to do is make the RLS unpredictable. So I don't have it every night--which is great, don't get me wrong. That part I have no quarrel with. But when I do get it, I have no idea why. Why last night? Why not Saturday night? Or last Thursday night?

*ahem* Obviously, I'm just a tad bit cranky today. Move along, nothing to see here. We are a hedge.

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And, in fact, I have something shiny and distracting to offer:

Mad Norwegian Press has announced the full list of contributors and the table of contents for Whedonistas, which is slated for publication March 15, 2011. My essay, "The Kindness of Monsters," is about the struggle of monsters in Whedon's various worlds to learn to be human, and why the finale of Angel made me cry.

(If you'd rather not deal with a .pdf, the table of contents is here below the cut:

( here! )

Lots of cool women, including coffeeem, matociquala, yuki_onna, rm, priscellie, seanan_mcguire (whose essay is online here at Tor.com), and many others whose LJ handles I do not know.* And, ne plus ultra, rarelylynne.)

I, personally, am geeked beyond words about the Juliet Landau interview.


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*If you are one of them, or you know their handles, comment on this post, and I'll add them in.

So today at 10 (after an excruciatingly bad night), I had my first acupuncture appointment. It was interesting.

The acupuncturist diagnosed a chronic yin-deficiency and suggested some ways to help combat that; she also suggested a herbal supplement that she herself uses (she has restless wrist).* Then I took off my shoes and socks (and brace and compression stocking) and got up on the table for her to put needles in my hands and forearms, my calves, ankles, and feet, my ears, and the crown of my head, so I was a kind of postmodern porcupine or a really minimalist Martyrdom of St. Sebastian. Mostly, although I could feel the needles going in, it wasn't painful--except for a particular spot on both calves that caused stabbing agony when she adjusted the needles. (This seems to be part of the point, however, since those two were the only points at which she stopped and said, "Can you feel this?") After insertion, I couldn't feel most of the needles, except for one in my left forearm and one in my right hand which maintained a low-level dull discomfort. So this is not something I would do for fun, but it wasn't unendurable, either.

Then she turned the overhead light out and left me and the needles to work things out.

People apparently sleep; I did a four-count breathing pattern (in for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four, which self-modified into just in for four, out for four, after a while) and tried basically not to get in my own way. The worst problem I had was finding a position that would let my arms relax without either (a.) flopping off the table or (b.) bumping the needles. After a while (I have no idea how long), I had to call the acupuncturist for a blanket, as my forearms got chilly. I had a hell of a time getting my voice to work, which is something I've noticed happen coming out of savasana after intense yoga sessions. She draped the blanket very carefully over my porcupined forearms, and then I lay there and counted breaths and tried not to think about my bladder. (Yes, very like trying not to think about a blue-eyed polar bear.)

At the beginning of the session, both legs were relaxed, and my left leg stayed that way, warm and boneless and not causing trouble. But my right leg started twitching. It got to where it was like I could feel the RLS like a fist-sized iron knot in my leg (outer side, front, just above the knee), preventing the leg from relaxing and causing this horrible counter-productive twitching. I was on the verge of giving up in despair and calling the acupuncturist to say this wasn't working when something really interesting happened.

The iron knot dissolved.

My right leg was abruptly a leg again, warm and relaxed like the left leg.

I was still just lying there being astonished when the acupuncturist came in to remove the needles. (Ergo, it took most of the hour for that to happen.) I got up carefully, paid the clinic (because, of course, my health insurance does not cover acupuncture), and walked home. Fed the cats, took the acupuncturist's herbal supplement and the calcium/magnesium/zinc supplement the pharmacist recommended with a Pepper Jack cheese sandwich, and am going to spend the afternoon drinking lots of water and probably typing in my progress on "Clouded Mary" from yesterday. If I'm even that ambitious.

I have no idea if the iron knot will stay dissolved even long enough to get to bedtime tonight. But, even if it doesn't, I felt the RLS retreat.

And that is truly amazing.


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*Evergreen Herbs Flex SC, if you're curious. Incidentally, Catzilla seems to be fascinated by the bottle.

More terrible RLS last night. And the damn acupuncture clinic still has not called me back to schedule an appointment. (Dear clinic, this is deeply sub-optimal. Nolove, Mole.) And my Kinesis keyboard has died, like a Norwegian Blue parrot. (I'm typing this on a spare Mac keyboard mirrorthaw happened to have lying around, which is fine as a stopgap measure, but no good as a long-term solution.)

But.

1. I have 2100 words on a new story, tentatively titled, "Clouded Mary and Crawdad Marie," which seems to be what happens when steampunk crashes head on into The Wizard of Oz. Also, seriously, inspiration can come from anywhere. This one started in a rest stop in Indiana on the way back from WFC with a series of three doors labeled "Assisted Care," "Women," and "Mechanical." I'm hoping it will kick up something with which to simulate a plot soon, but in the meantime, I'm enjoying the characters and the world building and, well, the writing. It's a tremendous relief to discover that I can still do this and all the machinery works.

(I wonder if one reason for the popularity of steampunk is that many writers are secretly convinced their creativity is like one of those steampunk machines with the gears and the levers and maybe a steam whistle. ... Or is that just me?)

2. cmpriest is in town for TeslaCon, and although I am not doing TeslaCon, I do get to have dinner with Cherie tomorrow night.

3. Also tomorrow, I am going to make the grand experiment of getting back on my horse, and I don't mean that metaphorically.

4. Everyone involved seems to like my Whedonistas essay.

5. Truly lovely fan art for The Bone Key.

Around the interwebs:

• Via maryrobinette, there are some Icelandic horses in Zillah, Washington, in desperate need of rescue.
  
• John Scalzi has some rational things to say about last night's elections. I personally feel that if my county could secede from Wisconsin, we could elect Russ Feingold our Grand High Panjandrum, and that would be excellent.
  
• jimhines, awesome as always, is posting about sexual harassment at conventions.
  
• Today's moment of zen from jaylake was pretty much exactly what I needed. See above re: election.
  
• And, as another corrective to the general fucknuttedness of humanity these days, Apex Magazine's special Arab/Muslim issue is online.
  

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Short version of last night: the legs were fine, but the respiratory system was awful. Curse you, con crud.

Today I need to run--well, walk--errands, including paying the cat sitter and picking up a couple of prescriptions. This has the added advantage of providing at least some of the daily exercise I need. Since one of my goals, aside from staying off the narcotics, is to decrease the amount of Requip I'm taking (and hopefully escape its unpleasant side-effects--nothing like a little nausea just before bed), daily exercise is transitioning from a should to a must. Which, on the one hand, does provide motivation to stay fit, which is a plus. On the other, I hate being told what to do, even by my own body.

Still not able to drive, which is frustrating (cats need to go to various vets, I need to get back to riding, etc. etc. etc.), but I flinch just thinking about having to stomp on the brakes, so it's clearly not time yet.

On the career side, I can tell you that The Goblin Emperor is tentatively scheduled for Spring 2012, although obviously this is still mostly vaporware, and I'll have a short story collection coming out from Prime in November 2011, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves. (Don't worry, I'll be posting about that again--and probably again and again--closer to the publication date.)

Also, at WFC I got my contributor's copies of The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2010, edited by Paula Guran, which includes the Booth story, "White Charles." (I would offer you a link, but Prime's website is currently not cooperating.)

So, taken all and all and despite the con crud, I'm doing okay.

This morning, the orthopedist gave me the all clear to start getting rid of the walking boot.

Yeehaw! says I.

I spent part of this afternoon calling first my HMO (which does not cover acupuncture treatments) and then the acupuncture clinic which is within walking distance. The acupuncturist was very nice and perfectly honest. The answer here, as with everything else about RLS, is "Maybe." Which, at $60 a session, is a rather expensive ambivalence.

But I note two things:
1. My GP's nurse offered to put in a referral to a neurologist, but warned me it takes 6 to 8 weeks to get an appointment. Also, when I asked, she said it was about 50/50 whether they'd be able actually to help or not. So, neurology offers no better odds than acupuncture.

2. The acupuncturist talked about chi and blood stasis, as opposed to the orthopedist, who said essentially, "Nobody knows why," but they agreed that the return to normal motion should make the RLS quiet down.

I bothered mirrorthaw at work, and we agreed that the best thing was to wait until after WFC: give the increased dosage of Requip and my new and very exciting mobility a chance to work before we try other, expensive and/or time consuming options which may or may not do anything anyway. And hope that something starts working before I run out of Vicodin, because I don't think my GP's going to give me any more. At least now, though, if I need to get up in the middle of the night, I can just go ahead and damn well get up, without having to plan it out like a land war in Asia.

In the meantime, even though I'm having a lousy day on other health fronts (ME: Meat, is this nausea really necessary? MEAT: Bleah.), I am absolutely loving the fact that I'm wandering around the house barefoot. It's like a freaking dream come true.

Tried going down to one oxycodone last night, vis-à-vis the RLS. It did not work. I am disheartened. Also draggy and exhausted and probably a Very Slow Loris Indeed.

On the plus side, PT is going well. My physical therapist is very encouraging. I'm down to one crutch, and we have hopes that I will be able to dispense with crutches entirely sometime next week. This would be a TREMENDOUS boon.

I'm doing better on other fronts: more energy, less nausea. The writing is kind of rocky, but not dramatically outside normal parameters. "Thirdhop Scarp," the Booth story I've been working on since approximately the dawn of time, is now 16,000 words long, and it's not what you could even call close to being finished. It is obviously a novella, which explains why it would not work when I kept stubbornly trying to make it a novelette.*

I did not want to write a novella (which would be why I kept stubbornly trying to make it a novelette), as there is practically no market for them, but the story does not care. And I would much rather it be a good, even if unsaleable, novella, than a bad (and therefore even more unsaleable and also embarrassing) novelette.

Actually, at the moment, what I want is for it to be a finished novella. We can work on "good" later.

Writing. Still, blessedly, not performance art.

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*Definitions by word lengths here, courtesy of SFWA. Personally, I hate the word "novelette," but if we're going to make artificial distinctions by word length (which, obviously, we are), we have to call them something. I have a tendency to write novelettes, particularly, though not exclusively, with Booth, and I admit, I do not think of, for instance, "The Wall of Clouds," as a short story.

Also please note, while I'm being cantankerous, that "novelette" is another English word, like "cigarette," "kitchenette," "Rockette," etc., that provides a useful clue as to the pronunciation of my surname. You don't say it "novel-ay," do you?

Took the first full dose of Requip last night (it's one of those drugs you have to ease into), and the RLS struck back. A good time was distinctly not had by all. We will hope for better things tonight--for one, I will not repeat the optimistic experiment of skipping the oxycodone.

Then there was insomnia. There's still insomnia, for that matter, although I did get some sleep between 2 and 7, and now there's nausea to go with it. I do not like anything about this combination, anymore than I like the thin but persisting narcotic fog in which I move.

(Yes, the narcotic fog is preferable to the RLS. Extrapolate a little, and you know everything you want to know about RLS.)

The ankle, ironically, is at this point the least of my problems.

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This post is depressingly self-centered, as I have not the wherewithal to do better. But at least now you know why I'm not posting much.