Technical Difficulties

1. Yesterday I posed with a giant inflatable colon to promote colorectal cancer awareness. Most surreal Thursday morning ever.

Yes, a colonoscopy is not the most fun you will ever have, but speaking as a friend of the awesome Jay Lake and as someone who has had a polyp removed from her colon and will be going back for another screening in a couple years, colon cancer needs to be beaten to death with a stick.

2. Liz Bourke has reviewed The Goblin Emperor for Tor.com. As an author, positive reviews are great, but what you really want are good reviews, reviews that understand the book you tried to write and convey it well. This is that kind of review.

3. I am currently undergoing all kinds of adjustments to my . . . I don't even know what to call it. The victory conditions for sleep? They're shipping me a different mask to try with the little Cthulhu machine. It will still look like a disastrous attempt at an elephant costume, but hopefully it will (a) be more comfortable and (b) seal to my face better. Yes, I have seen Aliens. Please don't remind me.

But ALSO, my sleep doctor and I are trying to rejigger my RLS medications, because I'd gotten to the point where it was requiring way too much narcotics to club the damn thing into unconsciousness. The new medication is definitely working, so that's a plus, and I am re-weaning myself off the narcotics. Yes, there has been just a tiny bit of withdrawal. I haven't gone off them entirely yet, but I am working on it because I hate the damn drugs. I am hoping that when I can finally stop taking them, I will be less tired and also that my creativity will come back again.

It did come back in December and January before drying up again in February, and the creepy thing is that I can actually articulate the difference. When everything is working correctly (i.e., what I thought of as "normal" until the clusterfuck began in 2010), there are words in my head. Well, there are always words in my head. I am like Hector Puncheon, who "usually thought articulately, and often, indeed, conversed quite sensibly aloud with his own soul." So maybe it's more accurate to say that the staus quo ante, to which I desire ardently to return, is that there are stories forming, word by word. Because there are words, separate from my internal narration/dialogue. They form themselves into sentences, and the sentences form narratives. When it was working right, I would frequently "get" sentences from Booth out of nowhere.

Now, I can force prose. There are always days when you have to. But it's not the same, at least from my side of the proscenium, and I really didn't realize what I'd lost until I had it back. I didn't realize that there was a wellspring, that I wasn't imagining that writing used to involve joy instead of just grim desperation.

I had it back, and then the RLS went bad, and it was gone again. I knew that bad RLS nights correlated with low or nonexistent creativity, and now I know what it's attacking. I know that there's a thing that should be there that isn't. And I can only hope that it can grow back. Again.

This is most likely the last post I will make specifically about my ankle, unless something changes dramatically for better or worse, although I'll probably still bitch about it from time to time.

I'm making this post for closure on the series of posts I made about breaking my ankle and recovering therefrom, and because everything is a learning experience and everything is potentially story material, so that anyone thinking about breaking a character's ankle will have some idea of (at least some of) the possible repercussions and outcomes.

( cut for the laundry list )

Overall--and I want to be clear about this--I am extremely lucky. I do have full range of motion, and the lingering problems don't prevent me from doing any of the things I love. The RLS is far, far worse, both in terms of day to day nuisance value and because it makes travel so very, very unpleasant. But my ankle is never going to be as good as it was before I broke it, and while I'm at peace with that (unlike with the sleep apnea, which still makes me want to punch things), it is a fact that requires some workarounds and hacks in order to be manageable. (Really, the cut-up old socks are damn near miraculous.)

And that's the new status quo.

This is just to let everyone know that I'm going to be off the internet for the next couple of months. Do not panic; although it is a medical issue, it is nothing life-threatening or paradigm-shifting.

Hopefully, I'll be back, at least in a limited capacity, by the New Year.

In the meantime, two things:

1. Since someone asked & I suspect other people will be interested in the answer: no, there is not currently any legally available e-format (or paper format for that matter) of either Mélusine or The Virtu. This is because I, personally, do not have a useable electronic version of either book and thus cannot self-publish them through Lulu and/or Smashwords (or another of their ilk), which I promise you is still the plan. I am really, wretchedly sorry about this state of affairs, but making any of the files I do have into useable versions of the text of the published books is something I cannot do right now.

2. If you need to get in touch with me, to ask me a question or tell me about something important, my email address is semonette (at) sarahmonette.com. I will be checking my email, although not necessarily every day.

Best wishes to you all for the rest of 2012.

My body, as I have noticed before, thinks it has a sense of humor. Sunday, I write that one of my goals for 2012 is to be healthy. Monday, I come down with the stomach flu.

Ha bloody ha.

The violently disgusting part of the program was mercifully brief, but apparently stomach flu acts as an amplifer for RLS. Monday afternoon I ended up going to Urgent Care, not for the flu, but for the involuntary twitching and spasms I was having in both legs. If RLS is like having little dragons chasing each other up and down my legs, this was big dragons. On STEROIDS. We weren't to too serious for numbers, but we definitely reached my pain is not fucking around. (The doctor said that gastrointestinal upset can have neurological effects, which was a new one on me. Of course, usually those effects are weakness in the legs, not uncontrollable twitching. Because I just have to be a special snowflake.) They ended up giving me an extra dose of my usual RLS medication--which, hey, three cheers for Lyrica, because it worked.

Since then, I've been virusish: weak and washed out and although I'm not nauseated any longer, food is deeply unappealing. And there's the twitching. The horrible relentless twitching. The sleep clnic doctors have okayed my taking an extra Lyrica during the day and assured me Tuesday that things would die down in "a couple days."

The degree to which I want them to be right cannot be expressed in words.

::twitch::

So, today mirrorthaw and I spent way more of our Saturday than either of us had intended in various healthcare institutions, determining that what I have is NOT a blood clot in my right leg. It is a Baker's cyst. Which is good news (no blood clot = YAY!), but is in itself annoying and painful and about all there is to do about it is wait for it to go away.

My body thinks it has a sense of humor, but it's wrong.

So, in case anybody was wondering, the RLS isn't beaten yet. It's definitely improved--it's mostly just the right leg now, except on really bad nights, and it's not as miserablely awful. But it's still bad enough that I can't sleep until it lets go. I've started thinking of it as a very small dragon flexing its claws in my right quadriceps; when the dragon goes to sleep, so can I.

But this lack of sleep is interfering with basically everything, including my writing, and most specifically the revisions to The Goblin Emperor which I need to have done by September first. Mostly what's been happening lately is that I open the file and then just stare at it sadly, kind of like this:


(Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Dogs Don't Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving)

This is not a good state of affairs.

So I let my doctor at the sleep clinic prescribe temazepam (brand name Restoril), even though I do not like sleeping pills, and I tried it last night.

It was an interesting experience.

It did work (Ambien didn't), but it seemed to send my body to sleep well before my mind, so I lay there for I don't know how long, being aware that my body had become this great inert LUMP. On the other hand, it worked on the dragon, too, so there was a certain amount of pleasure simply in being aware that my right thigh wasn't doing the latent-twitch thing that it does almost all the time these days. (It's not that I'm actually twitching; it's that my right quadriceps feels like it's about to twitch. CONSTANTLY.) And I know I did sleep, because I had weird dreams (that part, at least, is comfortingly familiar), and I slept for what must be about twelve hours.

On the other other hand, I feel disassociated and unsteady and not particularly well rested--although that last may be attributable to chronic lack of sleep rather than the temazepam. So I'll keep taking it, at least for another couple days (yes, I am hyper-vigilant about that whole chemical-dependency thing, thank you), but I'm in no danger of coming to like it.

1. The Gabapentin has stopped working.

2. My (baffled) doctor has prescribed Lyrica, which my insurance company does not want to let me have. Since the paperwork couldn't get cleared up before the weekend, it will be Monday before I have a chance even to TRY this new drug. ("I want a new drug, one that does what it should"--Glen Phillips's cover of that song is BEYOND BRILLIANT, btw. And there's always Weird Al and "I Want A New Duck".)

3. This is the second time in 2011 I've had this problem, since my insurance company decided at the beginning of the year that it didn't want to cover Protonix, which I have been taking successfully for 10+ years. It would rather I take Prilosec, which is not as effective (I'm on a doubled dose, and am suspicious I may have to go back and tell my gastroenterologist that's not working either).

4. And this is with GOOD health insurance.

5. Also, our fourteen-year-old Saab has just gone pear-shaped. I think Friday the Thirteenth was just waiting until Saturday.

So I voted today, in exactly the pinkoliberalcommiebitch way you would expect of me. I also ran a number of other errands, including an appointment with my GI specialist so that maybe I can stop feeling queasy all the time.

And, following mrissa's Law, I stopped for ice cream. (The Chocolate Shoppe's Peanut Butter Cup, which--just in case you need to know--I recommend highly.)

Ice cream is almost always, IMHO, a good idea. Sometimes, it is also the right idea, and today was one of those times. My mood and general demeanor improved approximately a hundredfold between walking into the ice cream parlor and walking out again.

In celebration of that, I'm going to offer a list of some other things that have made me feel cheerful this week:

• Occasionally, I talk in my sleep. Sunday morning, mirrorthaw tells me, I said, very clearly, "Oh god, an audience." I have no idea what I was dreaming about.
  
• Monday, when I dragged myself out of bed, there were no jellicle ninjas visible. I staggered out into the hall, and--like magic!--two little black faces appeared, one from the TV room and one from the stairs, to see if I was doing anything cats might be interested in.
  
• The crocuses are blooming, in a distinctly Dear Old Man Winter, fuck you very much fashion.
  
• Drabblecast has given matociquala and me an awesome graphic:
  
  

1. I dreamed Monday night that I was cast as the Wicked Witch of the West in a production of Alice in Wonderland. (stillsostrange was Alice, which tells you what kind of Alice we're talking about.) I've been wondering all week, more or less idly, how to make the mashup work.

2. Dear Feckless Acupuncture Clinic: If you wish us to have a client/service provider relationship of any kind, there must be a method by which I can communicate with you. Either phone or email is fine, but ONE OF THEM HAS GOT TO GET A RESPONSE.

3. Okay, maybe it's not my magnesium/calcium/zinc supplements making me queasy. Maybe it's just me. :P

4. Amazon says there's cover art for The Tempering of Men.

5. Johnny Cash covering Sheryl Crow's "Redemption Day" has depths of awesome beyond what I would have expected. And that's saying something.

THIS IS NOT THE SALE POST. YOU CANNOT BUY THINGS FROM HERE.

---

So here's the thing. Due to the RLS being a complete monster for the past week, I haven't been getting to sleep before about four in the morning--and therefore, haven't been able to drag myself out of bed before noon. Or one. (I hate this, btw, but that's not the point here.) Also, Wednesday, I have a dressage lesson at three, and I know for a fact that if I'm setting up sale posts to go live at two, I will be late. Which is bad.

So I'm making a change. The Ben Jonson Memorial Fundraiser will start at midnight CST, February 2nd, and run 'til midnight CST, February 3rd. This is much more realistic vis-à-vis my actual life right now.

---

How we're gonna work it:

Except for the production costs of Unnatural Creatures, all the money goes to the Companion Animal Fund.

I will pay shipping costs, and I will ship anywhere in the world. Depending on what the total ends up being, that may mean a lot of things get shipped Media Mail.

After the sale, I will set up a post with screened comments so that if you want things personalized (e.g., To Gawain, with best wishes, Sarah Monette), you can tell me what name or names. If you don't want an inscription, that's cool, too. I'll also ask that everyone who bought something comment, so that I don't make any mistakes in the shipping.

There will be three sale posts, one for the Doctrine of Labyrinths auction, one for the Unnatural Creatures subscription, and one for all the items that I'm simply selling.

1. The auction will run from midnight to midnight. Starting bid is $100.

2. Unnatural Creatures will be on sale from midnight to midnight. You can buy as many copies as you like. I won't place the order with Lulu until after the sale ends (and possibly a little after that, depending on when hominysnark gets the cover finished), so there's no need to worry about running out. I will order as many copies as have been paid for at the end of the sale. Please be advised that, since I will have to sign all of them once Lulu has shipped them to me, it may take me a while to get them shipped out to y'all.

3. Everything else. How this part of the sale is going to work goes like this: (1) You make a comment to the post indicating that you want to buy an item. (2) I reply to the comment, letting you know that the item is yours. (3) Then you PayPal me. I don't want anybody paying me when they are, for instance, the sixth person to comment for the five Companion to Wolves hardbacks. Also, if you are having cash-flow issues (as I know at least one interested party is), you may stake your claim during the sale and pay me later. I will not ship anything until the money has transferred, and I won't hold items indefinitely, but you can have a couple days' grace if you need it.


Also, if you don't want to buy anything (or can't afford to buy the thing you want), but would like to make a donation in Ben's memory (for whatever amount--if you can only spare a dollar but want to contribute, that is perfectly okay with me), I will figure out how to set up a PayPal button on the catch-all post so that that can be easy.

---

If there's anything I've forgotten to address, or anything that's unclear, or heck, just anything you want to ask about, please comment.