Hyperfertility Mystery Solved!!

Playing in the background: The ceiling fan. On second thought let's crank up Pandora, here. Okay, Sea and Silence by Deuter. Liking that.

My rabid fans are no doubt aware that for some time now I've been having these fits of hyperfertility. The most screamingly obvious was back in May, when I camped out in front of my laptop for a solid holiday weekend and wrote something like 80 pages of Soulmender. What is hyperfertility, you ask? Well, that's when I feel like working nonstop for days, hardly bothering with such niceties as food and sleep. Or having nonstop sex, but this being a religious establishment and all that, I don't talk about that part in public. In one of my more infamous episodes, I cranked out the end of Part the Second of the Almighty Trilogy in an eighteen-hour sprawl of wordplay that had me forget to get up and get a bottle of water and then wonder, two hours later, why I was thirsty. I call it hyperfertility because it seems to hit right around the time I'm most likely to get pregnant, and because I feel like if a male came within about 100 yards of me, he'd have an excellent chance of knocking me up. Luckily, the only male around is Caesar and he is neutered. (By the way, you can follow Caesar on Twitter: @carpefelem)

Well, after the Soulmender incident, I got to thinking that this maybe wasn't quite normal. I mean, writing is temporary insanity, but, you know, telling myself I'll sleep an extra hour so it's okay to stay up until 11:30 or midnight when I know full well I'm gonna get up at 5 anyway and go to the pool, and then do it again the next night, because the more sleep deprived I am, the longer the hyperfertility lasts, is, you know, probably not all that good for me. The copious amounts of caffeine and sugar that keep it going are also probably not the greatest.

So as one of the hyperfertile fits was winding down, I went to see my doc for my Annual Exam (TM). And she asked me how I was doing and, for some strange reason, I leveled with her. And she asked me how long I'd been having manic episodes. And I said, about a year now but probably longer than that and did you just call them manic episodes? (She had.) Manic as in manic depression? (Yep, only we call it bipolar disorder these days.) Are you serious? (She was.) Well, crap, what does that mean?

Well, it meant that she was gonna port me off to a psychiatrist. And again for some strange reason, I went along with this. What's more, I wrote up a brief history of the Jeniverse, including my previous experiences with psychiatry (which began when I was five) and odd behavior among my family members (most specifically my grandparents, all four of whom, though dearly beloved, were a piece of work.) Being the paralegal that I am, I even faxed it over to the psychiatrist before the appointment. I mean, just in case, you know? It didn't necessarily have to be bipolar disorder. It could just be, you know, genetically enhanced weirdness.

So the psychiatrist, who was very nice, greeted me as, "You're the one who sent the fax, right? Boy, I wish everyone would do that. It sure made my job a lot easier." She then asked me a whole bunch of questions, some of which were bizarre ("Name the last three Presidents." Crap. Okay, there was George W. and was there a world before then?) and some of which were just spooky. "Do you wake up a lot during the night?" "Do you have a history of alcohol abuse or heavy drinking?" "Did you have thoughts of suicide before you turned 13?" How does she know these things? Hmm, she must be psychic. Maybe she's a mindbender. Maybe she's related to Roland and I should get out of here right now because - oh, right. Reality break, Jen. Sorry about that.

Anyway, when the smoke cleared and the dust settled she told me not only did I Have It but that I'd probably Had It my whole life. They know a lot more than they did in the 1970s, when I began my couch trip and when the idea of a bipolar child was unheard of. Now they know that not only can children be bipolar but they're catching them at the ages of three and four. Back then kids were more likely to be diagnosed with ADD, or "hyperactivity" which was what it was called. (Hyperactivity. Hyperfertility. Hmm.) What's more, they know it's genetic for a fact. If you don't have the genetic marker, you can't get it. And since all four of my grandparents had Serious Issues, it's entirely possible I got a quadruple dose. Or at least I got it from both parents, by way of their parents. "If you had children, I'd be telling you to watch your kids like a hawk," she said. (Nope, no kids. Hyperfertility notwithstanding.)

Cliches aside, What Does All This Mean? Well, firstly it means I've been very lucky. Bipolar disorder usually gets worse, not better over time. I've already been doing a lot of the things they'd tell me to do; exercise frequently, meditate, hot baths (jacuzzi, natch), massage therapy. I've also been self-medicating for years (booze and food, in that order; I quit drinking four years ago and started going to OA two years ago and gee, the symptoms just turned up out of nowhere, didn't they?) Secondly, it means I'll be taking some med or another for a very long time, probably forever, and visiting the doc often to get Checked Up Uponst. I'll need to keep a journal, track my moods, stay away from situations that stress me out. "But really," she said, "it's not that different than monitoring diabetes."

So I've been thinking about that, and I think she's right. In diabetes, your pancreas produces abnormal chemistry. In bipolar, your brain produces abnormal chemistry. With diabetes, you monitor your blood sugar levels,take certain meds, exercise, eat certain meals at certain times, and avoid some foods, including alcohol and excess sugar. With bipolar, you do all of that (monitoring moods instead of blood sugar levels) plus hot baths, massage and plenty of sleep. No more late night writing binges. No more staying up till 11 to watch Surviving Disaster (Dammit!!) I've already got a diabetic in the house, so I'm following most of the rules as it is. And Joan likes massages, too.

Notwithstanding, I'm A LITTLE FREAKED OUT RIGHT NOW, THANKEWVERYMUCH. There's something about going from a diagnosis of major depression, which most people get (everyone feels down once in a while) to bipolar disorder, which most people don't get. I mean, depression's normal. Bipolar - well, that's crazy. Maybe not walking down the street muttering to no one in particular and every once in a while announcing I'm God crazy, but still, crazy. So I'm trying to get over that. And I'm reading lots of books and scanning the Internet and trying to Connect With My Peer Group, which, to be honest, I've always sucked at. And strange as this sounds, I'm kind of mourning my lost hyperfertility. As not-good-for-me as it certainly was, it was a lot of fun.

Writing As Temporary Insanity. Discuss.

Playing in the background: The soothing sudsy noise of the washing machine.
Meters swum today: None. Overslept. But I'll probably ride my bike down around the lake later.

Repeat 100 times: I Will Not Write Under The Influence of Politics. I Will Not Write Under The Influence Of Politics. I Will Not...well, you get the idea. Having calmed down a little and wiped the foam off my face, and in the clearer light of - uh, midafternoon, I can see how that image about the severed head might have upset a few people. I'll offer no apologies but I will say That's Not Normally Like Me. Brahma vijara maitri and all that.

Thing is, almost all writing is done under the influence of something. Sane sober people hardly ever see the need to sit at a keyboard and type all day for something they may not even get paid for. There are all these jokes about alcoholic poets (I like the one where the poet, sobering up after a long night with the quill, refuses a cup of the blood of life, that is, my favorite stimulant, saying, "Certainly not. Coffee is for novelists.") and of course lots of real writers were serious hardcore addicts of one form or another. Wilde (booze, inflated ego), Poe (booze), Hemingway (pretty much anything he could get his hands on but mainly booze), Hunter S. Thompson (I think heroin mostly), Bret Easton Ellis (God only knows), Anne McCaffrey (whatever it is, I want some). I have the food thing, and I did drink a bit in my day. But honestly, I think writing is closer to temporary insanity. At least, it is for me.

Take last weekend, for example, when I abruptly wrapped up Spellbinder in a bizarre 18-hour binge of wordplay. I was way, way deep in San Sebastian most of that time (my fake Latin American country, named after my late cat and in homage to Hemingway; it's standing in for El Salvador) but I do recollect a few things. Like sitting at the keyboard and thinking, "I'm thirsty," then about two hours later noticing that I was still thirsty because (wait for it) when I noticed the first time that I was thirsty, it flat out didn't occur to me to frick'n get up and get a bottle of water. Another time I remember Joan asked me a question and I answered with "I don't know, I'm not really here." Joan, by the way, frequently sees me glaze over and asks me "Where did you go?" I guess assuming that I'm visiting the Pure Land or some alternate reality; usually I'm thinking about something much more mundane like shopping lists or how not to trim the cat's nails next time. Even when I'm not putting in marathon weekends, though, I'm often up too late, spend too much time thinking about writing when I should be Mindful Of The Present Moment (ie, driving), and calling up friends in the middle of dinner parties to ask if you can drink heroin (ask Gaby about this, she thought it was pretty hilarious).

So, like, is this healthy? Is this halfway normal? Do other writers do stuff like this or am I unique? And if it's not akin to abusing a substance, why does it feel like (as most brilliant stated by Rod "The Bod" Stewart) "I got lightning in my veins, and the rhythm of my heart is beating like a drum"?

I guess it's better than heroin. It is legal, after all.

Incidentally, thanks, Joan, for putting up with me. Again. Still.

Part the Third

Playing in the background: Still nothing.
Meters swum today: None.

Well, gang, with Spellbinder wrapped up there's only one thing to do: Start part three. Oh, and find a publisher for Part One. Did I mention I don't have a publisher yet? I don't have a publisher yet. Working on it though.

So here's what I'm calling part three: Soulmender.

Like it? Hate it? Let me know.

Spellbinder all done

Playing in the background: Nothing.
Meters swum today: None. Am about to embark on a 15 or so mile bike ride, tho.

Sorry for lack of postage, I've had my nose to the proverbial grindstone. I finished Spellbinder, my work in progress, last night. Now I have two volumes of a trilogy done and no publisher for the first one. (Gee, Jen, maybe you should work on finding a publisher. You think? Yeah, I do.)

It ended in a bad spot. I'm sorry in advance. See, a publisher could tell me how to fix that. Okay, I'll stop whining now. I'm tired. 308 pages, in case you are wondering. Roughly 82k words. that's pretty short for me. Course, I am pretty short.

My writers group is awesome.

Playing on the iPod: I know it's David Arkenstone, but I can't even tell ya what album.
Meters swum today: 1750

So the gang and I met over at Aunt Sally's yesterday to discuss mental illness, "Lifetime" Movies of the Week, British comedy, the foolishness of suing massage therapists for damages, and of course all things literary. I'm reminded again how totally outclassed I am. Kellum brought part of the index to his dictionary of mythical beings (yes, folks, we read the index to a dictionary). It was fascinating. I kid you not, it really was cool. He's indexing concepts, such as "tree of life" (26 entries) and "pocket full of sand" (okay, I made that up, but it should be in there) as well as groups of people (the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea, just by way of example) and the various deities and folklorish permutations that tend to hang around with them. This is the 4th edition, by the way, and will be available through Lulu Press shortly. Details here as soon as I have 'em.

Jackie, on the other hand, is morphing into the female Gordon Lightfoot I wanted to be in high school. She brought her guitar and sang a couple of new songs for us. One of 'em was about lonely college girls who go looking for studly Renaissance men who can quote Shakespeare while skinning freshly killed grouse. There was another one about "this game I play in my head until I get over you" which I'm not going to quote because it's sad. She's got an amazing voice, she can actually play that thing with the six strings, and now she's composing on top of it. Good God, people, after all this I gotta drag out the latest chapter of Spellbinder and leave everybody, uh, spellbound. I say it again, I am totally outclassed.

I never thought I'd be saying this, but thank God the Olympics are over. I don't think I've worked on the book in three weeks. It's a good thing I already had a chapter mostly finished or I'd have been Spellbinderless. Or it fell out of my binder. Or something. Anyway, looking forward to things going somewhat back to normal, or as normal as they ever get around here anyway.

Just one more thing about the Olympics though: Whose idea was it to sing "Whole Lotta Love" at the closing ceremonies? I mean, okay, the next Olympics is in London, Led Zeppelin is a classic British band, at least one member (Jimmy Page, who's not aging well) is still alive to show up and play the guitar, the title is nice, but did anybody on the committee actually look at the lyrics?! Or does "Way, way down inside, I'm gonna give you my love/I'm gonna give you every inch of my love/I gotta whole lotta love" translate into Chinese as, "Peace, love and understanding"?

Seriously, if you were the city of London, and Beijing was singing to you, "Shake it for me girl, I wanna be your backdoor man," wouldn't you be a little worried? I'm thinking as long as they're trying to present the new host city in such a good light, why not sing "London Calling" by the Clash? Or "London You're A Lady" by the Pogues? Okay, the Pogues are Irish, but there's always "No Place Like London" from the Sweeney Todd soundtrack (the feel-good movie of the Christmas season, make no mistake). In fact I can't think of too many songs by great London acts that would be less appopriate, except maybe "God Save the Queen." Or "Hungry Like the Wolf". Or, hey, how about "Honky Tonk Woman"?

The Funerary Belly Plate Scene

Playing in the background: "Tougher in Alaska" on the History Channel
Meters swum today: None. See below re: overslept.
Kilometers swum in July, Swim for Distance Month: 7.7 of 40.2

Good news, everybody. Despite my failure to find a malleable female with an available belly for sugar cube counting, I've finished the scene with the Egyptian funerary belly plate that caused such chaos and disruption earlier. Here's the relevant snippet from Spellbinder.
...

 He picks up the briefcase, which is small but oddly heavy for its size. It’s a good thing he hasn’t ordered breakfast because there’s barely room on the table to perch the thing on the edge. He expects it to be locked but it opens on the first try. Inside, the case is lined with black velvet, a drape over the center portion. He pulls back the drape and raises his eyebrows. A square plate of what looks to be solid gold, about the size of a hardback book and covered with Egyptian hieroglyphs, glints in the dim light. “I didn’t think you collected Egyptian stuff.”

“I don’t. I’m Greek, Minoan and a little Chinese. But I, ah, happened onto this one piece, you might say.”

“You might say,” he agrees, tapping the plate with an experimental finger. Definitely gold, and a high purity from the softness. “What is it?”

“It’s the funerary plaque from the tomb of Princess Ankhneferaten,” she says. “Amarna dynasty. She was King Tut’s great-aunt.”

Don Cristobal lets out an appreciative whistle. “Looks like she had a few bucks. What’s it for?”

“They stuck it over the incision, on the stomach, where they took out the guts. When they were making the mummies.”

He pulls his hand back. “I hope it’s been cleaned since then.”

She smiles, though it’s not a friendly smile. “It’s three thousand years old. I imagine it’s been cleaned a few times.”

He looks back into the briefcase. The eye of Horus winks up at him. “I guess you could melt it down,” he says. “Sell it for the gold.”

Iliana does a pretty good job of suppressing a shudder at the idea of somebody melting down a piece of Egyptian art. “I wouldn’t. It’s pretty rare. There’s only six in the world.”

“Yeah? Why’s that? Curses? Ancient magic?”

“No, because it’s made of gold. And it’s small. And portable. Tomb robbers couldn't resist them.”

Don Cristobal grunts. “Well, it’s awful nice of you, ma’am,” he says in a bad John Wayne, “but I don’t reckon I know what I’d do with–”

“You’d take it to Morocco,” Iliana says, tossing a business card on the table. “And you’d call that guy.”

“Fariq Al-Saud, Dealer in Antiquities,” he reads. “Ten Charles de Gaulle Way, Marrakesh.” He looks up. “Why him?”

“Because that’s who I stole it from,” she says, shaking her head at his denseness. “And he’ll be very happy to see it again. I’m sure he’ll make you an acceptable offer.”

“Well, it’s nice,” he admits, “but I’m kind of not in the market for an Egyptian funerary belly plate at the moment, so–”

“I’m not selling it,” she retorts. “I’m giving it to you.”

He frowns. "What are you doing that for?”

“I asked you to leave the kid alone,” Iliana says, and smiles sweetly. “This is just my way of saying pretty please.”
...

Thanks, again, Tammy, for making me sound like I know what I'm talking about -- always a challenge in this business.

Hello, Goddess, My Old Friend

Playing on the iPod: Something slow-moving with lots of flutes (that narrows it down...)
Meters swum yesterday: 1800

I was getting ready to write a post about how mopey and depressed I'd been lately when my old friend the Goddess of Fertility plowed into me like a tsunami. That's her on the left, preggers, nursing and surrounded by All Things Spring. And while it's grand to be staying up until all hours, writing my little heart out, flying along on not much sleep and dodging males for fear of quickening if I get too close, I gotta wonder if there's maybe something wrong with me. Don't normal writers just type about an hour a day and then forget about it? Or, by definition, is there no such thing as a normal writer? I dunno. To be sure, though, sometimes I'm cranking it out full tilt, sometimes I'm not not doing sh*t and sometimes (on a rare day) I do the type an hour and go to bed early thing. Honestly, though, not very bloody often.

In case you're wondering, I'm not bipolar. I've been tested. I have been depressed, and I may be depressed now, but damned if I can tell. As soon as the moon passes last quarter we may find out (tonight, 12:20 U.T.), but for the moment I'm just surfing away. Back in the old days I'd start snarfing sugar and caffiene right about now, to keep that high goin' as long as possible. Alas, I can't do that anymore. Maturity sucks.

The very wise Tammy told me that the reason Tolkein ended The Fellowship of the Ring in such a lousy spot was that the guy, being smart and all that, wrote the whole thing all at once. All 1800 pages or whatever the hell. The publisher had to arbitrarily decide where to chop it up, and that was just where the axe fell. So it's not like he chose to end it there. That's just what happened. Contractual obligations are ugly things sometimes. So here's my new plan; don't end Spellbinder. Well, sort of end it, but just keep goin', start Part the Third and let the publisher decide. This presumes I'm gonna find a publisher. Well, let's be optimistic about this thing.

Meantime, I'm taking suggestions about what to call the third one. Spellbinder got named by accident. Kellum was referring to Mindbender and said Spellbinder by mistake and I said, "Hey, I like that," and thus Part Two had a name. Reminds me of this unbelievably awful trio of vampire romance novels (unbelievably awful and vampire romance novels in one sentence; yep, that's redundant all right) called Confession, Possession and Obsession. My first thought was Mindbender, Spellbinder and Pathfinder, but there's not much about pathfinding in the third one (unless you count stumbling around lost, some of which will in fact happen) and let's face it, that calls to mind the unbelievably awful 2007 remake (unbelievably awful and remake in the same sentence; there I go again) of the 1988 Finnish stunner, Ofelas (Pathfinder). (Star Wars on skis. Find it. Rent it. Fall in love. )

So, seriously, I've been bouncing around titles for part three. Pretender. Left Fender. Return To Sender. My favorite so far is And the Nobel Prize Goes To...

The Things I Do For Science

Playing on the iPod: Something by the Tannahill Weavers
Meters swum today: 1700

Don't ask me how this happened, but it seems that some of the characters in Spellbinder will be fawning over an ancient artifact that, by most accounts, probably doesn't exist. It's a funerary breastplate, or maybe belly plate, that covers an Egyptian mummy over the place where the embalmers made the incision to pull out the, um, guts. There were once lots of them, or so the documents tell us, especially in the Amarna dynasty. However, as these things were made of solid gold, they tended to fall prey to tomb robbers, meddling adventurer archaeologists, embezzling Egyptian bureaucrats and the like. Here's a visual:

But anyway, I'm resurrecting one of 'em and sticking it in the book. Does the book have anything to do with ancient Egypt? Uh, no. Does the funerary plate form any great linchpin for the plot, or anything like that? Uh, no. I just happened to mention to my geologist time-traveling neocraftsperson friend Tammy that I was in need of an artifact of a certain size, that weighed a certain amount, that could be valued at a certain price, and this was what she came up with. So I said what the hell, and now I'm trying to figure out some of the technical details. Namely, how valuable is this thing anyway? Okay, it's made of gold and gold has some value, but how does one weigh an ancient, nonexistent funerary breastplate, er, excuse me, belly plate, in the terms of modern commerce?

I've failed in my attempts to Google "Value of Egyptian Amarna funerary belly plate" for some reason, but I did learn that one troy ounce of gold (whatever the hell that means) is approximately the same physical size as a sugar cube. Said sugar cube size piece of gold, circa 1998 when the tale is set, would have been worth an average of $291 (gold set an all time record low that year, dipping down to $250 before creeping back up again.) So, then, how many sugar cubes make a funerary belly plate?

I propose the following experiment:

Ingredients

1. Calculator
2. Sugar cubes (lots)
3. Small, malleable female willing to subject her belly to science. She can keep her clothes on.

Procedure

1. Have the young lady lie down in the Osiris pose.
1A. Better buy her dinner first.
2. Cover her belly with sugar cubes. No tickling.
3. Gather up the sugar cubes and count them. Bonus points if none of them fall apart.
4. Take the number of sugar cubes, multiply it by $291, and that should be your average figure.

Now, if we used my belly, we'd get some ridiculous stratospheric figure. I've got a calculator and I've added sugar cubes to this week's shopping list (thanks, Joan!) Now all I need is a small, malleable female.

Any volunteers? Dinner's on me...

A snippet from Spellbinder

Look, things are just starting to settle down, Cameron said. I mean, it’s, you know, there’s a house and I live there with some people and they’re nice, and I’m in school and I have some friends, and, you know, it’s–it’s–

Roland pushed the walker around and looked at him, the one green eye reflecting endless patience.

Normal, he managed. Just, you know, ordinary.

The single eye watched him, unmoving.

And I don’t know what I want to do. He didn’t mean to say this much. He couldn’t seem to stop. I mean normal’s okay. Normal’s fine. But what we did was so–

Again Roland waited him out. Not a flicker of expression crossed that scarred face.

Cool, Cameron finished, a poor choice of words for everything he felt.

Then you have a problem, said Roland, which was a relief; for a while there Cameron wondered if he was talking to himself. You cannot be ordinary and extraordinary at the same time, as I’m sure you know.

Jen speaking: I'm closing in on the end of this thing. I think it's gonna end in a bad spot and I don't know what to do about that. When Big Steve wrote the second or third part of The Dark Tower, he ended it with Our Heroes on a train, which just happened to be possessed by a psychotic computer that was hurtling them all toward certain doom. (Flashback: This must have been 1991 because I'd just graduated from college and was on my way to, or from, California with my then-boyfriend, Noah. It was my turn to drive and I only had like twenty pages left. Somehow I talked him into reading me the rest while I drove. After a few pages he kind of got into it. He started doing different voices for the different characters, including this dull monotone for the psychotic computer, and when he got to the non-ending, he said, "Well, that sucks.") The ending I have in mind may be just as sucky as far as being nonconclusive. Will it be as bad as Smilla Jaspersen hopping from one ice floe to another in the far north of Greenland, hoping to find other humans before she freezes to death? I dunno, but I'm afraid it's not going to make anybody happy, including me.

What do you do, when you're in the middle of a trilogy and there's no good place to go from Book Two to Book Three? Or Book One to Book Two, for that matter. Ol' Tolkein picked a hell of a place to end The Fellowship of the Ring, with the good guys split up and the bad guys in charge, but somehow you had total faith that Frodo was gonna make it to Mordor with Samwise, Aragorn was gonna catch up with the orcs that made off with Merry and Pippin and kill all one hundred and thirty of them, by himself with no help, and Gondor was going to stand up against the forces of darkness for a little while longer, or at least long enough for Gandalf to show back up from wherever the hell he'd been. Course you had total faith because Tolkein wrote the whole trilogy in the 1950s and this was 2002. I hain't written part three yet. I think I know where it's going, sort of, but I thought that about part two and it hared off in this totally unplanned direction. Fiction does that. It's got nerve.

I mean, I guess I could push it a little bit farther. Invent some cliffhanger or other with the misbehaving psychiatrist or the obnoxious drug runner. Give the mousy accountant some moral dilemma where he could do the right thing-again-and doesn't-again. I could even force the whole story another hundred pages or so to the big betrayal at the Manhattan Bar and Grill in downtown Chalchuapa. But I think that'd be a bad idea. For one thing, I haven't found a publisher for the first one yet. For another thing, every time I push something past where it wants to go it has this bad habit of dying on me. Eight hundred pages into a trilogy is no place to drop dead. For a third thing, I'm tired. It's not easy, this God game. In case you were wondering.

Am I whining? I guess I am. Okay, I'll shut up for now. But if you're one of those people who watched the end credits after The Empire Strikes Back and thought you might have to kill yourself immediately if you didn't find out what happened to Han Solo before the three year intermission, you might wanna just wait until I get all three of 'em out there. Forewarned is half an octopus and all that.

Coolest Rejection Slip Ever

Dear Jennifer:

Thank you for submitting The Mind Bender's Apprentice to Wild Child Publishing. I have had a chance to read the first chapter and synopsis, and while I think you have a very imaginative and interesting story here, we will not be offering a contract on this manuscript.

The idea is a good one, but there are areas in the storytelling that need to be strengthened. Chapter one starts out in an almost omniscient point of view. It would be better to start out deep in Cameron's POV. Also, the I can't quite tell who the market is for this story--adult or young adult?

At times there is more telling than showing in the manuscript. I would suggest going through it and making sure it is as active as possible. You may want to find a critique partner, if you don't have one already, to help you hone your prose.

I still think you have a wonderful voice and great talent. Please consider us again in the future.

So how'dya like them apples? I guess I could snarkily point out that anybody who could confuse this with young adult fiction has not read the synopsis I spent a month pounding my head against the wall trying to write, but that's not the point. Rejection slips, by and large, are, "Thanks, don't bother us again, goodbye." When an editor takes the time to write you a personal note, you don't suck nearly as much as you think you do.

(Incidentally my "inappropriate content" filter on my work email catches the word "suck" and flags it as profanity. It also catches the words "Avis Rent A Car" for reasons I cannot explain. We have a case where a guy got s*cked into some machinery at work. We're going to have to start saying he, I dunno, Rented A Car. Hm, new Mafia euphemism for 'death'. "Yeah, ya know Vinnie? He rented a car. Real shame. Terrible for his wife and kids...")

Just to point out how little things have changed, I got the email in my box and knew immediately (from the typeface perhaps?) that it was a No. Rather than read it I forwarded it to Joan, who came back with, "Hm, those are good ideas. Have you thought about....?" It took me almost four days to read the thing. I still haven't responded to it yet, though I need to. You'd think somebody who tosses sentences around all day, at work and at home, would not be afraid of them. Well, ya'd be wrong. Sentences are scary. Check out this article if you don't believe me.

Other than that, things are kind of crazy around here, what with company and the ongoing audit thing at work and the Final Dash to Billable Hours for the month of May and just incidentally, I seem to be going through another hyperfertile phase with Spellbinder. I think I know how it's gonna end now. Should be interesting. More on Buddhism, bugs, Bentleys, babes and buttocks to follow shortly.

Roger Hodgson might be God.

Playing on the iPod: "In Jeopardy" by Roger Hogdson
Meters swum today: Zilch. Took the day off.

Yeah, I know, I said Stuart Adamson was God, but gods don't drink themselves to death in cheap motel rooms in Hawaii a week before Christmas after disappearing for six weeks and scaring hell out of their wives and kids. Not that I'm bitter or anything. Seriously, though, I think Roger Hodgson may be God. My sister sent me In The Eye Of The Storm for Christmas and it's been riding around in my car CD player ever since. I've got a few of his other ones--Hai Hai was the follow up to Storm and it isn't near as good--but just for recording Storm, Roger has achieved deity status. Hi, Roger! Please bring me a pony and a plastic rocket!

In case you don't know Roger, he was the lead singer of Supertramp for years and years before striking out on his own. Storm was his first solo album. If you want a serious head trip, get onto YouTube and look for the video, "Had a Dream." I love that whole marching-band-turning-int0-Nazis thing. Or maybe Russians. As an ex marching bander myself, I can relate.

My hyperfertility is dying down, but I have figured out how the bad guy in the second book knew the good guy's father from the first book by way of the go-between dude from the Cafe El Rincon who trades in information, which has something to do with money laundering and a missing three or four million and the blowing up of things. Plot turns to counterplot turns to scheme turns to sinister goings on and sooner or later even I get confused so I'm fine with things settling down again. It's just that I like this stuff. It makes me feel high. It's like ol' "Bod" Stewart said, "I've got lightning in my veins." I'm not leaning on a slot machine, but it doesn't work that way, anyway. If it did I'd be rich. I am not rich. But I have Enough and that is a lot.

This thing I'm writing

Meters swum today: 1900 (I swim with Dallas Aquatic Masters)
Playing on the iPod: Something by Terry Oldfield

So I'm writing a book. It's my second. Well, actually, it may be my fifth, I'm not sure how many of the others count. I'm flogging two of them around to the Media, which is to say, I'm thinking about flogging two of them around to the Media, but I actually haven't done any flogging at all this year. I keep coming up with reasons not to send out letters. I need to compile a list of potential markets and do research and create an Excel table and and and. Procrastination and anxiety are my friends. And with friends like these...

Anyway, what I'm writing is Spellbinder, the sequel to Mindbender. Mindbender was/is about a twelve-year-old American boy, picking up about six months after his mother's mysterious death. His stranger-father shows up and whisks him away to a large Latin American city (the fictional San Sebastian, standing in for San Salvador, El Salvador, where I spent some happy time as a delirious idealistic twentysomething.) They're staying with an art collector who hates having a child in her very expensive home, Dad's away most of the time doing whatever it is he does, he's alone and at loose ends, and the whole thing would be plenty unpleasant enough without the men in grey that seem to follow him everywhere he goes. Oh, and for some reason things tend to blow up whenever he's around. He makes a friend, a university librarian, and he's more or less gotten her convinced that the men in grey are real when they show up at the library. Hm, they're both more and less than they seem to be, and oddly enough they're not very nice guys. Much hilarity ensues.

Spellbinder is about what happens next.

I've always been a big fan of what happens next. Take Stephen King's The Shining, for example. At the end of the book (spoiler alert!) the psycho dad blows up the Overlook Hotel, killing himself and hopefully all the spooks. (Can you kill spooks? If you don't believe in them, do they go away?) Mom and kid are left alive, and what happens to them? Do they get arrested? How do they explain the blown-up hotel to its owners and insurance agents? (Hey, I'm an insurance defense paralegal, I wonder about these things.) Do they get sued? Probably not, since they don't have any money. How do they go on with their lives, knowing what they know about things that go AAAAAAAAAAAIGH!!!!! in the night? Steve doesn't tell us. He did a better job with IT, though he gave us (spoiler alert again!) a mournful future of forgetting all about everything that made our heroes what they are. Which sucks. Sorry, Big Steve.

Anyway, that's what Spellbinder is about. "Okay, we've been kidnapped, tortured, lied to, we watched friends die, learned about a sinister conspiracy, escaped and survived, so now what?" I'll probably post some of it here. It's going great guns. I seem to get into these periods of being hyperproductive-- right around the time I'm most likely to get pregnant, oddly enough--when I can't hardly stop. I think I'm coming down from one of those as it were, but I still cranked out close on sixty pages in two weeks, which is pretty amazing. I was emailing chapters to my writing group because I didn't want to wait to read it all to them. Nice folks, the ones in my writing group. Heck, anyone who puts up with me is nice folks.