Rosemary Kirstein

the view from the front porch

Endicott West, the artist’s retreat in Tucson where I spent Thanksgiving of 2012 hidden away from the world (for the most part), and about which I silently blogged every day, has been shut down and, alas, sold.

Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman are there right now with Deb and Mike Manning, closing it up.

But should you want a piece of history, they are also auctioning off some of the books that have been residing there.   Check out the details at Ellen’s website.

It happens that Boskone is falling right after my fourth chemo, and projecting ahead, I can see that I probably won’t be up for dashing about and panelizing, and holding forth on esoteric literary issues, etc.

So, I let them know today that they should remove me from the program.

I might try to come by just as a rank-and-file attendee, possibly just for a day. The panels that they wanted me on sounded really fascinating, and I’d actually love to see what the other panelists might have to say.

Other news: Predictably, Chemo 2 was a bit harder than Chemo 1, and my day-job week was thus a bit tougher to get through. I had oh-so-many plans for my time in the evening, but discovered that the actual most urgent task was sleeping. I did manage to take a half-hour walk each day, however, and that’s something I want to keep up.

Next week’s a no-chemo week, so I’m predicting that more things that I actually want to do will get the attention they warrant.

I’m trying to be realistic, and not allow my enthusiasm to make me overextend myself — but dang, I gotta do something!

Other than rockin’ the turban, that is.

With scarf by Darlene!

Well, I thought my hair would start to go after the second chemo session, as that seems to be the general experience.

But last night:

Not exactly unexpected.

I’d been checking every single day by brushing and experimentally tugging slightly, to no result whatsoever.  Business as usual, my hair said to me, don’t worry about us.  In fact, we could use a trim!

Then around ten PM last night it was:

OKAY BOYS, PACK IT UP, OUR WORK HERE IS DONE!

And there they went!

My response: hilarity.   I  found it funny as hell.   I’m not entirely sure why.

Sure, I knew it was gonna go.  But now?  10PM?  The night before my second chemo?    And not 6PM, because I checked,  nope.  10PM.  Not a gradual thinning, but an apparently  unanimous decision.  Not that it dropped off all at once, but any time I gave a slight tug,  I got a bunch.  Each and every time.  If I’d kept tugging, I’m pretty sure could have plucked myself bald, right then and there!

When I collect enough, I’m going to knit myself a kitten.

I think it was the spontaneity and the unanimity that got to me.   It’s like they held a referendum.

So, I’m pretty sure that sometime today or tomorrow I’ll  do the pre-emptive strike.    But first: find a hat!

In other news:  Still looking in to getting the ebooks out on other platforms.   It’s a longer process than Amazon Kindle.   But I’m going to try like the dickens to get The Outskirter’s Secret  out at least on Kindle by, say, Sunday.

Well, think I’ll take a nap.  I’m at Chemo at the moment, and loving my iPad with Logitech keyboard allowing me to blog and write and all right here, right now.   Everyone else is either watching skanky daytime TV on the overhead screens, or talking on their phone, or dozing, or generally looking bored and unhappy in various ways.

Hey, Hugo awards nominations are open!  No, I’m not eligible this year, but my pals Delia Sherman and  Ellen Kushner are, in the Dramatic Presentation category for the excellent illuminated audiobook of their THE FALL OF THE KINGS,  about which I have enthused before at length.  So, if you are a WorldCon attendee, please do consider voting for them.

Faithful reader and commenter Sean tells me that he and some others have received the Amazon email that tells how to update their copies of The Steerswoman ebook to the non-erroneous version. Great news! I have not received an email myself about that, and I did buy a copy as a proof-of-concept. But you know, they can tell when it’s the author herself buying her own book, and might treat me differently from you the actual buying public. So — check your email!

Meanwhile… at the Day-job, I sent out an email letting everyone at work know what’s been going on with me, and what to expect going forward and such. The responses have been full of support and encouragement.

But, I must say…. some of these very nice people are not exactly what you and would call logical thinkers.

I received an email from one such, headed “Saw this morning and wanted to share”, attaching a long-winded, super-enthusiastic ad/article, which I quote briefly, because it went on and on and on in the following vein:

“The Sour Sop or the fruit from the graviola tree is a miraculous natural cancer cell killer 10,000 times stronger than Chemo. Why are we not aware of this? Its because some big corporation want to make back their money spent on years of research by trying to make a synthetic version of it for sale.”

Heavens! How evil of them.

“How many people died in vain while this billion-dollar drug maker concealed the secret of the miraculous Graviola tree? This tree is low and is called graviola !”

Wait, what? Low? Low, did you say?

“WE ARE NOT DOCTORS. ALLOWS CONSULT A PHYSICIAN BEFORE TRYING ANY REGIMENS AND/OR MEDICINES TO TREAT/PREVENT ANY ALIGNMENTS.”

Well, I’m glad they posted this very responsible disclaimer, before I rushed off to treat my alignments.

Actually, I’m kind of fond of my alignments. That’s why I aligned them.

Now, while I do appreciate that the person in question thinks they’re doing me a favor, and being helpful, I really do want to nip this in the bud.  I figure that if I take a tough stand immediately, I won’t be inundated with junk and can focus my energies on the important things.

So my reply was:

Typical internet bullshit.

If one bothers to read this closely, It’s glaringly obvious. Aside from the bogus science, these people can’t even spell! And some of these sentences don’t even make sense on the simple grammatical level!

That’s always BIG clue.

Furthermore, even the slightest bit of research on reputable sites reveals this as baseless.

Here’s a quote from Wikipedia about soursop/graviola:

Alternative cancer treatment
The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center list cancer treatment as one of the “purported uses” [you do know what “purported” means, right?] of soursop.   According to Cancer Research UK, “Many sites on the internet advertise and promote graviola capsules as a cancer cure, but none of them are supported by any reputable scientific cancer organisations” and “there is no evidence to show that graviola works as a cure for cancer” and consequently they do not support its use as a treatment for cancer.

In 2008 a court case relating to the sale in the UK of Triamazon, a soursop product, resulted in the criminal conviction of a man under the terms of the UK Cancer Act for offering to treat people for cancer. A spokesman for the council that instigated the action stated, “it is as important now as it ever was that people are protected from those peddling unproven products with spurious claims as to their effects.

The Federal Trade Commission in the United States determined that there was “no credible scientific evidence” that the extract of soursop sold by Bioque Technologies “can prevent, cure, or treat cancer of any kind.”

Here’s a little something about organizations like the “Health Sciences Institute” that your article refers to.
http://www.quackwatch.com/04ConsumerEducation/nonrecorg.html

I understand that you want to be supportive… but sending things like this does not support me in my fight.

I hope you’ll think twice before doing this again…

Stuff like this just wastes my time.

If you think I sound angry, there, I must tell you that this is the version I sent after I edited out the frothing fury that was originally present.

This is not what I would have sent an actual friend who kindly but unwisely forwarded me that ad/article. This is a co-worker, and not even someone I see every day.

Now, as I see it, there are three possible responses to this:

1. That Rosemary is a real tight-ass bitch! I hate her! I’ll never send her stuff again. Result: person never sends this stuff again. Yay!

2. That Rosemary is totally close-minded and not open to a) the wider, mysterious workings of the universe; or b) the truth about government/pharma conspiracy! It’s pointless to try to reach her. I’ll never send her stuff again! Result: person never sends this stuff again. Yay!

3. That Rosemary has a point. Maybe I should actually read the article next time before hitting SEND. Result: person reads the article next time, and sees that it’s sheer quackery, and does not send it to me. Yay! Plus: possible future friend!

See? Three yays! I win.

In other news: Ironically, I had to get a haircut. I went to Supercuts.

Stylist: Wow, you have really thick hair!

Me: Yep!

Stylist: I bet it grows really fast, too.

Me (trying not to laugh): Generally.

Stylist: Done! What do you think?

Me: Perfect!

Yep.  It was chemo day.

First time, and I feel pretty good so far.  Tired, but not bad.

Still working on the many replies to all the supportive comments and emails…  you guys are great.    I’ll post a note when I’ve replied to all.

In other news:  Amazon still has not got back to me about allowing the early purchasers to get a corrected version of The Steerswoman, without that peculiar issue where  “replace” was replaced with “With”.   It’s only 25 occurrences in the entire book, but I tried to stress to Amazon that my readers needed the real version!   They say they are reviewing the issue.

Well, it’s the holidays and real people at Amazon have to make the decision, so it might be a bit.   If we get no action, I’ll consider alternate ways to make this right.

Hey, know what I did during chemo?  I wrote.

Take that, cancer!

Chemo & me.

Whew.  Lotta stuff crammed in one week.

First the holidays and ebook issues.  Then Thursday, I had some out-patient surgery to install this extremely convenient port through which they’ll feed all my chemo.   Some versions have permanent tubes sticking out of you, but mine is completely under the skin.  Which is nice.  To not have open pathways directly into your body just hanging around loose, you know.

Friday, I actually went to the Day-Job and worked a lot of hours, which sounds dumb, but a) the job is not physically strenuous; and b) I’ve missed a lot of oddly-timed days and half-days, creating some inconvenience to the department; and c) I wanted to make it clear that I don’t take advantage of the situation, and intend to only stay out when I really need to.   Thus gaining the cred for when I really must be out, possibly a lot, further down the line.

Result: Totally beat today.

I have received many, many kind and encouraging emails and comments, that I want to  reply to.  I can’t thank you all enough for the good wishes.  I’ll be catching up on that this weekend — I’ve had no time yet until now.  So, if you haven’t heard from me yet, this is why.

Oh, and at some point I really must go see The Desolation of Smaug!  Really.

The corrections have been made, and the corrected version is now live on Amazon.com.  Anyone who bought it after  9:27PM on December 24th has the version with the fixes.

I’ve asked Amazon to email everyone who bought the earlier version, and to activate their ability to download the corrections.   This has to be done on Amazon’s end.    Since I bought a copy for myself, I’ll know when those emails go out.

I’m beat!

Plus: in proper German tradition, we did our present exchange on Christmas Eve.  Sabine is now the proud possessor of the DVD’s for the first two seasons of Game of Thrones, and the third season will be delivered to her as soon as it’s released!

I received a device that carbonates your tap-water, so you can make your own sodas, which will help me out with the immense amounts of water they want me to drink when the chemo starts.

And also this:

No, not a copy of The Steerswoman — the iPad it’s on!

I’m stunned!  This will help me a LOT when I’m stuck in chemo and want to write, since my actual laptop has all the bells and whistles and as a result weighs a ton.  The iPad will be much more portable.

Whew.   Whirlwind of publishing the book; being told of the errors (ack!); fixing the errors; upload, emailing Amazon to get them to send out the emails and stuff.  Plus: actual Christmas.

Okay, I’m done for the night.

Merry holiday of your choice occurring around this time of year!

So… that error.

Faithful reader Sean commented to let me know that the mysterious “With” had showed up again elsewhere.  As “Withd.”

After much investigation, I discovered that the problem was with the word “replace”.   The word “replace” had been globally replaced with the word “With”.   As in the middle of “fireplace.” Or “replaced”, or “replacements.”

Very odd..

So, I went to Scrivener’s conversion control screens and found that the Replacements screen had somehow cloned its own column headers into the column contents.   So that under Replace it had “Replace”, and under With it had “With.”  Since it executes these things on compile only my original document was perfectly clean!  It only showed up in the actual Kindle .mobi file.

Now, I had previously compiled the Kindle .mobi, and at that point I’d scrutinized it within an inch of its life, and no such error existed.  Thus, I already knew that it was clean, clean, clean —

So, I just added my brand new ISBN number to the front matter, and compiled one more time.

And that’s when it happened.  Unknown to me, every instance of “replace” got changed to “With.”  FiWith.  Withd.  Withment.

I think there was a Scrivener program update between my last scrutinization of output, and my final with-ISBN compile.  Might have happened then.

So… updates with corrections are now updating.

Insert sigh of both relief and frustration.

Amazon will be sending out an email to all owners of the book with instructions on how to get the updated version.  Also, I’ll let you know here.

Upside:  I made all the fire-places be fireplaces again.  Much better.

Yep, there’s an error in your copy of The Steerswoman ebook!

But it will be updated shortly!

Faithful reader Joanna (last name withheld, in case she doesn’t want it posted), noticed that the word “fireplace” does not appear anywhere in the ebook, but seems to have been been replaced with “fiWth”.

And she’s right!

My actual file in Scrivener has “fireplace”.  The compiled ebook has “fiWth”.

I recompiled.   Same thing happened!

I physically deleted “fireplace” and replaced it by hand with “fireplace” — this in case there were hidden control codes in the previous “fireplace,” possibly due to scanning errors from the OCR program.

Compiled again.

“FiWth!”

Typed in the word “fireplace” at a location in the book where there are no fireplaces mentioned for pages and pages.  Recompiled.

“FiWith!”

Dang.

Replaced all every instance of “fireplace” with “fire-place.”  Recompiled.

Happiness!

I do believe that “fire-place” is an acceptable alternate spelling.   I’m gonna go with it.

Good news:  I can upload the corrected version to Kindle, and it should be fixed in 24 hours.

Other good news: those of you who purchased the version with the error can re-download the corrected version.  I’ll get you the details on that in a bit.  And I’ll let you know when the updated version is live.

I must say: big advantage over print versions.

Now: forget about these piddling details and have a Merry Christmas!

PS: If anybody notices any other peculiarities in the book — please let me know!  At your convenience, that is — don’t be texting at the dinner table on Christmas!

I’m sorry to say that I have some very bad news. I wasn’t certain that I wanted to tell this just before Christmas, but for no clear reason, I feel that I ought to. Just to get it said and done, I suppose.

The bad news is this: I’ve just been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Now that I’ve dropped that stunner, I want to immediately reassure you: my prognosis is good.

The treatment of cancer has come a long way in the last couple of decades, and breast cancer in particular has been very well-studied. The type of cancer I have has targeted treatment available, and the track record on this is good.

Let me pause to stress that: Track record is good. They know what to do.

I have a lot of confidence in science. If you’ve read my books, you know that.

My doctors and I have decided on a course of treatment, and tomorrow I’ll be meeting with the nurse oncologist to finalize my schedule of chemotherapy, and my date for surgury and so on. So far, the plan is for aggressive chemo starting December 30th, surgery sometime in May, followed by a less difficult course of chemo through the end of 2014. If the chemo works really well, I might be able to do without radiation entirely! We’ll have to see how it pans out.

And oddly, at the moment, my spirits are actually pretty good. And this is because I went through a battery of advanced (and frankly geeky-techno-cool) tests (CAT scan, MRI, mammograms, ultrasounds, radioactive bone scan, heart test involving making my actual blood radioactive!) and the word is — no cancer elsewhere.

That’s great news! The day after I was told that, I had these waves of happiness wash over me periodically. I had to ask myself, Why am I happy? Hello, I have breast cancer!

Because it’s ONLY in my breast and nearby lymph nodes. This is treatable.

All this happened in the past two weeks, and it’s been a whirlwind. And during everything, my worst fear was that the cancer would be advanced, and untreatable — but that’s not the case.

This cancer is treatable, and the treatment is endurable.

It will be difficult, miserable, unpleasant in the extreme at times — but the chances are very high that it will work.

I’m also lucky that my sister Sabine will be with me through all this. There will be times when the treatment will leave me very ill, and it’s good to know that she’ll be here to help me out. I’m more grateful to her than I can possibly express.

I’ll get through it. And we’ll probably be at Worldcon in London, too. I’ll be past the worst of the treatments by then, and on a lighter course of chemo, every three weeks. We’ll just slip London into one of the gaps, there.

But between now and then, it’s going to get tough.

And some of you are aware that I was working on launching a Kickstarter campaign that would allow me to quit my day-job and write full time.

Unfortunately, yes, that had to go out the window. For the next year, at least. For two reasons:

1. My day-job provides my health insurance. And this stuff is going to be crazy expensive.

2.  I could not in good conscience ask people to pre-fund a year off to write when I might spend significant portions of that year too ill to do much of any use.

So, sticking with the day-job.  They do tell me that they’re willing to work around whatever schedule I need.  Which is nice of them.   Yep.   Sticking with the day job.

Man, that’s especially disappointing!  I was so looking forward to just walking out that door…

Well, that’s gloomy. What we need here is a little ray of sunshine.

Ooh! How about this:

 Yes, this is the eBook. Yes. I said YES.

 You know I had been working on the eBooks, right?  Many people have complained about me not releasing them yet…

The reason I hadn’t released them was that I was planning on using them as rewards for contributing to the Kickstarter campaign.  (Like, for $10 you would have got an eBook of the new book when it was done, but for $25 you would get that PLUS immediately, the eBooks of all four previous books, no waiting involved!)

With Kickstarter out of the picture, the eBooks can begin to roll out!

And I really,  really, wanted at least one to be on sale by Christmas.  And, oh look!  There it is.

Because, you know.

I had assumed (with the Kickstarter) that I’d have until the end of January to finalize the covers and formatting, and all the attendant self-pub chores that you don’t realize until you’re in the Bowker ISBN registration website, trying to click on all the clicky things to get your official registration done.  And then on the the Kindle Pub site for more of the same.

But I really wanted it done by Christmas, sort of as a statement of confidence, if you will.  So, I took all the stuff I’d set aside for January and did it yesterday and today. For the first book in the series that is.  And only on Kindle so far.

I’d have loved to get them ALL on sale by Christmas, on all platforms… but it just wasn’t possible at this short notice.  Still,  having done one, I now know the ropes and the others will move out pretty quickly.

I have to say:  Thank you, thank you Scrivener for streamlining the conversions!

And, there it is.  I can’t believe I did all that in a day and a half.   It Was Fun.  But exhausting.

Oh, did I mention that the eBook version of The Steerswoman makes an excellent last-minute Christmas gift?   I feel I should mention that.

So, there you are.

Despite all expectation, I seem to be having a very merry Christmas.

I hope you have one, too.  You deserve it.  As do we all.