Angela Benedetti

Writing: 7627 words — 2 pts. [sigh]
Editing: 41,093 words — 8 pts.
Submissions: 5 pts.
TOTAL: 15 pts.

Still want more writing, although what I did was all in the last two weeks, after I had enough focus to get back to it. If I could do twice that next month, I’d be pretty happy. [crossed fingers]

And I just want to note that it’s pretty darned annoying to go over a WIP for like the fourth time and still be finding typos and glitches and WTF bits. [headdesk] I think they spawn on their own when I’m not looking.

Edging over into August stuff, I had my first root canal yesterday (Tuesday) and… it wasn’t too bad. The doctor doing them is a root canal specialist; it’s all he does, so it makes sense he’d be good at it. I spent most of the next twenty-four hours unconscious, which I did with the deep cleanings too; I’m blaming that on the drugs. Yay drugs!

My book A Hidden Magic is one of the Books of the Month over on the Goodreads M/M Romance group this month. It’s basically an excuse for the group to read and discuss. You have to be a member of M/M Romance to join in, but if you’re able I hope you’ll come chat.

Also, today is my birthday, yay! I’m forty-eight, which is a pretty cool number — even four times over.

Angie

I’m taking June as my month off for the Koala Challenge, because I did squat last month. :/ I did a bit of writing, and submitted a few stories, but all around it was kind of a blah month, and then the end was sucked up in other things.

I’ve been watching my blood pressure, and it looks like it’s definitely gone up. No clue why; I’ve been heavier than I am now with a normal BP, but I suppose age and such are piling on. My doctor gave me some medication for that. At the same visit, she gave me another medication for my edema; it was the same one I was taking before that didn’t do anything, but this time we’re trying twice the dosage.

I haven’t actually been swelling up anymore since I got that under control — meaning since I started spending twenty-two hours per day with my feet elevated — but I want to get off my laptop and back to my desktop full time. I want a mouse. I want my desk with all the stuff on it. I want my computer room, with its books and software and such. The laptop works, in a hands-on-keyboard sort of way, but with just a TV tray to put Stuff on, there’s no way I can keep all the things I need around me on a daily basis there. Plus I really want a mouse. So, back to the meds, to see if I can get back to the desktop at least half of the time.

That was a Thursday. I started taking the new meds Friday morning. Saturday Jim and I went downtown to a concert — Carmina Burana, or most of it anyway, and the music was great. This was the second time I’ve seen it performed live, and the guy who sings the Swan Song solo always hams it up royally, which is a great giggle. The chorus was awesome, and the other two soloists, and the Seattle symphony is excellent. Unfortunately we were in a box with the front barrier way too close to the front of the seats. My bad knee doesn’t like being forcibly bent for very long. I was encroaching into my husband’s leg room next to me (of which he was wonderfully tolerant) but it wasn’t enough. The next morning my bad knee was much worse; I had a hard time just getting around. In a three-story townhouse where there’s often at least one flight of stairs between me and what I need, this is an issue. :/

Then the next day, I started having stomach trouble. It was like I had a big rock in my belly, and I had some rough times over the next few days. By Thursday night, I felt bad enough that I called the advice nurse on our insurance plan. She said that both the medications I’d started taking recently had side effects like this, so apparently I was getting it from both sides. [headdesk] She suggested I call my doctor’s office even though it was closed, because they probably had someone taking after-hours calls. I did, and got a nurse, who passed my info on to the physician on call, who wasn’t my doctor and wasn’t there on site, and — after the nurse relayed a message to me — was reluctant to actually say anything to someone else’s patient (then why do they have this service? [headdesk again]) but he said I should discontinue the first of the two meds and see my regular doctor. I stopped taking the one pill the next morning as advised; I have an appointment to see my regular doctor on Thursday anyway, so unless I get worse I’ll just keep that one.

It’s been three days that I’ve been off this one pill, and I now feel like I only have a medium-size rock in my stomach. [wry smile] My doctor gave me some nausea pills back when, and I’ve been going through them like crazy, but whatever works, right? Hopefully my doctor can find something to sub out for the other med that won’t twist my guts.

My knee’s been getting a bit better too, slowly. Looking back at what was going on, I’m not sure what happened with that. At first I thought it was two hours of cramping it up, but this seems excessive; it’s been over a week now, and usually it only takes a few hours max to get over that kind of issue. Both of my new meds are diuretics; I’m wondering whether the knee problem is actually an issue with too much liquid getting sucked out of the pads between the joint bones? Or maybe a combination? Too many variables at once — my inner scientist is Not Pleased.

In other news, there’ve been explosions going off around our house all week. The spousal unit exercised his Google Fu and found that the Indian reservations can sell fireworks legally. I think that’s cool; I grew up with home fireworks and have missed them in recent years. Unfortunately, someone was selling sticks of dynamite — whole, half and quarter — as home fireworks. O_O Umm, yeah, that’s a bit too much even for me. It sounds like some of the folks in the neighborhood think it’s an awesome idea, though. [wince] Hopefully that part of it at least will die down after tomorrow. Umm, later today.

Other than that, not much going on. Although I’ve figured out that in Seattle, summer is the season when it only rains half the day. Not that I’ve been out in it much, but it’s weird hearing frequent rain on the windows in June. And July. [blinkblink]

Have a great Fourth everyone, whether it’s a holiday for you or not.

Angie

Zoned on this earlier in the month. [duck]

6 Submissions = 6pts
7820 words written = 2pts (Arrgh!)
TOTAL = 8 points

Bother, I missed Approved for the first time this year, and by 180 freaking words! At least the amount I missed another point by was in the triple digits this month.

Still not happy with my writing totals, but I have a couple of stories I’m fairly close to finishing, around attempts to flog Paul and Rory back to work.

Jim and I only travel a few times a year, but two of them were in May this year — the cruise early in the month, and BayCon at the end. I spent a few hours very early Memorial Day morning in an ER in San Jose (or maybe Santa Clara, I honestly wasn’t paying that much attention), having gotten sick again about 2.5 days after the flight down there. This has been happening pretty much every time we fly somewhere for almost a year now, and I’ve been coming up with all sorts of theories about what might be going on, none of which have suggested solutions. The ER doctor watched me staying rock-still while he talked to me and examined me, holding on to the bed rails and keeping my head perfectly still. I’d been sick since about 3am and moving makes nausea worse, even just turning my head. I told him about the travel thing, and he thinks it’s the pressure changes in flying, that something is going squirrely in my inner ear during descent, and 2-3 days later it goes sproing! and I get a nasty case of positional vertigo, with massive nausea. I got some good drugs in my IV and was fine in the cab on the way back to the hotel. He gave me a prescription for what turned out to be generic bonine.

This is pretty awesome. If he’s right about what the problem is, and if the bonine works, then I’m basically cured. We’re going to WorldCon in Reno in August, and I’ll take the bonine for five days or so after the flight out. If I don’t get sick, then I’ll be celebrating; bonine is cheap and OTC, so if that works then the problem is fixed, yay. Keeping a set of virtual fingers crossed for that one.

I can’t believe it’s June! It’s still cold up in Seattle!

Angie, still in sweatpants

A little late, but just as well because it saves me from having to post an update.

Writing: 12,068 words = 5 pts
Submissions: 4 = 4 pts
TOTAL = 9 pts

Originally it was 5 submissions for 5 points, for a total of 10, but then I got that SASE back. [sigh] I’m assuming the rest of the package didn’t make it, so I re-sent the submission, but that’ll count for April. I have one fewer points for March, but I have an April point already, yay.

I’m not terribly happy with the writing total, either. I’ve certainly had months with fewer words written, but I did all of that by about halfway through March, and fully expected to hit at least 20K by the end of the month. I had some medical issues come up at that point, though, and they were pretty distracting. Still are, actually, although I think I’m over the hump now. Briefly, I have a pretty severe edema (that’s Doctorese for “swelling”) that started in my feet last summer and has progressed up my legs to just below the knee. In mid-February, I got this huge blister in one shin that I thought was caused by an overly enthusiastic space heater, but even after we got rid of the heater, I kept getting more blisters. After about three weeks of diuretics and four weeks of steroid cream, plus random foot-elevating and tight wrapping, the edema’s gone down a tiny bit (not nearly enough, though, and I need to get back with my doctor about turbo-charging the diuretic) and I haven’t gotten any new blisters in a few days. I still have open sores all over my legs at this point, but if the blisters stay away, the sores will eventually heal and I’ll have only the edema itself to deal with.

The dermatologist I was referred to was incredibly busy, so on my first visit I saw his PA. Which is fine; I’ve seen plenty of PAs before and never had a complaint. This guy, though, wasn’t a great communicator. He forgot to mention a couple of key facts on that first visit — one, that the edema itself can cause blisters, there doesn’t have to be some underlying condition or disease to do it, and two, that the steroid cream was just for the itching and wasn’t meant to speed the actual healing of anything — which left me thinking the situation was a lot worse than it actually was. If anyone feels like looking up “bullous pemphigoid,” that’s what I thought I had for a while. It’s not as bad as cancer or something, but it’s pretty distracting. :/

I talked to the dermatologist himself for a few minutes on the second visit, and my third visit (yesterday) was solely with him, and he’s a much better communicator. He’s actually able to be thorough in his explanations — and he draws diagrams even, with labels and arrows — without coming across as condescending. Great skill, much appreciated. The fact that things are starting to clear up, at least on the blister-and-sore level, is also helpful; it’s easy to appreciate your doctor when you’re improving, whether it’s actually due to anything he did or not.

The edema has to go down further, though. I can’t wear any of my regular shoes, and can only get into my velcro-strap sandals if my feet are bare. Socks (basic crew socks, nothing thick) add just enough bulk that the straps won’t stay stuck. I missed an evening concert already because of a lack of available footwear, and Jim and I are going on a cruise in early May, and to a convention in late May, and I need to be able to wear shoes at least part of the time at (and on the way to and from) both events. A friend of mine who’s a pharmacist has told me that my current dosage of the diuretic is very tiny, so ramping that up to something effective shouldn’t be a problem.

Meanwhile, I need to keep my feet elevated as much as possible. That’s logistically difficult, given my habit of spending 90% of my waking time on the computer, but I think I have it worked out, mostly. We’ll see.

Angie

I hope everyone had a great Halloween? This was our first Halloween in the new place, so we had no clue how many kids we’d get. There’s a school right next to our little group of buildings, though, and an apartment complex on the other side, so we figured we’d probably get quite a few.

None. Nada. Zip. Not a single kid rang our doorbell, and we had good candy, which the husband and I will just have to eat ourselves. [heavy, theatrical sigh] Seriously, though, that’s really sad. Trick-or-treating is one of the best rituals of childhood, and the idea that it might be dying out sucks massive quantities of swamp water.

Writing-wise, I actually did pretty well in October — 9 points in McKoala’s challenge, which is a great improvement over any of the last few months.

Writing 8250 — 3 pts.
Editing 17,102 — 3 pts
Synopsis — 1 pt
Submissions — 2 pts
TOTAL = 9 pts

One of the submissions was accepted, yay! And one of the stories accepted earlier was published on the 30th, also yay!

Most of the writing was in the last couple of days. I’ve been working on a fanfic novel that I started just over two years ago. I was originally thinking it’d be a long short story, or maybe a novelette, but it just kept growing. O_O Eventually, in early ’09, I just had to set it aside to get back to work on my commercial writing. My readers have been saintly in their patience, but I’ve felt this hanging over my head, and sort of cringed inside whenever I thought about it. I finally broke through a difficult scene toward the end, though, and from there it just flowed. Gotta love when that happens. [beam] I don’t usually mind half-done projects — I have more partial stories than I want to think about on my hard drive — but something I’ve started posting, that has readers waiting for the next chunk, is a different story. Finally getting it done feels like the classic huge weight fallen off my shoulders.

And… just in time for NaNo. I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year, after having skipped last year. If anyone else who’s NaNoing wants to buddy with me, I’m at AngiePen on the NaNo site. (Which is currently not responding — I’m sure Chris Baty is howling in pain over the demolition of his bandwidth, as happens every year at this time. [grin])

Speaking of which, I have an awesome NaNo icon I got from someone on LiveJournal. The credit was “Lesley.” I have no idea who Lesley is, but the person who gave it to me assured me it was okay to share, so feel free to grab it if you like it.

Enjoy! And best of luck to everyone else NaNoing this month!

Angie