Hi, friends. I hope you and your loved ones are safe and well.
I am so goddamn happy to announce October 23 2020 is the release date of my novel, Home. You can preorder on Amazon at this link.
One week. Just one week, and Ryan will be out of his backwater hometown for good. Sell the farm his grandmother bequeathed him, clear his debts, and start fresh with his high-flying boyfriend. That’s that plan.
What’s not the plan? Brooding bar owner and high-school crush Vic Ward, community hostility, and mysterious reminders of perfect Ethan. Ethan, who had everything Ryan ever wanted. Ethan, who fled Stockyard Point to pursue his dreams. Ethan, whose memory now dogs Ryan’s every step.
The longer Ryan stays in the Point, the more demons of his past surface, and the more Ryan is haunted by the life he could have forged.
Will Ryan stick to his plan? Or will the siren song of his past draw him home?
This is a dark gothic m/m romance of 84,500 words.
In March I announced this book with a May release and then COVID happened. But despite 2020’s best efforts, my book is here!
I cannot tell you how happy I am to release this story. Two and a half years ago my greatest fear was there would be no more time to write books. But there will be time. I am doing awesome. My tumor markers are down from the beginning of the year. I have zero tumor growth since March, and no change to my lymph nodes. Fuck you, cancer: not this year. There will be time for more stories. I’m so damned lucky to have the chance to share Home with you. And thank you, everyone who took the time to comment on my blog with your kind words of encouragement. I almost always felt it would be better to quit rather than continue, and only through the support of all you amazing humans out there was I able to press on.
It means “stand strong”. I’m healthy, and dear universe, I hope you are all healthy too. I’m an essential worker so I’m still heading into the office every day although I’ve been seconded from my usual work to do governmental COVID-19 response stuff. What a fucking month, huh? We will get through this to the other side, however changed that may look from our previous normal. *giant contact-less hugs*
I did not achieve 30 hours of writing this week, only 26.5, mostly because since midday today I lay on the sofa and ate an entire pack of Oreos and watched a tranche of Netflix and YouTube documentaries on SARS and H1N1 because I am a moron. But still, I am about to send my story to my beta reader, universe bless her wonderful brain.
I bought my ticket yesterday to Gay Lit Oz in Sydney in March 2021 (Australia’s own dedicated LGBTQ+ genre author event) so I can go and squeal at amazing authors and buy many books and generally fangirl with windmilling arms all over the show. Tickets are an incredibly reasonable AUD$20 per day so if you’re in Aussie (or NZ) consider going along .
I was working overtime yesterday when Jacinda announced everyone – everyone – entering NZ must self-isolate for 14 days on arrival. I came home exhausted and experiencing other people’s generalized crushing anxiety. Fucking mirror neurons. My gut clenches and my brain circles around “what if,” “what next” all without any input from my logic circuits and I’m ridiculous. I haven’t been this glued to news websites since September 2001. Going forward I am allowing myself 2 x 10 min news updates per day and that’s it.
I understand the reasoning. I understand we need to flatten the curve. But I have people in my cancer support group saying they won’t be going to their oncologist appointment this week because it’s “too dangerous” to expose themselves.
This is a long-haul journey. An effective globally available vaccine is reportedly a couple of years away. Australia is making noises that their copycat travel restrictions will be in place for at least 6 months, so I guess ours will be about the same. We can’t put life on hold for 6 months. And yet I grok the reflex jerk.
Goal for the week:
Acknowledge anxiety and release it. Let it drift past as the universe flows on.
Actually it’s because BIGBANG re-signed to YG this week and if there was one true tragedy of 2012 it was Gangnam Style being the Western breakout KPop hit instead of Fantastic Baby.
I am thrilled beyond words this week: I finally – for the first time in over 2 years – made my writing goal this week of at least 3 hours per day. Fuck, it’s so little, isn’t it? One hundred-and-sixty-eight 60-minute blocks in every week, but nevertheless, I am delighted this week I managed to get my ass in a chair in front of my keyboard for a solid 27 of them, making 101 hours worked so far in 2020, and 63,995 words written (probably just as many deleted, but screw it.) Pick your glass up, my friends, and make a toast with me for I am fucking jubilant.
Next goal is to make a steady 30 hours per week minimum for a solid month. I can do it. Wish me well.
In that 30 hours per week, I will be working on my draft.
Holy shit, I have a draft.
It’s crappy, it’s way too big (96K), but it exists. It going to be the best I can make it with what I have, and that’s going to be enough. I release into the universe my stupid ingrained beliefs that nothing I do is ever good enough because that is why I have a bushel of unreleased and/or unfinished books on my hard drive. This sucker is going out into the world. All that matters is getting another goddam book out and then another and then another and I will not stop.
I have a cover. Thank you Natasha Snow. Look! It’s all brooding and lovely.
I plan to have the book out in May, depending on the availability of my proofreader who I haven’t even contacted yet because I am still working on the draft and it’s still got to go to a beta-reader and I’m still pulling the extra overtime to pay for the proofreading. But it is coming and I am ecstatic and I will keep you updated.
In other news, I did not win $50 million last weekend, but if you needed more proof the Cosmic Joker isn’t just a theory, NZ’s second coronavirus patient visited my town the day she returned from Northern Italy, and so the chances of me getting COVID-19 turned out to be not so small after all. I’m fine though! *waves* Daily life feels weird though. Half the night shift took Friday off work and hand sanitizer is sold out across the whole region. I got Dominos pizza for dinner tonight and the usually bustling car park was empty, and they only had two orders on the whole board, one of which was mine. It was the best Dominos I’ve ever had. Now I know how good Dominos could be if it wasn’t fast food.
Be well, friends, and do what makes you happy this week. I am leaving you with Lady Gaga because this video has burrowed into my brain this week, exactly like a ludicrously neon pink Borrelia burgdorferi infection, and I am transmitting it to you. You’re welcome.
So, SARS-CoV-2 arrived in NZ yesterday, courtesy of a 60-year old NZ citizen who flew home from Iran via Bali. Apparently, some of my fellow Kiwis have lost their collective minds, with media reporting three-hour supermarket queues, bare shelves, and panic buying of tinned food and water. An Auckland Pak ‘n’ Save shopper helpfully commented, “I feel like I’m in a zombie apocalypse.”
I am proud to report there are no apocalyptic queues for hand sanitizer and tissues in Palmy. Instead, we’re apocalyptically queueing for Lotto, which tonight reaches NZ$50 million (just over $30 million USD) aka what Jeff Bezos earns in 3.5 hours.
In NZ $50 million is the largest jackpot the prize pool is allowed to reach. This means it will go tonight to whoever has the closest numbers, which will probably end up being about 12 people splitting the pool.*
The prize cap – part of Lotto NZ’s social responsibility policy – is so indomitably New Zealand. When Kiwis look at lotto draws from the United States of $350,000,000 (which is not even that big) apparently we say to ourselves, “Nah, not for us, thanks.” When people like Trevor Cooper win $37 million social media comments are full of, “No one needs that much money.” Our national motto should not be ‘Onward’. It should be ‘You’re Not Special’.
Still, I am not complaining! I shall be benevolent with my 50 million. Odds of me catching SARS-CoV-2? Well, it has an estimated Ro of 2.8, so . . . too slim to count. Odds of me winning Lotto tonight? 1 in 38,000,000. Comparatively, that’s a sure thing. Hell yes, I have a ticket!
*At least in NZ you don’t have to pay taxes on your win!
I thought once I finished active treatment the hard part was over. I was completely wrong. I have been drowning all year, and haven’t felt able to raise my hand.
Logic-brain hammers at me: you are lucky. So, so, lucky, lucky. How dare you be sad.
My tumor marker CA15-3 is 24 and has been stable there all year. I have a job! (Holy fuck, thank you, universe for finding me a job). I should be grateful. I am grateful. But right now I don’t feel like my life has meaning for me.
Meaning #1
I am my mom’s caregiver.
My mom is basically autistic, although of course, we have no diagnosis because girls now aren’t getting diagnosed, let alone girls born in the 1950s. My mom isn’t able to navigate the world. She has meltdowns, which FYI are terrifying to grow up with. I thought it was only my mom so Holy Fuck and Praise Be the internet, meltdowns are a thing. I’ve been looking after my mom since I was seven years old.
My mom has MS. This is such a sucky disease. It has taken away her ability to walk without care, to navigate the world thoughtlessly. She used to walk everywhere, dragging my reluctant ass along with cajoling and effervescent optimism. Now she’s fighting vertigo every step. She has to think consciously about every foot placement. If she forgets, if she lets her mind run forward to consider what she’s going to do when she gets wherever she’s going, her left and right feet conspire and tip her over. She falls a lot. When it’s on carpet the relief washes through me. When it’s on concrete outside I wonder how much time I have before my shift starts and how long the wait will be at Accident and Emergency at the hospital. And yet she’s still not broken anything. Grazes, torn clothes, bruises on the body and the ego, but no fractures.
My mom also has a brain tumor. I know, it’s crazy. To those who have little, even that shall be taken away. The tumor meant she had to stop working back in 2017 after she made some irrational decisions. Well, they weren’t her decisions. Let’s say the tumor made some irrational decisions. And it has spirited words away from her mind. We play daily guessing games to hunt for misplaced nouns.
We met with my mom’s neurologist last month. The tumor hasn’t grown. And her MS is stable, there’s no more degeneration. Possibly this is related to the greatly decreased stressed now that she’s not working. I mean, there’s still a terrifying blackness where the entire interior of her brain was. The dark that devoured the woman she used to be and has left me living with a looking glass version of herself.
So my mom will go on like this . . . forever. Or another 30 years, whichever comes first. For longer than me, almost certainly.
There’s never going to be an end to this for me. Never going to be a time I can leave the house without saying where I am going. Never a time I can spontaneously decide to have a weekend away, or decide to hell with dinner, I’m having toast in bed watching Netflix. And that makes me want to cry. I want to look after her. I just figured I’d have 20 years after she died I could have just for myself. But that won’t happen.
So my life has meaning in that my being here allows my mom to live at home, have a nice life, to be free of pain and fear. That has value.
Meaning #2
I am my daughter’s future financial stability.
Wow, we really fucked over the younger generations, didn’t we. Especially here in NZ with house prices. Before I had cancer I had no debt. I owned my house outright and that is because I was lucky enough to get on the property ladder in the 90s recession, with the worst house in a good street. I worked in customer service for a fashion brand, and my salary was exactly the same as it is now. Twenty years and salaries at the bottom end didn’t move a skerrick. It took holding down three jobs at a time and plenty of weekends where there was zero money and I was down to eating that rogue jar of pickles that had been pushed way to the back of the fridge since Christmas. But I was lucky.
Because of cancer, I have a mortgage now, and I’m about to consolidate my extremely unhealthy credit card debt. The Mortgage should be paid off in 9 years 7 months, the other debt in 5 years, I need to stay alive and working in order to leave my daughter a house she can rent out (please, universe, let her choose a stable passive income over cash she could accidentally misspend).
But a big part of me – most of me – that thinks it would be more valuable for her to have the money now. She can sell my house and buy one close to where she works in her city. She and her partner could seriously plan to have a child: something that cannot be done on two median incomes as renters. If I was gone I would make her life a lot easier, sooner. But it would only work if I was gone and my mom was also gone. While my mom is still alive my death would make things much harder for my daughter, not easier. And it’s likely my daughter will have children in the next 5 years or so. I can provide valuable child-sitting services during school holidays. That’s worth serious cash.
So, on balance, more value if I continue.
Meaning #3
I am a listening human who cares.
I am so grateful to have my job. I truly believe the benevolent universe has my back and gave me this job to get me through the rest of my life. I work in a contact center for a government department. I talk mostly with people who are upset: whose lives have been derailed. Sometimes they threaten self-harm. Once a caller threatened to hunt down the minister’s home address and meet him on his doorstep with a firearm. I wish he hadn’t said this. He seemed like a decent human knee-jerking in frustration, but of course, we had to call the police. That first bit is a lie. He seemed like a privileged white male Boomer who for once in his life hadn’t got everything he wanted the second he demanded it and I wanted to shout at him, to drag him into my headphones and make him hear the people who are actually suffering.
I can never fix what is wrong: that is not in my power. But I can listen. I can be a genuine person on the other end of the line who acknowledges their pain. I can show them the way forward if they’re ready to take that step.
I am good at my job, which is ironic because in my Ph.D. thesis introduction I literally named my worst fear: working hard for my Ph.D. and still ending up working in a call center. Which, yep, is exactly where I am. But the call center feels safe. The crew is lovely compared to the 99% of academics who are gigantic vindictive petty assholes. My crew embraces difference. We are pegs who can only dream of being a nice stable square or circle. Pegs hewn from raw branches twisted by the winds of economics and shitty growing conditions of brain chemistry. Pegs for whom no hole has been calibrated. But together we weave a stable form.
My empathy has value.
Photo by Patrick Hendry via Unsplash
The thing I’m struggling with is where is my meaning? Where’s the thing that gives my life value? No, not value. All that above, that is value. Where’s the thing that brings me FUCKING JOY? I work six days a week for not much above minimum wage and I can only pay my bills if I do that extra sixth day of overtime.
The days are fog-painted, each one endless, yet, en masse, darting like swallows around a wharf as they circle the core of my life. Get up. Do . . . what? I have no idea where the days go. But they go. And then it’s 3pm and I’m showering and dressing so I can look like I haven’t stopped caring and then I am at work and wishing for my 8pm lunch break and then it’s midnight and I drop my co-worker off and come home and sit on my sofa and watch YouTube until it’s 2am and I’ve stopped replaying the night’s calls and failures in my head and I’m tired enough to sleep. Or not. Sometimes it’s 5am and I’m lying awake with the covers thrown back, dabbing away Tamoxifen sweat.
And the voice in my head never shuts up counting, never shuts up bargaining, never shuts up wondering. Two years, Em, Two years left of the median survival. Was the last eighteen months worth it? Was that worth you being on the planet for? And you want fucking more? That news article about a woman with stage 4 who lived 20 years, could I dare think . . . ? No. Never ask for too much. Don’t be greedy. Ten years? No, not ten. Counting chickens, and all that. But maybe you could get five years. Maybe? That would leave you with another 3.5 years now. What are you going to do with them? What’s worth the last 42 months of your life? If you’re not going to contribute anything in the next 12 months what the hell is the point of having another 30 beyond that?
I want to find my joy in writing but I’m not writing. I want to have written. Don’t we all. When I was diagnosed with cancer all I thought about was the tiny story embryos I was carrying. I want to take them to full term, but more than that, I want them to be out in the world even if that has to be as misshapen first instars, slimed with imperfection. But the days drift by as I try to make myself get out of bed, put my fingers on the keys, prise the words from my tongue and force them, writhing, to the page, and still there are no books, there are no more stories.
My blog has been basically on hiatus for over a year.
In January 2018 I found a lump in my breast. It was large enough to be pushing out against my bicep and I was a cup size larger on my right side. That lump turned out to be a big, aggressive tumor and I was diagnosed with de novo stage 4 breast cancer. De novo means when I was first diagnosed I was already stage 4.
Stage 4 cannot be cured, but it can be treated.
I have metastases (secondary tumors) in my liver and lungs. I spent 2018 doing chemotherapy and radiation therapy, and I had a double mastectomy without reconstruction.
This sounds bad but I have been incredibly lucky. I’m under 50, which gives me a slightly longer life expectancy than if I were over 50. I’m healthy, overall. My blood pressure was down to normal before my diagnosis. (I shall now disclose to you that when I was still working at the university it was 180/126. I was about to have a stroke. I’m so glad I don’t work there anymore.)
And I’m even luckier to have had people to walk with me all through the last year. I couldn’t have done it without my friends’ support. I owe them everything.
More good fortune: because I wasn’t able to work for 10 months, if I’d still been in Auckland, I wouldn’t have been able to make my mortgage payments and I would have lost my condo to foreclosure, or, best case scenario, lost a shit-ton of money from an urgent sale. Because I moved to my small town three months before diagnosis, I had no mortgage, and although to clear my debts I have now had to take a loan out against the house, I still have a house. Isn’t that the damndest timing? Thank you, universe!
In December 2018 I was well enough to start full-time work again. I am incredibly fortunate to have found a safe, secure Day Job with 15 sick days a year, four weeks’ annual leave, and if a medical appointment is under 2 hours duration I don’t even need to lodge a request for time off.
Working full time is an ongoing struggle, I won’t lie. My medication causes fatigue and joint/bone pain. Some days are tough, but the pain is a blessing because I’m still here to feel it.
Much more important than my Day Job is writing down the stories in my head before I’m gone. This is my focus right now.
Overall, I am awesome. My metastases responded well to chemo. I’m on tamoxifen, which is like weed mat for tumors, and it’s working for me. My last three blood tests show my key tumor marker – CA15-3 – is down in the totally normal range i.e. the cancer is beaten back for the present. Aside from tamoxifen, I’m done with treatment (for now). I look forward to a future of regular blood tests and CT scans, and at some point the cancer will come back, but then we’ll try a different drug, and then a different one, and then another, and by that time, with luck, I’ll have a bunch more options currently in development, like immunotherapy.
So how long have I got? There’s no way to tell.
The average life expectancy following a stage 4 diagnosis in New Zealand is 16 months. Isn’t that shocking? That figure is skewed by the lack of timely, accessible, and culturally appropriate primary health care for Maori and Pasifika women, leading to late diagnosis and therefore fewer treatment options. I have huge privilege, and I will live longer than 16 months.
Going by US figures, median survival for my age group is 39.2 months, which statistically gives me until mid-2021. The five-year survival rate – i.e. till 2023 – is 36%, which isn’t negligible. There’s definitely a good chance I will make that.
Statistics never tell the whole story. Survival rates necessarily come from people who were diagnosed in the past, and cancer treatments get better every year. The 5-year survival rate doubled between 1992 and 2012, so the longer I live, the better the chance I can see the development of more effective treatments.
The 10-year survival rate is 14.9%.
I choose to live as if that’s not true. I choose to live as if I have 35 more years. 2054. C’mon, universe, let’s take that ride. I have a total solar eclipse to see.
I will blog about cancer stuff from time to time. Not all the time, but definitely sometimes. If this is triggering for you, you might want to stop following my blog. I’ll miss you. There will be blood tests. There will be CT scans. There will definitely be more chemo in the future: hopefully many, many years from now, but I have no control over that timing. And I’m going to want to talk about all this. I’m more keen on talking about notebooks, and planners, and climate change, and science, and the cat who adopted me while I was laid up on the sofa recovering from surgery (I can’t wait to tell you about him). But the cancer will always be lurking in the shadows. That’s what it does.
Fuck cancer. I have sunlight to bask in, words to carve, and a cat to pet. The world is gorgeous and I’m so glad to be in it today.
I’ve been waiting to see one of these guys since I was seven years old and my classmate brought one of the caterpillars to school for show and tell. I could never even find a caterpillar. It’s an Emperor Gum moth, introduced to New Zealand from Australia in 1939. The adults live for only two weeks, without feeding, just to mate and lay eggs.
I nearly missed him, even though his wingspan was nearly the length of my outstretched hand. He was lurking on a footpath at the base of a wall. I was there again the next day but he was gone.
This is an amazing planet. I’m so happy to live on it.
Hi, my name is Em and I have a browser tab problem. If I don’t watch myself like a hawk I can have 20 or 30 of those suckers open at any one time. This is a bad thing. And my daughter laughs at me.
When I’m warming up for the day, or unwinding, I jump on Feedly and Reddit and Tumblr to explore the day’s latest in science and octopuses and climate change, and planner and books and Ao3, and and the next thing I know my Mac is wheezing and panting like I asked it to climb Ben Nevis. This presents a problem for my ADHD brain, because once I have all the websites open I can’t decide how to categorize them. Do I want to keep the whole page as reference in my Evernote exobrain? Do I want to record a future date to take action? Do I need to read that fic now, or should it wait? Do I want to forward that info to someone? And so I sit, paralyzed, not working. Not doing anything.
Tab Snooze solves this problem for me. I simply snooze a tab and voila, it vanishes, to be recalled tonight, or tomorrow, in the weekend, next month, or, indeed, any time I tell it to come back. And when it’s recalled, the delay has allowed me to now know what I want to do with it. A lot of the time I want to just close it and move on, but in the original moment I felt too stuck to make that decision. Tab Snooze lets me take action.
Such a simple thing, but wow, this makes my life better.
If information overload is also a problem for you, Tab Snooze for Chrome is free, and you can download it here.