And Then, All Will Bow Down Before Me
No one emailed me today, asking me what my master plan might be for Shatter*. No one asked this question because, as of this writing, you’re all content to lurk. Nevertheless, I felt no one’s question warranted a well thought out reply, and here it is. I fully expect no one to respond to this column to let me know his (or her – hard to tell with no one, that oddball) reaction.
As with all great plans, I’m starting small. Page by page, I have been editing my medical website, placing eye-catching icons** linked to Shatter at the bottom of each page. The Medical Consumer Advocate generates a good number of hits. Some of those folks are bound to wonder what on earth a guy like me will write in his blog.
When I get some sense that folks are actually reading this column, I’ll move on to step two: my discovery of the Virgin Mary in a square of matzah. That’s right, I’m going to find a matzah cracker with the Blessed Virgin’s image in it, and I’m going to post that image exclusively here, on THIS page, along with an article urging all readers to email this link to seven of their friends. If they do so, they will have good fortune for seven years; but if they fail to do so, they will be cursed with ill luck for the same interval.
I believe this to be a sound marketing strategy.
But to what end, no one asks? Well, once I have a real readership, I’ll serialize The Brakan Correspondent on my website. Periodic appearances of You Know Who – perhaps on rye bread, or in the iridescent sheen of an old slice of roast beef – may be necessary to drive my readers that way. We’ll have to see about that. In any case, the inevitable will happen. Tor Books will offer me a sweet contract, and my novel will become a smash overnight sensation.
And then (says no one) all will bow down before you? Foolish, puny nobody. Not yet. Does anyone bow down to J. K. Rowling, John Grisham, Stephen King, or Dan “Well it was just a Cracker Jacks rebus†Brown? NO. Authors get no respect.
Except on The Daily Show. With the success of The Brakan Correspondent, fellow yid Jon Stewart will have to invite me on the show. He’ll have read my book, naturally, and he’ll zoom in on one rather embarrassing detail, that the spider god’s name (Obrah, translated, ‘she who eats’) sounds suspiciously like Oprah, as in Winfrey; and, furthermore, didn’t I call Oprah Winfrey the Troll Queen in the story, “My Troll Lover� And what do I have against Oprah, anyway?
I’ll save the situation famously with some smart and snappy reply, so winningly in fact that Oprah, watching at home, will be quite charmed. She’ll have me on her show, and the repartee will make my stint on The Daily Show seem like a wake. Ratings will soar. Oprah will offer me a regular spot.
And THEN all will bow down before you?
Pipe down, you. No, my friendship with Oprah will merely ensure inclusion of my novels in her Book of the Month Club. I will become fabulously wealthy***. I’ll be offered movie contracts on my books weeks before I’ve penned the outlines. I’ll become close friends with Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson, and Tim Burton; they’ll put me in the movie versions of my books – bit rolls at first, supporting rolls afterwards.
I’ll suck, naturally, but that will hardly matter. What will matter – and this is the important bit – what will matter is, people will forget I’m a novelist. (My original profession will show up as a Trivial Pursuit question circa 2015.) They’ll know me only as a familiar face. That little, old, bald guy who always gets the girls. (What? Oh, come on! nobody says. And yet, if Jack Nicholson can snag Helen Hunt, why can’t I have Heather Graham?)
At some point I’ll be elected president of the Screen Actors Guild; shortly after, Governor of California. I think you know where I’m heading.
With my feet up on some big oak desk on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue**** and with my finger on one of those infamous buttons – you know what I mean, you’ve watched Dr. Strangelove – then, all will bow down before me.
D.
*This BLOG, okay?
**Okay, so I drew this lame bird on Paint Shop Pro. If I manage to win the Fantasy Challenge with “My Troll Loverâ€, I’ll win the prize: Saborra will do some commissioned artwork for me. Then I’ll have a delicious icon at the bottom of each page.
***Michael Crichton will spare change me as I leave my Bel Air manse. Bill Gates will ask me to float him a loan or three.
****They say that in this country anyone can become President. Ample proof can be found by studying the careers of every US President from Richard Nixon on.
So, you’re saying this is NOT my fault?
I blitzed a lot of my old friends with emails today, alerting them to the presence of this place. Start posting comments, folks. Many of you guys know each other.
Jake had his neurology appointment today with Dr. Ali in Ashland. (This is the boonies. We have to drive three hours to find a pediatric neurologist. In exchange for this isolation, we get a beautiful coastline, drop dead gorgeous countryside, a real estate market that is booming like you would not believe, and . . . drumroll . . . no HMOs.) Dr. Ali called me after seeing Jake and told me he has ‘chronic tension-type headache’.
I confess ignorance on this one. For me, headaches are divided into categories: sinus headache, nasal headache (yes, there is such a thing), cluster, migraine, atypical migraine, MPD (myofascial pain disorder, a close relative of TMJ), and oh-my-God let’s get your head scanned YESTERDAY — rule out tumor, in other words. I’d heard of tension headache, naturally, but I didn’t know you could have a tension headache that lasts, in Jake’s case, six weeks.
Good doctor that I am, I consulted a reliable resource to learn more about chronic tension-type headache: the web. Here’s a link to a MAGNUM article on chronic tension-type headache. MAGNUM = Migraine Awareness Group: A National Understanding for Migraineurs. They got their information from a neurology textbook, so it must be true. Honestly, though, Dr. Ali explained everything very well to me, but I needed to see it elsewhere, in writing, simply to feel reassured that it wasn’t my fault.
What’s in a name? Turns out ‘tension headache’ is a misnomer. It has nothing to do with tension. The fact that I’m making this fifty pound nine-year-old read from an 11th grade literature textbook, that I’m expecting him to kick ass in algebra and learn physics, French, and typing besides, might be making him miserable, but isn’t the cause of his headache. (We’re home-schooling.) To quote from that MAGNUM site, “Tension-type headache is multifactorial and poorly understood.”
On the other hand, tension-type headache “may be triggered by physical or psychological stress, lack of sleep, anxiety, and depression.”
Oops.
Bottom line, the kid is all right. Focus on the positive.
By the way, Karen tells me Jake entertained Dr. Ali with his comic stylings, cribbed largely from the collected works of Monty Python and Steve Oederkerk’s Kung Pow: Enter the Fist., wherein the bad guy announces, From now on, you will refer to me as Betty . . . (one of Jake’s favorite lines). Trust me, this gets old after a while.
D.
Two dishwasher loads in one day. Not bad.
I got up at 7:30, futzed on the BBS for an hour, then settled down to work on The Brakan Correspondent. This chapter has been a bear. Cree and her father have reached a pivotal moment, and it’s essential that each of their actions be not just understandable but inevitable. Yesterday, I doctored Cree’s scenes; today, I cut away to General Voss and his hijinks. Much more fun to hang out with the Dobolu horde than the poor doomed Huurans anyway.
It took me three hours to write a little over 1000 words. Not bad, not great. Afterwards, I finished getting whupped by Jacob on the Warcraft boardgame (yes, there’s a boardgame), and then I rewarded myself by cleaning the kitchen. Next, I hopped over to the BBS, did some critting, then got started on dinner. On the menu tonight: beef shank ossobuco and focaccia. I added too much olive oil to the focaccia dough, which led to a pleasant discovery. The end result was much airier than usual, almost cake-like. The ossobuco turned out well, too, even though I didn’t have any lemons.
While waiting for the ossobuco to cook, I played a bit of World of Warcraft, but Jake took that over as soon as I figured out how to buy a pet. He’s upstairs right now, training his newly purchased scorpid, Jeff. Tossed off that computer, I came downstairs and started a mammoth project: I’m revamping Medical Consumer’s Advocate. I’ve added some cool links to the ear candling page, in case you’re interested, including a link to the infamous butt candling website. Anyway, with over 160 articles to edit, this is going to take some time.
Karen’s taking Jake to the neurologist tomorrow. With a normal CT, MRI, and labs, it’s unlikely Dr. Ali will find anything. I just hope he’ll have some useful treatment recommendations.
I promise to be more interesting next time.
D.
Doped exorcist philosophize the raw(a) vaudevillian with anisometric Ceratopogon
Stay with me on this.
- Karen and I sat in the same room with Jake while he had his MRI. Noisy as hell, but any of you who have had an MRI know that already. There’s also something scary as hell about that jumbo Tesla-jelly-filled donut (no small wonder I write lots of valium prescriptions for my patients undergoing MRI scans), and that reminded me that
- Things used to be much worse. In the old pre-MRI, pre-CT days, we used to order myelograms. Basic idea: inject something radiopaque (dark on X-rays) into the spinal canal, tip the patient upside down to let the material get into the cerebrospinal fluid surrounding the brain, and shoot some X-rays. This was painful, and also — early on — quite dangerous. Why anyone ever thought it would be okay to inject oil or thorium dioxide into the cerebrospinal fluid is beyond me, but hey, we used to radiate kids for acne and ear infections. Then I remembered
- Didn’t poor Linda Blair have to scream her lungs out in The Exorcist when they made her pretend she was having a myelogram? Maybe I’m the only person who recalls that scene, but in my opinion it’s THE only scary scene in the movie; the rest is pure camp. So
- I decided to investigate this a bit by googling Exorcist + myelogram, expecting perhaps that another blogger, my doppelganger, perhaps, might have already written a piece like this. Instead, I discovered
- There’s a whole world of websites that dope their meta tags with words like ‘exorcist’ and ‘myelogram’, websites that want folks like me to come take a look in the hope that here, at last, I will find some commentary on Linda Blair’s myelogram. Some of these sites sell prescription drugs; many more are porn sites. Now, I consider myself a student of human perversion, but even I had not heard of bangboatbackseatbangers. (Look for yourself if you’re so damned curious. Despite the neologism, the sex is horribly pedestrian.) But it gets even better.
- A website with the title line, ‘Breast pain progestin — hungry titties taste the studded pubes with wet maidenhead’ actually sells Ultram; the same website has a separate page (with identical content) entitled ‘vioxx and aspirin allergy — Statuesque vulva smack the knobbed teats with thin balls’. And I’m thinking
- Man, they really want to sell Ultram, and
- I could write this stuff.
The horror, boys and girls. The horror.
D
I should be tickled silly
Last night I had one of those moments. I realized that in a few hours’ time, our lives could change forever. Why? Because this morning, my son had an MRI of the brain.
He’s had a constant headache for the past five weeks. His mother and his pediatrician both seemed ready to write this off as a particularly nasty viral crud, but I’ve seen too many kids with brain tumors. It didn’t help that the mom of one of those patients came by to thank me last week. (Sure, it’s nice when people do that, but it stirred the pot.) Nor did it help when I told myself that those other kids were a lot sicker than Jake. They had much worse neurologic symptoms (says I), they LOOKED sick, and so forth. That little creep in the back of my head (trust me, you want your doctor to own a creep like this) merely said, “It could STILL BE SOMETHING HORRIBLE. You can’t drop it just yet.”
And so we got the head CT last week. Normal. Does that let Jake off the hook? No! Some of the nasties will only show up on MRI. So why do I bother with the head CT? Go figure.
Last night, I thought about Life after Diagnosis: the mental distortion that comes from hanging on to hope, when the odds are so slim; the painful trifecta of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy (what’s worse: living through that, or watching your child live through it?) The loss of function. The dissolution of personality.
We doctors are a fucked up lot.
By this morning, I’d gone past that stage. As Jake’s appointment neared, I found it more and more difficult to dwell on ‘what if’. Now I was in Writer Mode, already assuming the MRI would be fine, mentally composing my daily blog entry. Realizing: asshole, this isn’t about you. But writing, like medicine, is a fundamentally egocentric activity. (More on that some other time.)
Well, Jake’s fine, naturally. Otherwise, we’d be flying or driving to Portland right now. Next up is the neurology appointment on Monday in Ashland.
Jake went through the MRI like a champ, by the way. He barely flinched when the tech injected the contrast, and weathered the nauseating flushing reaction that came with it. He saw the films afterwards and commented on what a nice looking brain he had. I looked through the films, too, with quite a different frame of mind (that fuzziness — is that just volume averaging? And what’s that dark spot — flow void, or something else?) Obvious enough that there weren’t any big gumbas, to use the technical term, but was there something subtle present that only the radiologist would see? Nope. The radiologist gave us a clean bill of health, too.
So. I should be relieved, tickled pink, delighted. I am relieved, but I still feel tight.
Really go figure.
D.
Who says I can’t give it away for free?
For the past two months, I’ve been bruxing over “Cornucopia”, my first story to make the Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine’s almost-but-not-quite-yet cut. Today, I received my ASIM: Sorry email. They have a policy not to keep stories — even stories they love — for more than a few months. All this is depressing, naturally, BUT, and I paraphrase their email, ‘if you’ve made it this far, we’re sure you’ll have no trouble placing this story.’
Ahem. Surely they know how tough the fiction market is (not to mention the humor market)? With Planet Relish defunct, where else can humorists go? Yeah, the occasional funny story shows up in F&SF or SciFi.Com, but when it comes to my personal brand of raunchy yucks, ASIM’s the best market. I’m tempted to email them back:
Look, guys, if you want to hang on to “Cornucopia” a few months longer, go right ahead. I’d like to see the story published where it belongs.
I like that where it belongs bit. Up until that moment, the underlying message reeks of desperation. But with where it belongs, I’ve placed my lips firmly upon their collective editorial asses. I’m told this works sometimes.
On a not-quite-unrelated note, I’ve posted one of my older short stories (“Omega Point Books”) on the website. OPB is a homeless waif of a story . . . until now. John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, inspired me to do this. Scroll down to John’s April 11 post — he has some very interesting thoughts on copyright, fair use, and fan fiction. He’s made me realize the wisdom of giving stuff away for free.
Why post “Omega Point Books” and not “Cornucopia”? Hey, if I’ve made it this far, the ASIM editors are sure I’ll have no problem placing my story. Do you think I’m nuts?
D.
Does my butt look fat in these scrubs?
Surgery day for yours truly here at St. Mammon Community Hospital. Not only will my cases fill up most of the day, but we have Surgery Committee Meeting this evening, which promises to be as fun as a Roman ad bestias execution. Will it be the wolves today, Sir, or the hyenas? The lions, perhaps? Oh, good choice, Sir. Bravo.
(Oh, Hoffman. You’re just p.o.’d cuz they never have Atkins-friendly food at those meetings.)
D.
It never stops.
One reason I continue to fork over the cash for my subscription to Nature is the quality of their book reviews. In the March 24 edition, Simon Singh covers John D. Barrow’s The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless, Endless.
Here’s a quote, but the full text is linked above.
“We learn that one of Hilbert’s students committed suicide when he failed to solve a particular mathematical problem. Hilbert was asked to speak at the funeral, so he stood at the graveside and matter-of-factly explained that the problem was not particularly difficult and that the young man had merely failed to look at it in the right way.”
And I’m thinking: as much as I would dearly love to read this book, will I? There are so many books I want to read before I die, and yet I can’t find time to get through more than one or two a month.
That’s how far we humans exist below the infinite.
D
Tales of the Dying Earth
I live in a place where we have to drive 90 minutes to get to a real bookstore (Borders in Eureka). Amazon will only get you so far; sometimes a guy has gotta browse. This last Sunday, I picked up Jack Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth: all four novels in the series are now available in one volume.
I found a nice bio on Vance here at Answers.Com. Vance is my hero: 88 years old and still chugging out novels. Can’t get much better. Here’s a link to his latest, Lurulu.
At least, I think it’s his latest. This guy stays busy.
D
Sin City, yeah!
Karen and I went to see Sin City this afternoon. We left Jake behind, which turned out to be a good thing — way too violent for him. Almost way too violent for me. I didn’t do a Joe Bob Briggs-style amputation- or decapitation-count, but it was up there. Fortunately, none of it was particularly realistic.
Good stuff, however. I can’t think of a movie which captures the look and feel of a graphic novel quite as well as Sin City . . . The Crow comes close.
Not a great writing weekend. I’ve done a fair bit of critting for others, and a lot of thinking about my prologue. Lev has given me a lot to chew on. Leading with my villains has thrown more than a couple of people, so I may go back to an older version of the prologue where I opened with one of my protag, and quickly segued into my villains — first, clearly identifying them as such. That dumbs it down a bit, but clarity is paramount.
D