Archives for July 2014

Got a little more than half a chapter done today as I resume work on Blood for Blood. I probably could have finished the chapter (it’s not like I don’t know what’s gonna happen…), but decided to make sure that where I was going with it was where I wanted to go with it –  the experience of a trash-canned chapter will do that to you.

Though actually the chapter I had to discard contributed to this “new” Chapter Eleven. I went looking through the unused chapter for a character name that I would mention in passing as I summarized in a couple of paragraphs what I’d written in excruciating detail last time around. And while doing that, I found that there was a nice section in the last third of the “bad” chapter, a scene in Hanritty’s, that wasn’t so horribly pedantic and which actually set up something for later. So I grabbed it.

Of course, that messed up my idea for the opening line of the chapter. “I tossed the wallet on the desk. “Not loansharks, Jimmy.”” That had to get bumped back a thousand words or so.

I tried to keep it. A technique I occasionally use is to start a chapter “in the now”, so to speak, then go back in time for a few paragraphs to summarize stuff I don’t need to show in real time. I like it because it catches the reader’s attention, fills him or her in, then gives them some background and gets back to the story. When I grabbed the 700–800 words from the discarded chapter, I tried sticking it in right after the summary of the boring stuff.

Sadly, that had me open with Charlie’s line to Jimmy Mutz and then go off on a thousand word tangent before the conversation continued. Not good. Confusing.

So the “recap” and scene in Hanritty’s ended up leading off the chapter, and then we pick up with the conversation between Welles and Mutz. I’m sorry. I tried.

But other than that minor disappointment, the writing went well. I’m ready to finish up the chapter tomorrow morning then move into the next one.

It’s good to be writing again.

As I said yesterday, here’s what the last three months have been like…

So, three months ago tomorrow, I took a short “break” from working on Blood for Blood. I actually thought it was going to be a week or two or three, and then I’d get back to work.

I was cooked. I’d been sick, off and on, for about three months (and in retrospect, my illness probably contributed to the darkness of Bandit’s Moon, particularly the latter parts of the book). My storytelling was suffering –  not the writing so much (I write the way I write) but the way I was telling Blood for Blood. As my last blog post indicates, I reread the chapter I wrote on April 8^th  and it was awful. I thought a little break would clear my mind – watch some movies, do some reading, relax, recharge, and get back to it.

On May 5th, my mystery illness was no longer a mystery when I went to the doctor and was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Cancer is a scary word (even more so when two years earlier my younger brother’s prostate cancer diagnosis began the journey that led to his death from lung cancer a year later). As it turned out, my cancer hadn’t spread, it wasn’t especially aggressive, and would be easily treatable. That was a plus.

The minus was that my swollen prostate was causing what my urologist called “overflow incontinence”, which he likened to water flowing over a dam. The “water” being urine, the “dam” being my prostate. We worked that, through medication and hormones designed to shrink the prostate, for about a month, with limited success. My bladder was extremely swollen (the “water” behind the “dam”) and my kidneys were not functioning properly (the “river” that was feeding the “water” behind the “dam”).

It was so bad that either he had to get a catheter in there to “drain the lizard” as they say, or he would have to open me up and put in a stent or something to do it. On June 5th, he was finally able to get a catheter past my swollen prostate and manually drain the bladder completely. I don’t recommend it. When my swollen bladder collapsed as it emptied, the pain was horrific. And as a bonus, all the blood vessels in my bladder began to “pop” so I was peeing what seemed like pure blood. That was unnerving.

So I left the doctor’s office with a catheter and a bag strapped to my leg. A bag that kept filling with what appeared to be pure blood. Blood for Blood indeed.

The next evening, a blood clot in my bladder apparently blocked the catheter and it began to “leak” around it. Distasteful at best. So it being too late to go back to the doctor, I figured I’d drive over to a local hospital emergency room, have them do whatever they had to do to “fix” it, and then come home.

No.

They took a blood sample, checked my creatinine levels, and determined that my kidneys were failing. They did “fix” the catheter problem (push water in there to break the clot, then manually drain the bladder –  yes, it was just as painful as the day before…). Then they admitted me to the hospital with acute kidney failure.

I spent a week there. And six of those days consisted of laying in a hospital bed, drinking lots of water, peeing into a bag, watching TV, sleeping, eating three meals a day, and being interrupted by nurses every three hours or so to check my vitals, etc. It was like a strange vacation.

Finally got out, back to the urologist, they check to see if I could pee without the aid of the catheter…no go. More hormones, more meds, in an attempt to continue shrinking the prostate. A few weeks later, back to the urologist again for urodynamics, to test my bladder function. The bladder was functioning normally – it just couldn’t push the “water” past the “dam”.

But continuing with the catheter and bag on my leg wasn’t really an option. In the roughly a month that I had it, I had to empty it every two and a half hours. Day and night. Which meant setting alarms when I went to bed to wake me every two and a half hours. Not very restful.

My choices were TURP (as the urologist described it, it was like “coring an apple”, the apple being my prostate) or intermittent catheterization. I chose the latter, at least for now.

When I need to “bleed the lizard”, I shove a catheter up there, I pee, I remove it, I get back to my life. It’s not an optimal solution, and I continue to do the hormone/meds thing to shrink the prostate (and the cancer) with the idea that eventually it will shrink up to the point that I can pee normally. In time, if it doesn’t shrink enough, I may think about TURP.

But otherwise things are back to normal (well, except for the catheter thing…) and I feel good and ready to get back to work.

So, after those 800 some-odd words, my point is that I’m back to work on Blood for Blood. The plan is to spend a couple of days going through the first third of the book that’s written, see how it reads, get up to speed, make changes as needed, and then by Monday get back to work on the next chapter. The four chapters I went through this morning were actually enjoyable to read, and only required a few limited wording changes.

I even have the first sentence of the next chapter written, done on April 28^th  when I thought my break might be over…  “I tossed the wallet on the desk. “Not loansharks, Jimmy.””

It definitely feels good to get back to work…

The vacation is over.

I just wrote a 900 word post describing what’s been going on since April 11th, when I went on “break”. That post vanished into the ether when I attempted to save a draft and then post it. Gone.

After spending the better part of an hour on that (and it was a good post – informative and amusing), I just don’t have the will to rewrite it right now. Maybe tomorrow.

In short, I was sick, I’m better, and tomorrow I start rereading the first third of Blood for Blood as I prepare to get back to work on it by Monday. Get into the flow, make changes as necessary, and then pick up with the next chapter.

I’m looking forward to it.