Happy Thanksgiving!

This is another Thanksgiving craft my son made in school. Isn’t it adorable?

I want to wish you all a happy Thanksgiving. I hope your day is full of family, food and good memories.

It’s hard to believe at this time last year I thought I was healthy and was sending out queries for my book. I do plan on continuing the process once I am sure I will be able to handle rewrites and edits.

I have much to be thankful for this year. Surviving the bone marrow transplant, being home with my family and having the support of amazing friends are the first things that come to mind.

I did a vlog post talking about all I am thankful for this year. Enjoy…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2_g02Lkado

One Hundred Days…

Today is my 100th day since my bone marrow transplant. I have been home longer than I was in the hospital. I am getting stronger every day, though not as strong as I had hoped I would be at this point. I want to be able to walk around the store without using the electric cart or a wheelchair. I know it will take time.

I did get wonderful news from my bone marrow biopsy… no leukemia showed up and the transplant cells are still working! woo hoo!

On the writing front, I wrote a kid’s short story. This is the first piece of fiction I have written since I was diagnosed. Hopefully my muse is coming back. I need to read it to my 7-year-old to see if it passes the kid test.

uhoh, he might just be my toughest critic!

Homeward bound…

Huzzah! Today after 41 days in the hospital  I get to go home. It has been a long tough stay. The first few weeks passed in a morphine induced haze.

I suffered from mouth sores- heck I got a whole new mouth basically. The morphine was mostly needed for that pain.

Then I had a set back when I developed graft vs host disease in my gut. So the new stem cells were fighting with my old ones and the battle ground was my gi tract. Not fun but not as bad as it could have been.

I can’t believe I have missed almost all of July. School starts next month for my son and we are not ready.

But I made it. 20% of people don’t survive this process, we learned that scary number going in. I can say I beat those odds. Now we have to wait until about day 100 (I am day 34 today) to see if the leukemia is gone. It should be.

Thank you all for your support during this whole ordeal. There are days I still can’t wrap my head around this year. I got Leukemia. Sounds so strange. But with the blessings of friends, family and even strangers I have made it through.

So Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

Happy Birthday to me…

I got my new stem cells today. I am officially on day zero of my transplant. So from here I just need to wait for my counts to go up and to get over any host versus graft disease. (where the new bone marrow fights against what cells I have left). Then this nightmare may be over.

Huzzah. To celebrate I have written a few haiku:

Bone Marrow transplant

Good cells joining mine today

Rebirth day for me.

 

Second Chance today

For a strong and healthy life

Thanks unknown donor!

 

My donor is a 24-year-old female, who got a tattoo in January, traveled in Europe during the mad cow scare and has never been pregnant. She donated on 6/20. If you know this person please thank her for saving my life!

My husband even wrote me a haiku- his first ever.

Happy, happy day!

From the new stem cells to you

Look what we can do!

The nurses and hubby sang happy birthday and my favorite nurse wrote 2 haikus that I am not printing since I didn’t get her permission first same as another nurse who wrote her very first  one and it is a good one too.

Had  a bit of a reaction, swelled eyes and hives but they went away with steroids and 100 milligrams of Benadryl which left me loopy. I was singing Dancing Queen so loud to Mamma Mia the nurse came in laughing at me.

So in that honor enjoy the video:

 

Endings: good, bad or sad every book should have one…

I was reading a book and it ended mid-scene. Literally it ended with the guy getting ready to be murdered pinned on the floor and stabbed to death. What the heck?

That is not an ending. Well technically I guess it is a cliff hanger ending. But I hate them. They kill me. Luckily this was an older series I had just discovered so book two was readily available. What if it wasn’t? What it was the apocalypse and I was taking a much deserved break from zombie slaying to read this book?  I would get to the ending and would have no way of finding book two. That could destroy my zombie fighting spirit and then how could I save the world? See why those endings are bad?

I think they are a cop-out. Now I hesitate to say that because recently one of my favorite authors had a cliff hanger ending and I wanted to scream- but still love the author. One difference was she finished the storyline of the original book before introducing the new danger.

Now I am not saying everything needs to be tied up in a little bow at the end of the book- heck no. Jim Butcher’s last Dresden Files book, Changes, had an ending a lot of fans weren’t happy about. Without giving away spoilers I can say it was dramatic, unexpected and I may have cried a  little- but I’m sure that was just dust in my eye or something. It was a kind of cliff hanger- except it too resolved the main storyline in the book. It took me a few days to deal, but I realized it was a good ending and I can’t wait for the next book.

In my novel, I resolved the main issue, but I did leave the big bad out there so the story could continue. That way if someone read book one and never had the chance to read book two, they didn’t feel cheated. But really, why would anyone not want to read book two?

So though you may want to end mid-conflict, don’t do it. Finish your story and trust it is good enough to have readers wanting to read more. I think cliff hanger endings should be left to the pros who have several books in the series and know the next book will get published.

See, even Dennis DeYoung of Styx agrees with me…

A few Haiku for you…

I never really was a haiku person before, but they are really starting to grow on me. I’ve published a few since my little diagnosis and thought I would share with my writing readers. Enjoy.

Heaven – A Haiku
Baldness- A Haiku

Always a writer…

I had to get a very claustrophobic MRI of my head the other day. It was made worse than normal because I have to wear a germ mask any time I am out of the room and I always feel like I can’t get enough air in those things as is.

So when they told me to relax and stay still for 20 minutes I did what any good writer under stress would do, I created a new story in my head. I think it might be a beginning of a novel. Something a little different than my usual. I started getting into the story so much that I survived the MRI without having to take any anti-anxiety meds. woo hoo

Today I had to have a lumbar puncture, not the most fun procedure. I tried to picture myself on the beach, ehhh, didn’t work. Instead I switch to my current novel and the next chapter and that helped.

I will admit when I found out I was going through all this, I was worried I would lose the writing. At first I was on morphine and Percacet for pain a lot, but not so much anymore. My head is clearer and I think I will be able to write.

I am also hoping to be able to continue the blog. But it will be about writing not Leukemia. Probably a mish-mash like this post and you will have to forgive me if the writing isn’t quite up to par- I am heavily medicated even without the pain meds.

For those of you interested in my chemo journey, I have started making Vlogs on Youtube. You can follow me on there, I have a few up now. I probably won’t post them here but will send ya over to the first one and you can follow on there if you are interested…

Happy New Year…what? I have what? oh crap…

Tried to think of how to write this post. Gotta explain why I am gone from blogging for a while. But more importantly, need to thank such an amazing group of people.

So back story- hey this could be a good hook opener for a book. On Christmas I was writhing in pain. (gotta love that word) I had natural labor, the tattoos on my feet took 2.5 hours- dude, I can take pain. This made me cry. I went to the ER and found out my platelet counts were at 3,000. Normal is 150,000 to 400,000. My pain was in my bones from my body trying to make more.

Was admitted and several days later had my diagnosis… Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. The version I have is a Philadelphia gene mutation that normally shows up in teenagers. (see, perfect that I write young adult- I am a teen at heart!)

Spent New Years Day in the hospital getting my first chemo treatment.

Have been perfectly healthy before this, aside from being tired after chasing around my six-year-old boy and husband (who I don’t have to chase so much after being together 13 years).

Normally I am a very private person, but when my friend, mentor, publisher (heck, pick a title, she fits it cause she is so awesome) heard about our medical bills. (I have to pay a deductible and co-insurance for 2010 and Happy New year- 2011 now.  Plus I can’t work now. Money was freaking me out.)  She posted on some of the writing forums and facebook that I could use donations.

I’ll admit at first my pride was not happy about it. But common sense prevailed. Within 24 hours my friends- writer friends who have never met me in real life- friends I do know in real life and some of their friends rallied. I had over $1000 in donations in one day. Was blown away!

But they haven’t stopped. Friends keep donating. Some have awesome t-shirt lines that they have created for me where all the proceeds go to me directly. They are cool- I am known as the ninja because, well, Asian but I am always ready to kick butt. The designs reflect that- can’t wait to wear mine!

There are pages set up for donations and Michy and Lynn have decided to send a percentage of the profits from the anthologies sold directly to me.

This is on top of the hundreds of well wishes and emails I get every day. In my low moments, these really help boost my spirits! Plus how could God ignore all these prayers? He’s gonna cure me to get some peace and quiet!

I apologize for not linking. I am on percocet and morphine alternatively for the pain so my head is kinda loopy.  Please feel free to link in comments. I think there is one video that has all the links and let me tell you, when I first started writing there was a list of writers I admired who I always wanted to comment on my articles- Randy Barefoot was one of them. And now- I have been mentioned on his vlog twice. I feel famous. The hospital won’t let me load the link so you can click on it from my blog- so here is the you tube link for Randy’s video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NEbecAXU5k

Thank you all so much for your support, love and prayers! It’s amazing how a community can rally around someone so quickly. Love you!

edited to add in the link I found that has a list of all the different fundraisers for me. It is pretty mind blowing…

http://downthemusespath.blogspot.com/2010/12/freelance-writing-family.html

Dude, your writing’s all emo…

I want to talk about emotions, more specifically emotions in your writing. The best stories invoke some sort of emotion in your readers. The stronger the emotion, the better your story. (With the exception of something that is truly offensive and/or disgusting).

I submitted a dark short story to my critique group and one person’s comment was simply that he was disturbed by it. At first I wasn’t happy by the reaction, but then I realized… Bingo! that strong of a reaction to my story was a huge compliment. It was meant to be dark and a wee bit chilling and from his emotional reaction, I succeeded.

I wasn’t happy when I wrote the story. There were some bad things going on in my life and I poured that frustration into my writing and it showed- in the best possible way.

My story “Fly”, published in Elements of the Soul, struck a different kind of emotion in readers. Some say it was very sad, others say it was hopeful. But the judges said I won because I made them feel.

I wrote Fly after some hard times with my father. A lot of what happened in the story were things we were going through. I can remember being surprised to realize when I was finished that tears had been running down my face while I was writing.

It’s funny because neither stories are in genres I would normally write- but I decided to stretch my writing muscles. I poured a part of my emotions into both stories and it showed. I received strong emotional reactions from my readers. Now obviously this isn’t something you can do with everything you write, but when you are feeling a strong emotion, use it.

Maybe because I wasn’t used to writing in those genres, I was able to let go and allow my words to flow from how I was feeling. So the next time you are feeling a strong emotion, good or bad, break out the computer and get to writing. You might end up with a winner.

Gotta love that Sweeeeettttt Emoooootttiioonnn…

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

How adorable is this? My son made it for me in his 1st grade class.

I am thankful for so many things this year. Way too many to list while I have a turkey to bake! I hope everyone (well, I guess only my American friends) has a wonderful Thanksgiving. And to those not celebrating, I hope you have a wonderful day as well.