The Journey to Normal

So, there's this Thing that happens when you start to get better after having been, oh, pretty sick from the flu, say.  You start to feel better, and you say, "Hey!  I'm better!"  and then a couple weeks later, you look back at that point and say to yourself, "Oh, boy, who was I kidding?  But, hey!  I'm really better now!"  And a couple weeks further along, you look back at that point, and shake your head, because, man, you didn't know what better even was -- and so on until you stop thinking about it and eventually, you're back to 100 percent, or whatever passes for 100 percent in your country, and life goes on.

That's kind of where I am, now. I'm definitely better than I was four weeks ago, on my radiation graduation day, and really better than three weeks ago, and noticeably better than even two weeks ago, but -- still not 100 percent.  Maybe 80 percent.  Maybe not that much.

One of the most frustrating parts of this continuing journey is the hitting a Wall of exhaustion, when, just five minutes earlier, I was feeling just fine.  Really, it's like 80 to zero in two heartbeats, and suddenly I'm tearing up because I can't remember how to hard boil eggs.  Disconcerting.  My particular Wall seems to manifest in the afternoon, anywhere from ten minutes to three hours after the midday meal, so, naturally I've been trying to cram all the Stuff I feel I need to do in the hours before the midday meal. Which may or may not be exacerbating the situation, but we play with the tiles we've drawn.

In any case, I am not back to a place where I can write fiction yet (argh), but I can do other writing related things, like read page proofs, which is what I've been doing, slowly, with the proofs for the mass market edition of Accepting the Lance, which has been its own small journey into surrealism.

It's not that I don't remember the story -- not exactly that.  I do remember the -- the hanger points, which is to say, the scenes that had to be there in order for the story to continue in a forwarder direction.  What I don't remember are things like Val Con having lunch with his daughter, or the Miri's meeting with the snow removal crew, or any other of a bunch of the small scenes that give the story depth and Truth.

So, I'm about 87 pages short of a complete read of the proofs, and hope to finish them tomorrow.  Then, I'll see what other trouble I can get into -- in a good way, as the journey toward normal continues.

Everybody be safe.