The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
So Book IX of Fire-Rider, Into the Mountains, is now officially online at Amazon.
Y’know those plot turning points they teach you about in MFA courses, where the action reaches ever darker and more desperate straits? This is one of them. Don’t miss it!
Shortly I’m planning a promotion — a contest, actually. Hope to give away one or two installments of the Fire-Rider Saga, as well as maybe one yet-to-be-published racy novel.
Just canceled my print subscription to The New York Times. And since the pitch they made their wretched phone CSR throw at me to try to keep me in their clutches was so damned obnoxious, I canceled the online sub, too.
By the time I got off the phone, I was ready to wring that kid’s neck…and it wasn’t his fault, he being a schlep who was just doing his job. Thank heaven for small favors: I may go hungry, but I don’t have to do a job like that.
The cost used to be pretty reasonable, because I got it while I was teaching at ASU — way back in 2002, the kid said! — when they were practically giving it away to students and faculty. But prices being what they are, every year they’ve inched up the rates. It’s now $34 for print delivery with “free” online access included.
Problem is, often the thing isn’t delivered. A couple of weeks ago they failed to deliver the Saturday and the Sunday edition, even after I called (twice!) to complain.
When you do that — call to bellyache that the paper wasn’t delivered — their CSR will say they’re crediting your bill. But of course, they don’t.
The biggest problem with home delivery, though, is simply that I don’t have time to read a newspaper anymore. Much as I love the Times — and I do enjoy reading it — the only clear time available to read the paper is the ten minutes or so it takes to bolt down my breakfast. There’s usually a little coffee left after that, but nine times out of ten, I’m writing promotional copy, wrangling Amazon, or chasing e-mails over the last of the coffee. Two or three hours of work have already been done by then: only another ten or twelve to go.
Really: I don’t think ten minutes of hurried reading is worth $408 a year.
I can get the print AND digital versions of The New York Review of Books (which I dearly miss) for $75 a year. I can get The Economist for $52 a year. Both of these are delivered by mail, so one does not depend on the bums (not an exaggeration) to bring it to your door and drop it in a puddle of water.
Between you and me and the lamp-post iPad, I think I can get by with the news reports and opinion that are available for free online.
Most of the time, instead of sitting down and reading a newspaper, I graze for news online during short breaks between projects. Best sources around:
Hmh. No wonder I don’t have time to read the Times…
So, what are your favorite news sources? And BTW, while you’re at it, don’t miss this news flash. 😀
The New York Times, one of whose hobbyhorses is overtesting for and overtreatment of women’s breast issues, has decorated the front page with the latest report on DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ, a poorly named condition that may or may not be a breast cancer precursor). Some 60,000 women a year are diagnosed with this vaguely understood malady (if malady it is), and most are treated with lumpectomy plus unpleasant chemicals plus unpleasant radiation or with mastectomy, with or without the added unpleasantries. Many of us, myself among them, opt for double mastectomy, just to end the torture.
And the Times reports that all the frenetic treatment does just about nothing to change the outcome: that women with DCIS are no more likely to die of breast cancer than the ordinary woman on the street, a member of the “general population.” Those who do die — an extremely small percentage — “die despite treatment, not for lack of it.”
Yes. Well, this is not exactly news. The study, published yesterday in JAMA Oncology, essentially confirms what we already know: the widespread hysteria over breast cancer and the frantic push to screen every woman on the planet with mammography lead to widespread unnecessary treatment and mutiliation, accomplishing rather little.
I knew this at the time I got sucked into the mammography/mastectomy vortex. One of my doctors, an oncologist, openly admitted I was probably being subjected to unnecessary treatment. But the problem was then — as it still is now — that so little is known about DCIS that doctors and patients alike are afraid to take risks with it.
Possibly as many as 80% of DCIS occurrences may never evolve into invasive cancers. Estimates range from as few as 20% of cases to as many as 50% of cases turn into cancer. We do not know the correct figures, but we do know that some proportion of DCIS does morph into invasive malignancy.
Why do we not know? Obviously, since we have established that the phenomenon can signal the advent of or turn into invasive cancer, it would be monstrously unethical and immoral to leave, say, 10,000 women untreated while treating another group of 10,000 women with the tools we presently have, just to compare the outcomes. So…we cannot subject this ailment (if it is an ailment) to the gold standard of scientific research.
We can make some inferences, though, based on observation.
What we’ve seen over the decades since we began treating DCIS as though it were cancer is that for women over 40 who are not Black, the outcomes have not changed. Dr. Laura Esserman, probably the leading exponent in the movement calling for some sanity around this issue, points out that if life-threatening invasive breast cancers start out as DCIS, then deaths from such cancers should have dropped dramatically as detection rates have skyrocketed. But that’s not what’s happened at all:
During the 1980s, before the mammography enthusiasm, women found to have DCIS numbered in the hundreds. Today, 60,000 women are treated for it every year. And there has been no change in the rates of true cancers.
Some researchers in the minimalist camp feel that most women should not be treated for DCIS, other than perhaps to remove the aberrant cells. Eighty percent of women with DCIS are not in the high-risk categories — young or black women or those with tumors bearing telltale genetic markers; that 80 percent may be fine with no treatment.
How do I feel about this, after a year of disruptive, painful, and frightening treatment culminating in removal of both breasts?
Well, of course it pisses me off. But not much.
In the first place, there was an outside chance that the DCIS in my right breast, which was extensive and probably had been there for many, many years, might have morphed into a cancer that could have killed me before some other natural cause picked me off. As a practical matter, it’s far more likely that I’ll die of cardiac disease. It’s probably more likely that I’ll die in a car wreck. But why invite trouble?
The surgery accomplished two things:
1. Lowered my chance of developing a breast cancer to something less than 1 percent; and
2. Obviated the need for tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors (both of which have some very nasty side-effects) and for radiation therapy (whose very nasty side-effects can surface 30 years after the fact).
It also brought a stop to the unpleasant and bothersome trips to the mammography machine. I will never have to get another mammogram again, thank God, because there’s nothing left to mammographize. 😀
If I had been much younger, say in my 40s or even 50s, yes, I’d have been very upset about being converted into a boobless wonder. However, at my age…well, I see it as cosmetic surgery! It removed two unsightly blobs of flesh that were competing to see which one could reach my bellybutton first.
And what a boon, to be able to walk out the front door without first having to get oneself lashed up in straps and cantilevers! The comfort level and the simplicity factors are amazing.
There are, however, some assumptions the supposed experts make about mastectomy veterans that annoy the hell out of me.
For example, we are repeatedly told that women who ask for a double mastectomy do so because they’re terrified that the condition will “come back” in the other breast. We are assumed to be so stupid that we don’t understand that a cancer (or a DCIS, apparently) in breast A does not “come back” in Breast B; we can’t get it through our silly little heads that a recurrence in the contralateral breast is a new entity, not a spread from the original site.
And we’re thought to be unable to grasp what our real risk of recurrence is — i.e., very low. Whenever the subject of elective double mastectomy pops up in the media, invariably the language states that women do this “to be safe” or “as a precaution.”
No. Women do this because they don’t want to be lopsided.
Some women are bright enough to figure out exactly how harrowing breast “reconstruction” is — and how unlikely it is to lead to a truly satisfactory outcome. Quite a few women who opt for double mastectomy after some condition has appeared in only one boob do so because they’re choosing to go flat: because they choose not to put themselves through months (in some women’s cases, through years) of painful surgery.
If you decide you are not going to have a bag of silicone gel implanted under your pectoral muscles or you are not going to allow a doctor to slice flesh off some other part of your body and slap it on your chest, then it makes sense to have both boobs removed, so that you will not be uneven. This obviates back and neck pain, posture issues, and problems with clothing.
With a tabula rasa for a chest, I can go out without any artificial accouterments — almost all of my existing clothing accommodates this — or if I please, I can use one of my old bras (not one of those radically expensive special mastectomy bras) and fill it with knitted foobs that are very comfortable and, shall we say, amazingly convincing. Instant va-va-voom, if I so please… 😉
Another aspect of the breast cancer mania that I find extremely annoying is the screening enthusiasts’ hoots about five- and ten-year “survival” rates.
In the first place, most breast cancers are pretty slow-growing. From start to finish, such a malignancy is likely to take more than five years to kill its victim.
Second, the advent of hypersensitive screening mammography skews the reality of supposed survival rates by detecting conditions at an early stage without changing the fact that the condition is going to kill you by a given date anyway. Here’s how it works.
Let us suppose you develop a malignancy that will spirit you away in eight years, no matter what. It has few symptoms, and so you are unlikely to notice it until fairly late in the game, say, two or three years before you die.
If your cancer is detected, two, three, or four years before it would naturally do you in, then you are said not to have survived for five years with it.
But let’s suppose the very same malignancy is spotted by an ultra-sensitive mammogram, only it’s spotted after it’s been there for, say, two years. You have surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, but in fact the thing has spread around and you’re a goner. You’ll be a goner after it’s been in your body for eight years — no matter when it is discovered. Because it was discovered six years before you die with it, you appear to have survived for longer than five years. Thus, presto-changeo, you are counted and touted as among the “five-year survivors.” Even though you have survived nothing.
You host the disease for the same amount of time. Your survival of the disease has not changed. Nothing has changed except the deployment of a piece of equipment that for many women makes little difference in the number of years remaining.
Along the same line, women who are operated on, drugged, and irradiated for DCIS are dubbed “survivors.” That is ridiculous. The mortality rate for DCIS is extremely low. Many, possibly most, of them would have lived a normal life span whether or not their DCIS was discovered, and whether or not it was treated. DCIS is not cancer!
“Survivors.” {snort!} I find that term excruciatingly annoying. I am not a survivor. A patient, yes. Probably a victim, yes. But “survivor”? Give me a break!
When you are sick, you are not at war. You are just sick. You are not doing battle. You are suffering a disease and hoping you will get over it or will not suffer unduly at your dying. You are not fighting. You are undergoing treatments that other people apply to you. You are not a hero, you are not a warrior, you are not a survivor. You’re a sick person.
Then we have the cutesy term “lumpectomy.” Doesn’t it sound better than “mastectomy”? No one wants to tell the little woman, of course, that a lumpectomy is a form of mastectomy: it’s a partial mastectomy, also called a “quadrantectomy” or a “segmental mastectomy.”
Nor does anyone bother to clue you that the re-excision rates for lumpectomies — repeat surgeries to go back in after “missed” cells — are simply phenomenal. On average, re-excision rates stand at over 30 percent. However, they vary by doctor, with some surgeons racking up re-excisions rates of 70 percent.
God, I hate sugar-coating. It’s impossible for me to imagine that most adults would prefer to have treatment delivered to them swaddled in euphemism.
Do we really need to be subjected to childish prattle to be able to deal, as grown-ups, with the inevitable? Why?
We’re changing servers again. So it’s possible Funny and the rest of its Blogging Empire will be off the air for a short time over the next few days.
Never fear: We’ll be back!
Finally, after endless technotergiversations, BOOK II OF THE FIRE-RIDER SAGA IS WINGING ITS WAY TO AMAZON!! WooHOO!
In The Spoils of War, the Okan war bands raid a farm outlying the enemy city they recently sacked and burned. The warlord Kaybrel, who tires of the endless fighting, performs what he believes to be an act of mercy and in doing so must deceive his fellows. (He resembles the wily Odysseus in that deceptiveness is part of his nature.) The men party down after collecting a great deal of booty and food, and Kaybrel learns enough about his young captive Tavio to realize that the boy is not what he seems.
I don’t have a link yet. As soon as I do, I’ll publish it here and at all other waypoints.
Good thing I set aside this whole day for Time Suck.
Holy MACKEREL, let me tell you about TIME SUCK.
Posting one of these things takes several hours. For the life of me, I can NOT, not for love nor money, get one of these documents correct the first time. The first installment, A Gift for the Kubna, took about ten tries before I got it right. And I’m sure today’s upload took at least that many attempts, maybe more. Spent a good three hours this afternoon wrestling with the ineffably buggy MS Wyrd 2008, and then another hour or 90 minutes struggling with WestHost and GoDaddy getting disappeared websites back online. What a hassle!
Technology is the Mother of All Timesucks.
A more ordinary timesuck absorbed the entire morning: at 9:00 a.m. it was off to the dentist. He actually occupied only about 40 minutes grinding down my back left molar so he could put a crown on it. That was fun.
However, while there I met a lovely, very sweet and innocent-looking young technician who spends EVERY LIVING BREATHING SPARE MINUTE OF HER LIFE reading erotic romances!!!!!!! She covets the very thing we intend to write and to get rich publishing.
She was extremely interesting and had a lot to tell me about why women read these things, what she’s looking for, what she prefers, and what about a cover or story draws her to buy.
So. Doc, grind away! I was beside myself with joy by the time I left his office.
I started working on the upload about 7:00 a.m., imagining I could get through it fairly quickly, having learned (I thought) enough in the first upload to move forward efficiently.
At 8:30, dropped everything to bathe and paint, then raced out the door at 9:00 a.m.
The appointment wasn’t until 10, but by the time I’d detoured to Costco to buy gas, I got there with just ten minutes to spare.
Then had to restock the pantry.
And now M’jihito is here and I must publish this without proofing it. And so away….
So yesterday I started the upload of Slave Labor to Snowflake Press’s print-on-demand service, just to see what would happen. It went pretty well until (I think) until I reached a point where the next step was… ????? Self-evident, this site is not.
Finding no way to proceed past the point of having uploaded the book and entered my company’s information, I saved and sent an email to their support folks. Got a message back instructing on what to do, so today I have to decipher that and move forward. I think the next step elicits page proofs — interestingly, from their online instructions as far as I got, it appeared that you’d better have printed and proofed your PDFs yourself, before uploading, ’cause you weren’t going to get bluelines or page proofs or whatever. If they ship proofs, though, THAT will be grand.
I’m also ready now to upload How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months, the diet/cookbook. Realized there was no reason to wait until I’d figured out how to get that on Kindle and Nook before setting up the PoD version. So once I learn EXACTLY how to do this task, 30 Pounds will be next.
Yesterday I developed a spreadsheet (I really do need a database on these computers!) to identify and keep track of stock photography for covers and populated it mightily. Today, having found those images, I need to subscribe to Shutterstock and start downloading and storing images for the future bookoids.
The Über-To-Do list I made a week or ten days ago, the one where I figured if I could get to three items a day, in a week or so I’d be positioned to kick Camptown Races Press into high gear — i.e., to focus most of my energy on writing and pre-marketing racy books and on uploading the books that already exist — is pretty well accomplished. A few things remain to be completed: one can’t register an ISBN, for example, until one has the cover art, and as usual I’m waiting (and waiting…and waiting…) for the artist to get done with the Fire-Rider images.
The websites are moved over to WestHost. The wonderful and clever Jesse is now freed of another distraction from his ambitions, and a new back-end guru is working on organizing the Blog Empire in a more reasonable way. It’s grown up like topsy, of course, and the result resembles…well, a weed patch. With that tidied up, things should run much more efficiently, I hope.
Today I have to move the Writers Plain & Simple domain name from WordPress.com to my possession, meaning what for that website, I do not know. As soon as we have the domain name, then we’ll move the site to WestHost, too. But I hope it won’t cause Writers P&S to go dark in the interiim. Oh well.
Also today I’m going to start building a kind of in-house user manual describing, step-by-step, how to do some of the complicated techno-tasks that have to be done. Some of these exist of a piece here and there — I downloaded William King’s explanation of how to build an e-book cover to a PDF and printed it. I’ve experimented with this once and found it pretty easy. Since I’m good with PP and not good at all with PhotoShop, and since the proposed smυtty books don’t need to have anything very fancy on the front, I’m thinking this will be the path of least resistance when it comes to publishing the frolics.
Other procedures to go into the proposed manual: how to post to Kindle, how to post to Nook, how to upload to Snowflake, maybe (if it proves very complicated) how to get stock art images. Any time I have to deal with something that’s yet another learning experience, I’m going to write down the steps, print them out, and stick them in a three-ring binder. So with any luck, I won’t have to look this stuff up and try to figure it out over and over and over again, which is what happens now.
Once again, though, this morning I simply had to take a break, which is what I’m doing while scribbling these golden words. The house has degenerated into SUCH a mess, I simply couldn’t stand another minute of it. Since I got out of the last visit to the Mayo Hotel and Resort, I’ve been working while flat on my back in bed. Though I’ve been recovering, most of the time I feel a lot better laying down.
Of course, my being out of commission does nothing to stop the constant blizzard of incoming paper. Piles and piles and PILES of it have come to rest on almost every surface in the house.
So I shoveled that off.
Found a box that would fit the index cards for the Boob Book, which have been arrayed in tidy (dust-collecting) stacks atop the family-room desk. Put those away neatly.
Then shoveled out a space in the office to hold the box of cards plus the 787 pages of source material for the book, which have accrued in three large binders. So got that stuff out of sight.
I’m waiting until I get a contract to write that book. I’ll send it to half a dozen agents plus one of my former publishers, Columbia UP. If no one bites, then I may write it and self-publish it, but not until I get the paying business off the tarmac.
Shoveled more paper off the desk in the office. Found stuff that was tossed on the desk because no file folders exist to hold it. So now have to devise some file folders and, far more problematic, find a place that can hold him. All the file space in the house and garage — four file cabinets’ worth — is jammed full of crap I’m supposed to save for three years, five years, seven years, or forever. What is the point?
Soaked the blood from the most recent medical adventure out of the sheets. Was kind of surprised to see it actually wash out. Sheets are expensive and I really, really didn’t want to have to throw that set away.
Well, I’m about as rested up as I’m ever gonna get. And so, to work…