September 26th, 2016

Following my semi-planned month off here I am now resuming my weekly blog posts every Monday evening! (Super exciting, I know). I'll start with two pieces of cautiously optimistic news.

First, after a PET and CT scan this past Thursday I received my scan results in record time on Friday afternoon, thanks in no small part to the efforts and persistence of one of our favorite doctors at Sloan Kettering.  My apologies to the radiology team who I know was badgered with requests to have my results ready as swiftly as possible; please know that I greatly appreciate your efforts and promptness. Learning my scan results on Friday instead of today made for a much more enjoyable and relaxing weekend, mostly because my scan results were pretty good!

Everything looks stable, with nothing growing a statistically significant amount. The larger spot they were most concerned about on the last scan even shrank a little and became less PET avid, a promising sign. For now I will continue with the chemo regimen I've been doing the last few months, going in to the cancer center in Corning once a week for a pair of infusions and taking a pill at home every evening. Having a chronic cancer might not be an ideal situation, but for now it's alright. It could be far worse. In three months I'll go back to MSKCC and have another set of scans and we'll go from there. These are very encouraging results, and it seems that my current chemotherapy treatments are, at the very least, keeping any remaining spots of disease from growing, if not reducing them slowly. We'll gladly take it.

My second bit of cautiously hopeful news is that a publisher is now reading a sample of the manuscript for my next book and has generously agreed to share their thoughts on it with me. Through my mentor with MSKCC's Visible Ink writing program I was put in touch with someone who works for a sci-fi and fantasy imprint of one of the "big five" publishing houses. Their feedback and advice will no doubt be immensely helpful in my quest to find a publisher eventually. I am, needless to say, greatly indebted to both my Visible Ink mentor and his contact who agreed to critique my writing, and I would be remiss to not thank them here. So, thank you very, very much. I truly appreciate the time you are volunteering to help me out.

I'm taking a hiatus from querying agents until I hear back about my manuscript and have a better idea who might be a good match for it and how to pitch it to them. This gives me more time to write my next few books, which I'm really enjoying getting back in to. I hit 30,000 words recently on the second book in 'The Legacy of Rythka' series, so it's starting to come along, which is certainly exciting. That and finishing home improvement projects (and moving our things back into our once-flooded, newly-renovated room) keeps me pretty busy.

But I don't think I'm going to write any more tonight. Instead I plan to watch the presidential debate, which should prove excellent entertainment. I'm pretty sure that's a bad thing.

August 22nd, 2016

This week I finished the final edits for the first book in 'The Legacy of Rythka,' the five-book fantasy series I am working on currently. I've had several other people read it and give their feedback (you know who you are; thanks!) and most recently I've enjoyed the privilege of being part of a writing mentorship program through Sloan Kettering. The Visible Ink program at MSKCC pairs patients with volunteer mentors, successful writers based in New York City. I've gained great insights about fine-tuning my writing, perhaps most importantly removing hundreds of commas from my manuscript. I've known for a while that I tend to throw commas in far too often, but I have a difficult time seeing it on my own. Receiving the level of feedback and advice that I've gotten through this mentoring program has been truly invaluable, and it is enormously relieving to know that my manuscript is at long last thoroughly edited, refined, proofread, and ready to send out. 

 Now begins in earnest the difficult and time-consuming task of securing an agent who will in turn find a publisher. The whole system and process moves far slower than I'd prefer and seems like a bit of a racket, but there isn't really anything I can do about that. So, I will simply try to send out ten queries a day until someone agrees to represent my work! I've had a handful of agents respond favorably and request a larger sample of my manuscript, but so far none of those have panned out, at least not yet. It's difficult to wait weeks for agents to reply, hoping that at least one of them will take an interest in my book. But it's hardly a foreign experience for me. If there's one thing cancer has given me plenty of practice with it's waiting for results beyond my control. I guess it's appropriate I'd pick a career that, at this stage at least, consists of much of the same.

August 1st, 2016

Well, my PET and CT scan results weren't perfect, but they could have been a whole lot worse too! All but one of the lymph nodes they've been tracking are unchanged or smaller since the last scan I had, back in the end of March. One of them is a little larger and more PET active, but not by much. So, yet again, my scans are a bit ambiguous and we have to wait to see what happens. I'll have more scans in eight weeks, after another two rounds of chemo. It still isn't the 'all clear' I really want, but it is also a much more manageable result than many people with DSRCT ever get. I'm extremely fortunate to be getting closer to two years after diagnosis at all, much less in this good of shape. I can still ride rollercoasters, play disc golf, work on landscaping, write, and do pretty much anything else (that doesn't involve lifting more than 40 pounds, at least). As much as I might get annoyed at yet another scan that isn't perfect, I'm also immensely grateful for how well treatment is going right now.

I'll be continuing my current regimen of maintenance chemo--two infusions on Wednesdays and a pill each evening--for at least another eight weeks. Since several of the lymph nodes they're tracking actually decreased, it seems likely that the chemotherapy i'm doing now is making some difference, which is great! It's even quite possible that the one larger lymph node is actually trending down now despite being larger than it was on the scans from March; it may have grown in the time between the scan in March and the start of this current chemo regimen in June. The alternative of course is that the lymph node is cancerous and currently growing, but the next scan in eight weeks will give us a better picture of what's actually happening right now, while I'm going through this phase of treatment. Until the next scan in eight weeks, there's not much else to do but keep on going a day at a time.