June 6th, 2016

First off, it seems that I'm moving my weekly blog posts to Monday. No real reason, other than Monday is when they seem to happen. So from now on, check back here on Monday evening, if you want to read my blog in the future. Since you are right now, I'll assume you do!

Chemotherapy is scheduled to start Wednesday. It was supposed to start last week Tuesday, but one of the chemo drugs takes a while for insurance companies to approve, and that wasn't ready in time. So we went to Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey, because I've wanted to go there since 2005 when they built what was at the time the tallest and fastest roller coaster in the world (still tallest, no longer fastest). Very glad we found a deal on season passes to all Six Flags parks for the same price as a one-day ticket when we were in California last march. The main point here is that I did not start the next round of chemo last week, so we went to a theme park instead. Sometimes people say cancer treatment is like a roller coaster, but I much prefer the real deal to the simile. 

Now the insurance approval went through, and everything looks to be lined up pretty well. As always, "everyone handles it differently" so we can't be sure exactly what to expect, but it's supposed to be fairly easy. Not much nausea or anything. Hopefully that holds true, since my dad and I are meeting up with an uncle in Montreal this weekend for the Formula One Grand Prix. Should be a good guys' weekend of car racing (and roller coasters--more on that in a second). If you didn't know, I started following F1 last year since I needed a sports-related distraction and football and hockey seasons don't cover July and August. While we're in Montreal I'm also planning on at least briefly going to the Six Flags park there. Not sure if I mentioned it yet but I really like roller coasters. I'll be bringing all my anti-nausea drugs, just in case the chemo makes everything weird. It does that sometimes.

Other than that I'm spending a lot of time reading and writing. Mostly writing. Recently I found out there's a writing mentorship program for patients at MSKCC so I joined that. It will be great to get more feedback on the books I'm writing. I recently finished another round of editing for my next book, and it's as done as I can get it, for now at least. I'm sure an editor at a publisher could find things they want to change, but that's down the road a little. For now I'm focusing on sending a ton of query letters to agents (because you can't send books straight to publishers anymore). Some agents won't even accept manuscripts without a referral. It all feels like a broken/patchwork system going through some intense growing pains. But it's the system in place right now, so I'll keep sending query letters. Fingers crossed.