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.
