Blog Intro: What to Expect Here are intermittent impressions of my real life that alter my perspective. As an example, though, the picture shows my manuscripts stacked with reference books. — **Blog** **Intro: What to Expect** **Here** are intermittent impressions of my real life that alter my perspective.

Blog Intro: What to Expect Here are intermittent impressions of my real life that alter my perspective. Or, move me so much that I feel a need to write down how a play, a concert, or a passing street scene affected me. I love Shakespeare and hip-hop that’s not about menacing women, which is probably mostly a thing of the past.

Sometimes A Novel Taps Into My Subconscious

Sometimes a novel taps into my subconscious right away: It affects something that’s been brewing inside me on a subliminal level. And I’m overcome with admiration. Sometimes I may write about this, but not always. Sometimes the experience feels very private.

As a writer, I admire anyone who writes, and especially anyone who writes fiction. Yet, if a book doesn’t draw me in within fifty pages or so, I’ll put it down. But, what happens to me more and more often is that later, I’ll pick up that book again. Maybe in a year or two–it varies. Because I’m not sure why I return to a book that at first didn’t pull me in. But when I do come back to a book, I suspect something that didn’t make a conscious impression on me must have affected me deeply, if subconsciously. And has been brewing just out of reach. Because usually, I discover that what didn’t thoroughly involve me the first time, later affects me with a lasting power.

Put Another Way: Fiction Is Always Subjective

Put another way; Fiction Is Always Subjective. What involves me so much that it feels real to me now, may not have “spoken” to me at all, or not out loud, on my first attempt. In any case, if you love a novel, if it expands your spirit, it’s a great book. How someone else may respond is inevitably different, even if you and another both love or dislike a specific work. Your own life comes into play. Because reading fiction is a creative act in itself. The common analogy is dancing. The writer leads, the reader follows, “backwards and in heels,” so to speak.

What to Expect Here Is Unpredictable

What to Expect Here is unpredictable: Unlike most blogs, I can only come to this occasionally. To write a blog consistently on a set schedule would not leave me the time I need to write the novels I have in drafts and very much feel compelled to do all I can to bring to life. And yet, as a writer, describing my surroundings, my thoughts, memories, and feelings sometimes feels almost necessary. And sometimes it doesn’t. But whatever I post here, no matter how fanciful it may strike you, is a real aspect of my real life. I’m posting it on this blog, hoping that something someone reads here will interest them enough so that they seek out my fiction. It’s what I love doing more than almost anything. I am seriously driven to write novels that demand more grace and dimension than I’m certain I can grasp.

What I post and what I do not is unpredictable. But I invite you to give me a chance! Writing fiction for me means soaring and plummeting. I love it but it does not make me easy to live with. And because reading fiction completes the novel, reading my best efforts demands more time and attention than passive appreciation. So, I’m grateful to anyone who reads what I write. My writing is like me–intimate, fast, and, I hope, fun. Also, no doubt like me, my fiction may be occasionally more demanding, in one way or another, than is apt to be widely popular.

Migraines Are Way Beyond Headaches

March 20, 2019

Migraines are way beyond headaches: I’ve been getting them, at least once a month, since age 22. They put me on planet pain for 3-5 days. I cannot eat or keep my head up. I feel as if sheer pain prevents me from sleeping. But I suspect I do sleep, aware all the while that I’m lost in a torrent of agony. And the strange part is that all my vital signs indicate excellent health. And this is true even when I manage to get myself to an emergency room during the throes.

An altered photo of me suggestive of what migraine pain feels like.

Until recently, I had seen every neurologist in the area. Now, a newer, younger group are available. But I’m reluctant to put myself through the rigmarole, time, and expense again. Unless, I believed real relief was available to me.

This despite believing younger doctors will treat me much better than in past times. Not that long ago, a specialist was likely to prescribe Excedrin and a nap. Or, a very cold shower followed by a very hot one. And, if that didn’t work, try vice versa. Whenever I heard this, I would explain:

Migraines Are Way Beyond Headaches

From 1996 to more or less 2006, doctors went from one extreme to the other. Those not recommending naps or showers prescribed mega doses of antidepressants, Depakote, anti-psychotics, and anti-epilepsy drugs. Supposedly, these help some people. Not me, though. And when I reported this fact, the doctors, during those Prozac, Depakote, Abilify, Topomax days, responded: “Double the dose.” Stupidly I did.

After Ten Years of Brain Fog, I Stopped!

Since then, of course, I’ve tried homeopathic remedies, herbal concoctions that in my case tend to trigger migraines. CBD, for example, which can help epileptics, does not help me. It’s much more likely to bring on a migraine, the same as the more lively strains of cannabis.

The one remedy I have not tried, because it sounds like a cult-monitor to me is electronic head-gear. But I think that might be already off the market. The only time I heard about it was once or twice two years ago. Not since.

Recently, a good doctor told me that the new miracle shot, that costs $3,000 a month, was over-hyped. He believed it would not help me at all even though it’s not one of those sickening vascular constrictors. The reports, he said, indicate it reduces fifty percent of the pain in fifty percent of migraineurs. He suffers migraines and would not go near it. Good to know.

Not so good to know, however, was his honest opinion: that if I never wrote for more than ninety minutes and stopped to take a walk, my migraines would lessen. Except when my children were babies, I wrote for approximately ninety minutes, and not much more, while they napped. And I always took them on walks, usually longer ones than they liked. But during that phase, I suffered as just as many migraines, possibly more.

Now My Daughter Has Inherited Them

My daughter, at age 22, developed migraines like mine. Yet despite seeing and, when she could, nursing me through them all her life, she could not not believe such out-this-world pain meant anything less than imminent death. When an attack subsided, she searched the internet: total organ failure; rare brain tumors; and other horrors. She spared me the gruesome specifics.

Knowing her pain, I suddenly needed to rack my brain for a possible benefit to the disorder. Wasn’t possible, I suggested, that for all our immeasurable pain, she and I experienced commensurate euphoria. Who could say?

Of course, I should have known: she could! Never had she known me to spent 3-5 days so euphoric that I was oblivious to all else. Somethings are just bad. And sometimes we must simply live through them. And afterwards, be grateful we did. After all, the pain is “all in our head.”

Familiars or Figments of My Imagination

March 15, 2019

Familiar or Figments of My Imagination--a stone table, chairs, and pillars call to mind a bloody death scene from an ancient Greek play. — If I’m running past this, I almost always sense a pair of lovers making a lethal pact.

Familiars, or figments of my imagination: Am I alone or do other people sense the scene that blinks in my mind when I run past the table and pillars in this picture?

When daylight lasts past eight, the Hudson River pathways throng with people. In the summer, they fish, smoke, skateboard, and walk dogs. Lovers sit side by side, laughing and kissing. Families take selfies or entrust a passerby with their phone to capture them–all smiles, the Statue of Liberty in the distance. Farther north, I watch pick-up basketball games. Also, volleyball. And, sometimes, people playing tennis. Or, trying to. A few times I’ve seen small groups practicing dance steps!

So I do not need my familiars or figments of my imagination for company. Yet they continue to appear in any sidelong glance.

But even when the area’s relatively empty, I feel safe. Because the security guards wave at me and my purple hair. I run between nine and ten at night. It’s not just a habit. I need to expel lots of excess adrenaline after writing fiction.

My long, hard runs are only possible because I listen to hip-hop at top volume through headphones. And running helps me transition from the world in my mind to the real world, in which I try to participate. But have yet to acquire the knack.

This granite table and columns, for example, elicit a quick scene (perhaps from Aeschylus): a beautiful man and woman sit together, each with an elbow propped on the table. They loosely entwine their forearms. And wear costumes reminiscent of ancient Greek royalty.

Without actually seeing the blood, I know they have slit each others’ wrists and are staring into each other eyes as their opened veins fill carefully positioned goblets. Before they pass out, and before I entirely pass them, they raise the goblets in a ceremonial toast.