OK, So Maybe a Bit Longer Than a Week

Howdy. I am not dead, although I play one on TV.

Turns out I was a tad optimistic about my recuperative powers. I don't know where I got the idea that, two weeks after total knee replacement surgery, I would be off painkillers and a fully functioning member of society (such as I ever was).

We are closing in on six weeks and I still needs me my Vicoden. I tried making it through Monday and Tuesday on Tylenol, and re-confirmed my belief that Tylenol is what they use for a placebo in drug trials. By Tuesday night, I was in that achy state in which you can't sit still because you keep thinking the Perfect Painfree Position is out there somewhere waiting for you if you just squirm enough. So, back to Vicoden.

Percocet, which was My Drug for two weeks, is probably mentioned in those torture memos Obama just released. It works great on pain, less great on the entire rest of one's physical being. I lost a week of my life (Week Three, in fact) lying in a nauseated heap a/ because I had been taking Percocet for two weeks or b/ because I was not taking so much of it anymore. Or some lethal combination of a and b. On the plus side, I lost 15 pounds. On the minus side, my clothes hang on me and I don't have the time or the money to replace my entire wardrobe, so now I'm trying to regain 8-10 pounds but not the whole 15, ha ha ha ha. This requires just exactly the right ratio of chocolate chips to yoghurt.

As a result of all this, I did not get to attend the lovely party for the Maine Literary Awards, in which I was a runner-up. My childhood friend Amy MacDonald, who writes books for young kids, did go to the party and said it rocked. Oh well. Back when I thought I was a demigod who could have her knee cut off without particularly noticing, Amy and I were planning to turn the party into a Brookwood (elementary) School reunion, and Pammy Winsor Brindamour, one of my three absolute best friends from childhood, was going to come up from Rockport. No dice, but at least we got to exchange a lot of email.

Rescuing me from my bed of pain was the news that The Unnameables made VOYA's list of Best Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, 2008. (That link is a pdf.) (Along with Carrie Jones' Need, which means two of the 33 books on the list were written in Hancock County, Maine. Heh.) Plus, Medford and friends have been nominated for YALSA's 2010 Best Books for Young Adults list, the final version of which comes out next January. This is very cool indeed, although my editor is preparing me for disappointment in the end because lots of readers will think my book is anything but young adult. Still, much better than Tylenol. (Carrie's on that one, too. Go Hancock County.)

Possibly the biggest surprise about this whole publishing gig has been the number of times my name has been spelled right in print. I never expected that...in fact, I reserved domain names for my web site in the most common misspellings, because I've lived with this name all my life and I know what it does to people's brains. As it turns out, VOYA and YALSA are the first to get befuddled by all the vowels and things. The VOYA misspelling is one of the common ones, the YALSA one not so much. Guess I'll have to reserve another domain name.

The other thing that happened during my Perambulations in Pergatory was the launch of The Enchanted Inkpot, a group blog I helped to organize and will participate in once I have a brain. The members all write fantasy novels for kids and they know about a million times more about the field than I do, so I'm thrilled to be involved. Check it out, and you'll see what I mean.

I got my editorial letter for revisions on The Filioli a week or so ago, so am trying to figure out a way to sit at the computer with my leg up without twisting myself into a pretzel. Tried the Laptop in Bed routine, and think I prefer Snakes on a Plane. Stay tuned.