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March 21, 2006

Little Known Author in Wretched Post-Book Season of Glums

I just got a blog comment from the esteemed Pastamasta--who's recently been in hospital with alarming health woes--who comments that I must be feeling pretty good about things now that I've finished the new book. To say nothing, of course, of the recent shiny award. You would think a guy in such circumstances would be feeling pretty chipper about things.

Sadly, this is not so. I feel dismal. Ergh.

The headaches persist, now on pretty much a daily basis, only varying in when during the course of the day they appear. I'm not sleeping well, and I'm not hungry most of the time, so I'm not eating much.

The new book, UMBRA, is just about all I think about, from the moment I wake up far too early to go to the loo to when I finally fall unconscious sometime round 3am. I'm thinking, does it need rewriting? If so, from which point? Does it need a complete rewrite, like I did with HYDROGEN STEEL, when the first version proved to suck like a chest wound? Is the idea any good even as a basic premise? I remember, what feels like years and years ago, sometime in my mischievous, prodigious boyhood, perhaps, when I got the idea for the book, how it felt, in my head, like a fresh, whizzy idea that would work up nicely into a pretty whizzy book. Now, I'm going, hmm. Not sure. Of course, I haven't started actually, you know, re-reading the MS yet. So I really don't know what I'm talking about. This is all just free-floating abstract gloom and confusion, fairly typical of the funk that sets in post-finishing a book. It's just that this time it feels considerably worse than the usual attack. This one's lasted for days and days, and is the major reason I haven't posted. It's hard to convince myself that this kind of thing is good blog fodder.

I've started seeing a new specalist about the headaches. Unfortunately, after I listed all the things I've tried, and various other specialists I've been to see about it, and everything they suggested, he told me he really doesn't have too many ideas of what to do because all the things I listed are the things he would have suggested, too. He is working on the idea that my headaches are somehow migraines in disguise, but freely admits he's not doing much more than guessing. The first drug he suggested, a migraine preventive called Propranolol, was a bust. Headaches every day. Plus bonus extra-sleepiness! I'm now waiting for that drug to finish flushing out of my system before starting another one. He tells me that in his experience he's found patients get sick of trying different drugs after about the fourth suggestion.

I explained that, many years ago, when my psychiatrist at the time was trying to find a new combination of antidepressants that agreed with me well and actually did their job, it took ages to find the right combo. We must have been through practically everything in the MIMS handbook under "antidepressant"--even the weird stuff like monoamine oxidase inhibitors! Weird side-effects were plentiful during this time (this was the pre-Prozac era, btw), everything from explosive diarrhoea to dry mouth to hyper-alertness to horrifically vivid apocalyptic dreams, and many many more! So I plan to stick with this guy for the long term. It's not like I have a lot of choice.

It hasn't been all bad. The weekend after I finished the book, before the post-book gloom really set in, I was the "Local Author Guest" at Swancon 31 (sorry, no link; the site has already moved to next year's Swancon), the local annual sf/f festival. It was very nice, despite the intolerable heat, which was nobody's fault. The launch for Eclipse, went pretty well, and resulted in actual sales. Conditions for doing a launch were, on one hand, really not optimal--too much background noise to do anything more than shout, not much room
for potential punters to sit and watch--but on the other hand, surprisingly okay--putting the launches in the corner of a very busy room meant lots more people showed up out of curiosity than, I think, would have bothered going to a separate room. Overall, considering some of the rooms I had to face during the Great Big Trip of 2004, it went really well! It seems to me that nothing in all of the writing life is better than signing copies of your books for folks who've chosen to spend their hard-earned cash on your meagre effort. It's a humbling and deeply satisfying experience.

So. Anyway. I'll be fine eventually. The glums, that is. The headaches, I'm starting to think, are quite possibly going to be a constant feature of my life for the forseeable future. As for UMBRA: I'm not deleting it. It needs a good read-through, and right now is too soon: I'm still, to borrow a phrase, "too close to the elephant". The battle right now is to just ignore all those niggling anxieties about the thing telling me it should be more X, or more Y, or whatever.

Change of subject: how are you going? What's new in your life?

Posted by adrian at March 21, 2006 06:02 PM

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Comments

Posted by: Terry at March 24, 2006 07:38 AM

Posted by: pastamasta at March 23, 2006 05:14 PM

Posted by: Charlie at March 22, 2006 08:07 PM

Posted by: Luke H at March 22, 2006 03:03 AM

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