Status Update • 18 September 2021

 

And another week flits past in the blink of an eye. More doctors, more clinics, more hospitals, more diagnostic work-ups: next week we find out whether this last cycle of thrice-daily infusions did the job and Karen can go back to normal chemotherapy or whether she needs another cycle of intravenous icannotbegintopronounceitin. The nasty bit is that this drug and her usual chemo conflict badly. While she’s on this one, they’ve had to suspend chemo, so while she’s making progress against the infection, she’s losing ground to the cancer. 

On the bright side, after doing the procedure approximately 168 times so far I’ve become quite adept at doing infusions. I now have the process down from at least an hour each time to about 45 minutes, and have become much better at multitasking, doing this bit with the ring finger and pinky of my left hand while I’m simultaneously doing that thing with my thumb, middle, and index fingers of my left hand and this other thing way over here with my right hand. Now if only there was something I could control with a foot pedal.

A few people have asked me to make some kind of inspiring statement about how Stupefying Stories is going to rise from the chaos and burst forth in new glory. I could make such a statement, or I could be honest. While the last eleven years have been challenging (to put it mildly), and the last 27 months have been quite difficult, the past eleven weeks have been downright hellish. I keep making plans for how and when we’re going to reemerge and resume publication, both of new books and of new stories and features on this web site, once the current medical crisis is resolved, but then Something Happens to throw everything into chaos again. Thursday morning, at 1:30 a.m. CDT, it was a ruptured hose in the laundry room—which was easily controlled and contained, but not before the flood had spread into my office, which I didn’t discover until about 9 a.m. Thursday morning, when I went into my office to boot up and get to work for the day and found I now had an indoor water feature.

Helpful hint: if you have a basement office and one or more tower computers, spend a few bucks, get some concrete blocks, and get your hardware up off the floor. It can save your sanity, as it did mine this time. The only irreplaceable thing destroyed in this misadventure was the only existing copy of one particular book manuscript.

Shrug. To be honest, I was never going to finish writing that novel anyway. I’ll take it as a sign and move on. 

More news next week,
Bruce Bethke

P.S. In the meantime, here's some art I got for another project that never happened. Enjoy!