To read an excerpt from the book, please click on the following link:

ashaveilbook.blogspot.com

An excerpt from The Pleasure Palace, my romantic comedy, can be found here:



Thursday, January 02, 2014

Praying to Carl Sagan

One other reason I have grown less fond of Facebook is that I feel the need to write every day, or more than once a day, about going through lupus chemotherapy, and that is the focus of my life right now--getting through this so I can better take care of myself and my granddaughter. If you find my little corner of the world here, you've come to this place voluntarily, and I don't have to slap my thoughts down on the Facebook newsfeed and tell everyone. Plus, honestly, people do not photograph their food very well on Facebook and being on there less helps me not to see all that, because it makes my nausea much worse--usually the food pictures are a camera shot straight down into what looks like a platter of barf. People's half-bitten food is particularly bizarre to see. I recently praised a fellow writer for a very nice informal shot of a red cup of coffee with milk, and a homemade jelly donut on a white dish set on a very pretty red plaid cloth. It looked like something one might actually want to eat. Ninety percent of Facebook still remains entertaining, and it is really good to keep up with friends and family, yet I don't want it as a place to diary my treatment or my weaving-back into life. I will update folks there from time to time, but if they really want to know what is happening to me, they can come here.

I am so grateful for CG and my friends, who have reminded me what I have forgotten for so long: that I am a writer, that I am a poet, and that I now have time to write (the science fiction novel I am writing includes poetry because part of it takes place at a festival kind of like the Elusinian Mysteries, a good explanation of which can be found here):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusinian_Mysteries

The Elusinian Mysteries dealt with the Demeter and Persephone myth, which is part of the festival in my book, and so it has been a major source of intellectual detective work to find information about this ritual.

Enough for the day. I am going outside to stargaze. I have so far identified 3 Messier objects: the Crab Nebula in Taurus, the Beehive Cluster in Cancer (an amazing sight, the stars like bees clustered around their queen), and the Pleiades. I think there are something like 135 Messier objects, so I definitely have to stick around, to find them all. It's like the coolest game of Clue there ever was. I watch the sky at night and pray to Carl Sagan, who inspires me because he too had a brutal chemotherapy, a million times more brutal than mine, and lost all his hair, and yet til the end, he kept his brilliance and his wit. He would find that funny, perhaps even silly,my prayers to a cheerful agnostic who felt that so much of religion (not spirituality) was often just a path of superstition and control, but he also had that sense of infinite wonder as an astronomer, a quality I would like to cultivate more and more in myself.

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