The odyssey began in the aftermath of the passing of the last of our nine cats, Leopard. His sister, Pirate, had passed several days after Christmas in 2004. Of all our cats, except perhaps his mother, Ginger, his was the longest goodbye. Many people put their animals down at the first sign of illness. We chose a different path. And from what I’ve seen of my animals, they love life and cherish it as dearly as we do, even if it’s no longer an easy one. There are still good things to be had. A tummy rub. A cuddle. Having been so sick myself, I find that I not so much remember the pain, but the bright and good memories that occurred along the way in spite of it. These were my friends who kept me company during the days that I struggled to get from one hour until the next. How could I do less for them? And so my and my husband’s life had become quite limited during the last couple of years. Near the end, most of our cats ate smaller meals and more often. So, rarely would both of us be out all day. We knew the sacrifice wouldn’t last forever. Nothing ever does. And I was still doing a lot of healing, so I wasn’t exactly living a normal life, anyway.
It was 2005 and the Comic Con was only days away. We had resigned ourselves to the fact that this year we might not be able to make it. Several times we had thought that Leopard was getting ready to go, only to see him rally. But the Monday of the week that Comic Con was, Leopard passed around 5pm. We were both with him, and shortly before his death, he wanted my husband to hold him. Only after he started coughing did Frank lay him down on his little rug with a towel for a pillow. Shortly after, he was gone. And after 26 years of living with cats, we were for the first time in our marriage without even one.
But there we were. The next day we took Leopard to the pet cemetery where we had already buried nine other cats. Since they couldn’t bury him until the next week, we were free to go to the Comic Con on Wednesday. Free might not be the best word to use. We were both exhausted from the late night feedings, the constant attention to attend to needs spoken in a language we were far from fluent in (unlike humans who can most of the time ask, animals communicate a whole different way and they expect us to understand them, because, after all, they understand us), and just a deep grief at having lost another good friend. But we went.
Which wasn’t a bad thing. We had two cat trees which we were able find homes for. We knew it would be a while before we got any pets again, my heart for one, just needed some healing time. And the baby food that we had scoured around for, I was able to give to a friend who is a veternarian to use in the clinic she works at, so it didn’t go to waste. Point of note, cats can’t handle cornstarch, and the only baby food that doesn’t use it, is Beechnut’s, which isn’t the easiest brand to find. But they like the finely ground meats and it’s easy on their tummies, so we went looking. Of course, they had their preferences. But it’s not rocket science, it just takes perseverance.
But the Comic Con was sort of a blur. And I wanted a real trip. We hadn’t been on one for a while. Shortly before I got cancer, the first of our nine cats died. Two more died shortly after my surgery. In fact the last real trip we took was in 1996 when we went to the World Con in LA. Several months later, our oldest cat, Tigger passed a day or so before New Years. So, it had been awhile. We had gotten our first new car in August 2004 and it was a year later that we no longer had any cats to take care of. I looked at my husband and said that I needed a road trip.
Where to go? Well, the next con was the CopperCon that was coming up in early September. In Phoenix. Like our next door neighbor said to us, “It isn’t hot enough here for you in San Diego?”
It would be a strange con. Although too be perfectly honest, the strangeness first popped up at the Comic Con. When I tell this story, I usually leave this part out. I’m not really sure why, except maybe it comes too close to dealing with the grief that surrounds my illness. Depending on when one chooses to say that FMS began to impact my life determines the number of decades one could say that I lost to this illness. But then one has to define impact. If one defines impact by essentially saying that I had very little semblance of a normal life, then it would be two decades.
However, if one defines impact of my illness as interfering with having a normal life (doing any and all what a normal healthy person takes for granted) then it begins to be three decades or more. The upshot of it is this: the time of life when most people spend developing a career, raising children, buying their first home, etc. I was trying just not to die. I’m not saying that I’m the only person who’s ever had to deal with illness, I’m just saying that there is a dimension that a person who is healthy just has never experienced.
When people ask you what you do, “just trying not to die and to get well” is not an answer that people are going to give you any positive feedback on. If they don’t run away (and illness/death is the last taboo in our society) they are going to be at a loss for words of what they could say. To be fair, I’m not really sure that there would be anything they could say. It’s like when someone’s house burns down, except for muttering something about how sorry you are and offering some help, there’s nothing you can say that will ease the sense of loss that the person is going through.
And with illness that is very undefined as to the time and course it will take and with the busy and unconnected lives most people lead, there’s a great hesitation at getting involved at all. So, besides not feeling good, you end up with very little to feel good about yourself on top of it. And because you’re not up to doing very much, you see less and less of your friends until you rarely see them at all. And so when you most need a reason to believe that you still have value as a human being and therefore a reason to continue fighting your illness, the very source of those reasons evaporate.
I’m very fortunate that I married someone who was made of sterner stuff and didn’t evaporate. But Frank is only one person. And the ironic thing is, I wouldn’t have needed much from my friends. One call a month would have helped. Instead I ended up feeling that they all just expected me to get it over with and die. There are many times when I think it wasn’t a mistake on the universe’s part that we ended up with nine cats; besides a constant presence reminding me of my value (OK, so maybe if you’re cynical you’re thinking I was a mobile can opener and a heated pillow, depending on whether or not some furry being was hungry or cold) they were also a requirement that I keep moving and therefore, keep fighting.
And then I finally get well enough and write my first novel, and within days of finishing it, Tigger, our oldest cat, dies. Six months later I get cancer and almost die. And the next nine years become this dance of illness and death until when I get to the Comic Con in 2005 I’m 53 years old, I’m still trying to get my first novel published, I’m still trying to get well, and I’ve just watched the last of my furry friends take 6 months to die.
I’m having serious doubts that I’m even going to survive long enough to have a career if I get one going. I’ve known more than my share of people who have died in their 30’s or younger. I have no idea what this silly illness has done to my body’s internal organs with regards to prematurely aging them. Perseverance may be what makes a person a success, but hope is the engine that drives perseverance. Death is what makes our choices important. With immortality, we’d likely become expert at putting everything off until manana. But one needs a little healthy denial that death is not going to happen tomorrow. That if one hurries, there will be enough time to accomplish what one has been placed on this earth to accomplish and maybe one day extra to bask in the glow of a job well done. Any healthy denial for me was long gone. I was sore at heart and without much hope. I despaired of my life being anything but a losing proposition. I was trying to fight it, but I didn’t know how. I hadn’t mentioned this even to Frank, because there wasn’t anything that he could say that would remove the mantle of darkness that was, inch by inch, enveloping me. Silly me, I prayed for some help. Maybe asked for it would be better way to put it. Something, anything, to help me shake this feeling that even if I got well, it would be too late.
Well then, off to Wednesday’s preview night at the Comic Con I went, trying to at least live in the moment and enjoy myself. It’s important to understand that I was being cheerful and talkative with the vendors and Frank. I may not have been running up and down aisles yelling “Festival, Festival” but neither was I chanting “Repent you sinners, for the end is near”. As far as I know, I was not doing anything that would give a normal person a clue as to the dark waters swirling inside of me.
And I don’t think a normal person would have noticed. But I was about to have an encounter with someone that I would find out later had had a near death experience and had been changed by it. As I was walking by this booth, a white-haired bearded man yelled out at me, “Quit worrying about it, you’re going to live into your 90’s.” OK. It was nice that he added that Frank was also going to live a long time. But then for other reasons, I’ve always known since my early twenties that he would outlive me (but that’s another story). Then the man muttered something about I put everybody else first, which is a comment that would probably fit 50% or more of all the women on this planet. I listened as he made comments to other people about other things, but I never heard him mention lifespan again.
Did he really know something? Was it just a bizarre coincidence? You’re welcome to argue with yourself on that one. But this is what I do know. The darkness lifted. The heavy mantle about my shoulders fell away. With a sentence from a stranger. I had heard what I needed to hear when I needed to hear it. And that is miracle enough for me. Even if it’s not the truth. Even if I live far fewer years than he predicted, I’m now living them without the fear. I know that I will have enough time to do what I was put here to do. Whatever it is. My tasks will not be uncompleted. I have enough time. I have enough my-time. And by that I mean that I’ve often said that this illness makes one live by inches while others are living by miles. And it’s now OK. I will have enough time. Period. No more need to worry (at least about this). I will proceed with enthusiasm and I will get there. Wherever there is. Of course, I told Frank about the darkness after the encounter. I suppose he knew something hadn’t been quite right. I suppose, when I look back at it now, that this was the beginning of my life changing. Although, since I had spent the last several decades living by inches, the changes would follow by inches, also, for a while. But all I knew then, was that a terrible weight had been lifted from my heart.
So perhaps it was this lifting of the darkness that propelled me towards the madness of going to Phoenix in early September when I’m a person who doesn’t like heat. Who doesn’t like heat with humidity and is going to a city which is at the tail-end of its monsoon season. It gets above 80 degrees and my mind says it’s taking a vacation. Now I’ve met people who just start to get warmed up when it hits 80 and they’re downright singing when the thermometer hits a hundred. Genetics are important in the strangest ways. My ancestry is pretty much localized to countries that don’t get much hotter than around 80 degrees. I like overcast days. I like fog. But like I said, madness had hit.
Add to this the fact that some twenty years ago, on our way to a per diem assignment in Albuquerque for my husband’s job, we passed by Phoenix on its west side, I looked and saw endless slabs of gray cement that reminded me all too much of the Los Angeles I never wanted to live in again, thought yuck, and made a verbal vow that Phoenix was a city on my short list of places I never wanted to visit. Well, one just never knows, does one?
To be fair to Phoenix, in those intervening years, they have struck out on their own and have developed a unique identity. Their freeways are either pink or sand colored with design elements making it clear to anyone who has lost track of either time or their mind, that they are now in the Southwest. I still don’t like the heat, but the people were nice and friendly. So, Phoenix is no longer on my city non grata list. I just hope that after this last year, no more trips during the hot months are scheduled for me by the universe. Otherwise I might seriously start considering moving there, a madness equivalent to the one that briefly hit my second year in college when I considered switching my major from chemistry to physics. But that’s another story.
So to Phoenix we went. The monsoon season ended a day after we got there, so we saw one 15 minute shower. And the temperature dropped 10 to 15 degrees. And if we hadn’t got there a day early, we would have missed all of that. But due to my illness, I try to pad trips with a day on either side so that I can physically handle it. However, let me be clear on one thing. It was still HOT!
I should have known something was up. It’s always easier in retrospect. One of the panel tracks was on the paranormal. They had panels on ghosts, regression, tea leaf reading, palm reading, and somehow I think tattoos were included in this. And there was a young woman out in the lobby doing tarot readings. I should have known after my experience with the psychic that weird things were about to happen. But then again, why? In my life, there have been enough strange things that have happened to know that there is a lot out there we still don’t have a clue about, but usually they are pretty isolated events. This was going to be different.
Well, we started with the tarot reading. Most of what she said pretty much came under the category of telling me about what had happened in my life (which is OK, that establishes that there may be something to the reading). The two things that stuck out, was first a comment about that I wasn’t as attached to an individual as I thought I was (and I was going through a painful and emotionally difficult separation from a relative that I could no longer have anything to do with on any level) and that my life was going to change in six months. Frank also got a reading. Showed up in both our cards that our finances were improving. Showed up that we were good as a couple. I don’t think he heard anything earth shattering. I do know that nothing showed up that his life was going to change in six months.
Now, on to the panels we went to, which is not exactly in the order that they happened. We went to one on reading tea leaves. I saw some interesting stuff in my cup. I saw an airplane. And I saw the face of a man that reminded me of a well-groomed devil, like that played by Ray Walston in “Damn Yankees”. At first, I wondered, is this something I should be worried about? Then I decided, no. But I knew that this meant some man would be coming into my life, and maybe this would have something to do with my book. Then the woman teaching the class came over and looked at my tea leaves. She saw a pagoda. She saw an ox. Now this would have been weird enough. There was no way she could have known on how immersed I had become in oriental culture. There was certainly no way she could have known about the importance of the ox, or in China, the yak (see my essay “Making Peace With The Ox”). She also saw the plane and said in a year and a half or a little longer I would be taking a trip (those leaves were further up the side of the cup). She saw a pig and a duck kissing, indicating a couple who love each other but are very different (my husband and I decided we would not try to decide who was the pig and who was the duck). And then she said, “Your life will change in six months. Please note, although she said strange things to my husband, she too did not say anything about his life changing in six months.
Then we listened to a woman talk about regression into past lives. And it was very interesting and the most coherent and sensible discussion I’ve ever heard (no, everyone cannot have been Cleopatra, but everybody could have visited the past lives library and read up on her and maybe have gotten a little confused about whether or not it was their life.) We would run into Mary later the next day at a party and I would end up talking about my book and she would tell me about this publisher that she really liked that she knew that would be showing up at a conference on marketing your writing that she was putting on in March. Thus would be set in motion our second trip to Phoenix, though strictly speaking it was at a hotel in Mesa which is right next door. Though if you insist on splitting hairs, you’ll miss the spirit of the tale.
Our next foray into the mystical was listening to a talk on palm reading. I’ve always been interested in palm reading, but I know that there are a lot of insincere practitioners out there. Anybody who won’t let somebody else sit in on your palm reading is probably pulling a con. Maybe it was because a classmate in college my freshman year looked at my palm and said I was going to have a lot of health problems in my twenties. When it started happening, I always wondered what it was that Eric had seen. He was a serious student (we were in chemistry, physics, and karate together) and not one of those guys that was always cutting up. Anyway, for whatever reason, Kitty impressed me as being the real thing. So, after the class I got her card and arranged for me and Frank to get our palms read the following Monday after the convention.
So we drove over to Glendale which is west of Phoenix and I got my palm read. Once again, she saw a lot of things in my past which I don’t think she had a way of knowing. Then she looked at my wrists and said, “You’ve been really, really sick. In fact, you almost died.” Now at the tattoo discussion she had been there when I had said something about I had had enough pain in my life and really didn’t want any more (when asked by the tattoo person about getting a tattoo I was trying to explain that it had nothing to do with being scared of pain, I just didn’t need to prove to anyone that I could handle it. In some cultures that is the whole point of tattoos, to prove to yourself you can handle the tough stuff. Been there, done that, thank you very much.) However, I never said anything about almost dying. In fact, the odd thing is, neither did anyone else at the time say it to me.
I have this strange karma that no one ever tells me anything. I’m not too sure if it’s because they figure I already know (to some extent I always do) or if it’s just too scary for them to put it into words. Maybe we’ve become a society of euphemisms. Anyway, it seems to me that I’m the only person to have ever gotten cancer and nobody believed that I could die from it. I think my husband did, but I think he’d been in the trenches so long with me we both just took each day one at a time. Even my surgeon danced around it. I had almost bled to death and the most he ever said was it was amazing how someone could survive on such a low red blood count, or something like that. Then weeks after my surgeries, it was how well I was looking. Considering how bad I looked when he first met me, I suppose I continued to surprise him. But the word death was never used. Or seriously ill.
When I first started acupuncture, I had trouble finding my own pulse (I had been trained in first aid, and I started to be concerned that if I ever passed out, nobody would be able to find it, either). Years after being in acupuncture, my acupuncturist at the time said something about how one of his patients would love to have my pulses. I then mentioned what my pulses were like when I had first come to see him. Suddenly, it was, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
After reading several books on acupuncture (and doing a little self-diagnosis) I had figured out just how far down the rabbit hole I was. But nobody ever talks about it. It’s almost as if if they don’t talk about it, it won’t be real. Meanwhile, I’m thinking that maybe I’m overstating things in my own mind. So, having Kitty confirm it like that, was big. Having someone, anyone, just come out with a simple declarative statement, “You almost died.” was a relief. I had almost died. I had needed two pints of blood and I probably could have used more. I had been in acupuncture for eight and a half years before the cancer and my acupuncturist said I would not have survived the surgery if it had happened two years earlier. My body sense puts it at a year. Afterwards I had complications that only this peculiar illness could bring on, and I am convinced if I had let them do what they wanted, it would have killed me. I was right on what was wrong with me, they were wrong. For a while it was like I was running a gauntlet. There were several places for missteps that could have had quite a different outcome than me still being here nine years later. Yes, I had almost died. Sometimes clarity is freeing.
But Kitty wasn’t done yet. There was encouraging stuff (like, yes, you’ll make it as a writer), the you’re in a good relationship and you’ve done this before (I once had a friend who also did astrology who said that according to our charts, Frank and I have been together before, will we never learn?, and yes, what you have been waiting for, the “And your life is going to change in six months.” She did not say that about Frank’s.
There were a few other strange things that came up in the readings. On my hand beneath the finger next to the thumb I have four squares together making another square. This was the first time Kitty had seen this on a hand, although she knew what it was supposed to represent: a master communicator. I’m not sure what all of the implications of that is, but certainly that’s not a bad sign for a writer to have on their hand (or for that matter, a former teacher). It probably means I’m good at explaining things to others (I once explained how a laser works to a twelve-year old), it does not mean that I use words no one has ever heard of before. Which, if you think about it, makes it very difficult to communicate effectively with others. I’m all for precision in language, as long as it’s not overwhelmed by the waters of obscurity with regards to the audience’s particular knowledge of language.
Every field has its own language. Abbreviations, acronyms, common words given uncommon meanings. What, pray tell, are nude mice? Well, if you’re not a biologist, you might respond that it’s Mickey Mouse without his shorts on. You’d be wrong, but at least you would have done it with a sense of humor. They are mice that have been specifically bred not to have any hair so that tumors can be more easily observed. As a chemistry graduate student reading papers on cancer, it took me a while to track that one down. Definitions of terms are rarely given in papers (they have to pay by the page to have them published, and it’s not cheap) unless they are these gigantic review articles. So, unless you’re with other people with your specific knowledge of a language subgroup, you stay away from using these words unless you’re willing to take the time and define them (One should never wait for the other person to ask, it’s not polite to make other people feel stupid. It’s also not smart, chances are that they can do it to you, too.) I prefer to speak simply about complicated ideas instead of speaking complicatedly about simple ideas. Ah, very Zen. Master communicator never uses any word bigger than necessary to communicate thoughts. Unless, of course, someone has really ticked you off, than the verbal gloves may come off and you may pummel them with dusty multi-syllabic masterpieces until they go sulking off to a corner. They may not have understood a word you said, but you will have made your point. Which is its own form of communication.
The other thing that came up that I can remember is Kitty finding St. John’s Cross on Frank’s hand. Now, Frank had his reading after mine, so when Kitty explained that this meant that he had saved someone’s life, I was a little quizzical. I had no problem with the fact that he had one, I had always maintained that he had saved me and that I wouldn’t have made it without him (this is another story, let’s just say for now that he rescued me from the insanity of my family–and insanity doesn’t even begin to convey it. Let me just add that Alice in Wonderland was saner than my life.), but I had in a clearer and more well-defined way, saved him. We were eating in our favorite Chinese restaurant at the time when Frank bit down on an egg roll and it flew back and got lodged in his throat. I had actually been trained in the Heimlich maneuver (I availed myself of opportunities for first-aid when they came my way, I figured since I taught Chemistry labs, they might be useful) and I was able to successfully use it to save his life. Kitty checked my palm again, and found a much smaller St. John’s Cross on my hand. Well, Frank is fond of saying that quantity has its own quality, I guess I saved his life in two minutes and it took him years to save mine. He gets a bigger cross for it.
So, that was the first trip to Phoenix. We came home and I had hopes of starting to get my life in order. I should have known better. I should have listened to what was not being said. I’m not saying that people chose not to say things. I’m saying that the universe has a way of saying things without saying them. When one is told three times “Your life is going to change in six months,” one should consider what that might mean about those intervening six months. The universe might be telling you to hang in there. Therefore when in about two weeks my back went out and my body was engulfed in pain and the only way I could go places was in a wheelchair, I realized my path to change was not going to be a slow and steady improvement. Once again, the Chinese proverb: Things will get worse before they get better. Or in my case, much worse.
I won’t bore you with the details. I’m not even sure I really remember them, anyway. I have learned to deal with a great deal of pain. Fortunately, I only remember it vaguely. Not that I really try to remember it. Sometimes its only use is to remind myself now how much better things are. I can still have pain, but on a scale from one to ten, at the most maybe it gets to five. When I really talk about pain, I mean pain off that scale. Having never been tortured, I can’t say this for sure, but I suspect that there may not be a lot of daylight between this pain and the pain that another individual can inflict on another. Even if one survives and gets to the other side, one has to relearn how to live one’s life just like a POW. In fact, I’ve coined the term POD (prisoner of disease) to describe my situation. [Husband’s note: Once Sharon had had to have one of her toenails removed. Before proceeding, the doctor asked her how well she tolerated pain. As he went about prying her toenail off, I could see her grimace, and the tears form in the corner of her eyes, but when he was done, the doctor said, “If anyone ever asks you again about it, you have a very high pain threshold.”]
Some illnesses have a limited effect on one’s life. A medication is added. Certain foods must be eliminated. Other illnesses come to define one’s life. My illness is unpredictable. I never know how I’m going to feel. My life can, and often does, turn on a dime. One day I can almost have the energy of a normal person. The next, I’m a zombie. Some nights I sleep extremely well. Some nights, very poorly. The good days are increasing in number again. But I live with the fear that something, anything, could throw me back into hell. It’s hard making plans. Frank and I don’t do anything that doesn’t allow me to move when I want to or that can’t be done on a moments’ notice. We used to go to plays. We haven’t gone in years. We go to conventions because they’re relatively inexpensive and one never has to sit for a long time. Sometimes there are events at cons that we avoid because it involves sitting for a long time, like masquerades. Neither do I do well with standing in line for a long time, either.
I joke about having become an urban hermit. There are good and bad things about that. I miss people. But I think its easier for me to step back and not to be so easily influenced by the frenetic trends that come and go. With illness as an excuse, I don’t do things I don’t want to do. Time has become too precious to me to allow others to waste it for me. I’m quite capable of doing that myself. Severe illness and near-death experiences tend to give one more courage to be oneself over the roar of everybody who wants to tell you to do something different.
Many people may say they know how important life is, but usually they only know it with their heads. Until one knows it with ones’ heart, one too easily can cave in on things that are not right for them. Or in one way or the other, turn their life over to someone else. In one form or fashion, our culture is constantly telling us how we should be living our lives. What we should be wearing, what we should be wanting, what we should be eating, etc. Unless you truly understand that you are going to die, you cannot live, because you will not stand up and make your own choices that are right for you. Death is a friend that reminds you that your choices matter. I think regret comes from choosing things we did not want to choose at the time, but were talked into by other people or by the voices that our culture has placed in our heads. No success can be assured in this life except this one. You can always succeed at being yourself. And since you is the only thing you can take with you when you die, it would seem to make the most sense to give that one top priority.
For those of you who did the math, you would have noticed that six months separate September from March. Ice Escape, which was the marketing convention, actually was held in Mesa which is just east of Phoenix. But we did do other things in Phoenix, so for the sake of this story, it counts. When the pain had subsided to a low roar and I could think again, I held on to the hope of the “In six months your life will change” as a promise that somehow I was going to be able to go to this convention. Hope and faith triumphing over experience. There was no way I was going to fly (I could end up not being able to move when I needed to), so that left driving. It’s not a bad drive. But when your back is in pain, it is something else to entertain an almost six hundred mile drive one-way. And if you feel good, what if something happens in Phoenix and you have to face that drive home? I’m just trying to explain that for most people they wouldn’t have had to give this a second thought. For me it was an entirely different story. It was like jumping off of a cliff after being told I could learn how to fly on the way down. Yeh, right, that’ll work. But I jumped anyway.
The mind is a funny thing. Language is not as straight forward as we lull ourselves into believing. If you’re mystical, you might believe that sometimes things are simply hidden from one until it is the right time for it to be revealed. Take an innocent statement that can be taken in a more ribald way. Certainly the person making the statement wasn’t thinking that way (yes, there are those who do this deliberately and feign ignorance, but I’m not talking about them) and some of the listeners may have taken it exactly the way it was meant. But some people will see the alternate interpretation. And break out laughing. A face will turn red. An attempt to mount a defense will be undertaken. It will fail. It always does. And it will take time to get the conversation back on track, if ever. Then there’s how to pronounce something. In English, not every vowel is pronounced. One would look at “cake” and pronounce it with one syllable whereas in other languages it would be pronounce “ca’ke”. I offer this as explanation to why I didn’t see something sooner. For the most part, I have an innocent mind (not naive, just innocent) and often end up as the person with the red face. So, I rarely look to the fringes, taking the common definition of words, not some esoteric scatological meaning of a word or phrase imbued by society. I also tend to assume an English pronounciation to someone’s last name, even if it could look like something else. And then, maybe, the universe just gave me a brain cloud. Whatever. All I know is that I really did not see it at all. I suppose I could always blame the pain.
Well, when Ice Escape updated their website with their guests, I checked out the publisher that Mary thought might work for me. He looked really nice. Then I checked his website and I came to the conclusion that this might not be such a good match for me, after all. I once tried outlining “China Harbor” after I had written it (yes, I did not use an outline to write it). I couldn’t do it. Frank also tried, and couldn’t do it. I therefore decided that trying to write outlines for me was almost the equivalent of asking me to commit “hari kari”. I didn’t want to do either one, but at least if I did, I feel that my chances for being successful at the latter far outweighed my chances at the former. Which led me to the conclusion that not only was I what they called an “organic” writer, but that I would have to work with an editor and publisher that could accept what that meant: no outlines, ever. Now Brian was not asking for an outline, but he did want all the plot twists and turns. I wasn’t even going to try it. Besides I believe the story should stand on its own. I believe that anybody worth their salt in the publishing field should be able to read the first page and know whether or not you can write. With the first chapter, they should know whether or not you can handle character, dialogue, scene, mood, and maybe even theme. Or at least whether or not you have something important or interesting to say about the human condition. After that, to really tell whether it’s a good story, they just have to read the whole thing. How can they appreciate your adeptness at surprising the reader if you already have told them all that’s going to happen? Besides, it’s not so much what happens as how you tell what happens that’s important. So I just figured there was no point in wasting his or my time on this.
Not that this stopped me from going to the convention. There would be other things to learn there (and there were). Mary tried getting me to talk to Brian, but I demurred. But then I thought I should just talk to some of the other people just for practice. They had sign-ups to talk to some of the guests at various times. I finally signed up for two times on the last day, Sunday. And I told Frank that if I was really supposed to talk to Brian, it would happen anyway. And it did.
We went down early on Sunday and checked in that we were there. We were just standing there and talking when Brian showed up and started talking with us. After a while I began to wonder if I should reassess my fear of him not being a publisher that should be checked out. So I told him my concerns about his website. He said not to worry. I showed him my blurb (which I had been able to write). He read it and said, “Perfect”. Well, that was an auspicious start. He had some openings and I signed up for one. Now after that I had the unpleasant experience of talking with an editor from New York who had showed up late. She frowned while reading the same synopsis (something Brian actually noticed and commented on to my husband). And in my book, she was just plain rude. Her initials are GB and if you ask, I’ll tell you who it was. I don’t mind someone who just says they’re not interested. But professionals behave professionally and there was nothing professional about this woman, even if she has been in the field for years. I would even go so far as to say that I think she’s the sort of person who enjoys being unkind. Incompetence can be excused to some extent on the basis that someone has gotten further than their natural talents can cope with, but unkindness is a choice that can be made by anyone. Her adeptness at it bespeaks a life-style choice, not that of a bad day. May you never cross paths with her.
Fortunately I had Brian to look forward to talking to, and that helped. Sometimes people don’t get my sense of humor. It’s a little dry, a little esoteric, and a little skewed. When people do get it, they usually split their sides with laughter. Brian got me. Brian was intelligent and kind (and you might have guessed by my recent short tirade that this is important to me). And he himself was funny and didn’t take himself seriously. Neither do I take myself or most things seriously. Life is too short. I have found a great deal to laugh about my illness. Not that being sick has been funny, but there’s humor to be found along the way if you look. And as it has been said, laughter is good medicine. Anyway I really liked him. And a 180,000 word novel from a first-time writer did not scare him. I never meant to write something so long, after all, I always wanted to be known for my short stories and the longest thing I had written before “China Harbor” was somewhere in the 20-30 page realm. So, the upshot was that I was to send him a copy of my MS.
Now here’s the weird part. Brian’s last name is Hades, and yes, it’s pronounced with two syllables like the Greek god of the Underworld. In my head, I had pronounced it with one syllable. Actually, there is such a word as hade and it refers to “the angle of inclination from the vertical of a fault, vein, or lode.” (Webster’s II New College Dictionary) and is pronounced with one syllable. And how many Canadians would you expect to have Greek names and who look like they’re of English or Irish ancestry? Remember the tea leaves? The friendly looking devil? Sigh. And to make matters even stranger his publishing house is in Calgary and I was born on Good Friday. Go ahead, try telling me there is no God and if there is one, that He has no sense of humor. Sorry, I only believe in coincidence up to a point. I can’t explain this. It’s just too weird.
However, did my life change in six months? It’s still too soon to really tell. I don’t know whether or not I’ll end up being published by Brian or whether this was just another signpost along the way telling me there are kindred spirits out there. To be honest, he’s the first person that I’ve met in the publishing field that I could be really happy about working with. Maybe all this was telling me was to stay away from New York (GB being the exclamation point to everybody else that I’ve met from New York, who have simply been not my tribe, not particularly mean). I don’t know. The only other side note to all of this, is when I got home, I went to the dentist to have my bite adjusted, got home, and halfway through a piece of pizza, a tooth broke off. This eventually led to a root canal and another gold crown. The good news is this was a tooth that had been bothering me for years but they could never figure out what was wrong. Nothing showed up on x-rays. After my root canal (and the nerve was inflamed) I came home and despite the fact that I could barely open my mouth to eat, my body insisted on doing a happy dance. It was thrilled at having had the root canal done. It would take at least seven months for the whole process to unfold and for my tooth to feel normal again (after all, it had been bothered for several years and with FMS I don’t exactly heal as fast as other people do, either). Was this the “And your life is going to change in six months”? I don’t know. Frank says he sees changes around me. People are responding to me differently. To be honest, there have been times that I have felt like I’m invisible to other people or that I’ve been wrapped in cotton batting and have just been cut off from life. But this is what happened around the second trip to Phoenix.
Sharon wrote this essay in 2006. After reading China Harbor, Brian Hades did say he wanted to publish it, but, as a small publisher, he didn’t have the distribution to do such a large book (450 pages) in print. He offered to do it electronically, something he was experimenting with. In 2006 ebooks were a very niche market, and there was no Kindle or other ebook reader on the market, so we judged it not likely to be a success and passed on Brian Hades’ offer. Perhaps that was a mistake, and, given all the signs we’d received, God would have shepherded it to success. For good or ill, it was a path not taken. In 2010 when Amazon opened the doors to any independent author to create their own ebook and take home 75% of the cover price, we put it out via Amazon where you can still find it at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003UBTOYO. It’s hardly a best seller, but everyone who’s read it, speaks very highly of it.
I should also probably note the reference in Sharon’s title for this essay. To the Chinese, the dragon represents the masculine part of the tau and the phoenix represents the feminine part. Since Sharon was a dragon in Chinese Astrology, she found the title fitting.
Musings of a Restless Mind 