11.29.06
State of the Hanne Address
It would seem that I am well overdue for a State of the Hanne Address. I’ve alluded several times here to having been under the weather a lot lately, and a handful of folks, concerned, have written to ask me if I’m okay.
Short answer? Yes.
Slightly longer answer? Yes, for certain values of “okay,” and am getting okayer.
Longer still, but more informative answer: The best I can figure it, my system waited until I had finally gotten done with the last stages of getting Virgin into production, until the page proofs were out the door, and promptly collapsed like a souffle in the front row of a road production of Riverdance. Almost four years of mostly solitary work on very difficult, often emotionally and conceptually toxic, intellectually tricky material that mired me in the misogyny mines pretty much from Day 1 took their toll… along with various other things, familial and professional, that’ve gone on in my life during that time that I didn’t really have a chance to deal with, grieve, recuperate from, etc. because I was already over deadline with the book.
So in the time-honored manner of college students finishing finals only to catch the most revolting flu available, I crashed. Hard. Not “post-book depression” particularly. I know from depression and this wasn’t the same thing. Exhaustion. Awful flareups of all the repetitive stress injuries I’ve ever dealt with, plus some new ones just for fun. Exciting new stress-related health issues I’d never experienced before in my life, like temporomandibular joint pain, frequent nausea and other GI misbehavior, cluster headaches… huh? Who, me? I’d never had these things happen to me. And then the array of symptoms that came along for the ride with the exhaustion, like the inability to focus, the shakes, the muscle and joint aches, the incapacity to think well. Writing was laborious and unpleasant, which it generally is nowhere near. Reading anything too complex was right out, because I couldn’t follow what was going on. I could just make it through Terry Pratchett’s new YA, Wintersmith, but I think that was mostly because I already knew the characters.
I’m not about to get into some tedious recital of all the ways in which this was a gargantuan pain in the ass, let alone how un-fun it was to endure. I’m sure you can do the math. Point is, I had never before understood those bits, typically in Victorian novels, where someone undertakes some massive task and does it and it “ruins [his/her] health.” I never imagined that was literal. I always figured that was code for “after doing such-and-so, s/he was feeling a bit run down and tired and in need of a vacation.” It wasn’t. At least not necessarily.
Fortunately, having something ruin your health can be a temporary condition. For the past six weeks or so, my day job has been getting better. Figuring out what I can and can’t do. Figuring out how to get the stuff I can’t do done anyway. Lots and lots of acupuncture, which has been helping me enormously… truly amazing, and my acupuncturist is worth her weight in something really really good. (Like maybe Michael Recchiuti fleur de sel caramels, or something equally outrageous.) Sleeping a lot. Eating plenty of fruits and veggies. Trying to get a judicious quantity of gentle exercise. Trying not to beat myself up too much about all the stuff I couldn’t do, or the stuff I still can’t. Waiting. Praying. Trying to be patient, because this kind of incapacity is tooth-grindingly frustrating.
The good news is that I’m doing a lot better. It’s a perplexing thing, this recovery process. There are some things I still can’t really do a whole lot of — driving the car remains inordinately taxing for some reason, for instance, so there’s a really firm limit as to how much of it I can do in a day — and other things that are getting more or less back to normal. But the ability to get through a whole day without needing to sleep for a couple of hours was a milestone. Getting to the point where I could go swimming was another, but first I had to get to the point where I wasn’t likely go shaky and dizzy and disoriented in the pool, or at least if I did, that I was well enough that I could depend on a few minutes’ rest being able to set me back to rights.
That was two days ago. And after two days where I was well enough to trust myself to be able to go swimming for a little while, I’m now having a day where I can tell it wouldn’t be such a hot idea. I’ll probably feel up to it again tomorrow, but today I’m apparently running on fumes. So, ya know, still a work in progress.
I’m hopeful that I’ll be back to normal by my birthday, which is at the end of February. Virgin comes out in March, so it’d be awfully nice not to feel like I had to husband my energies quite so carefully by the time that happens.
And speaking of Virgin, I’m happy to say that the Japanese rights have just sold, to Sakuhinsha. Other foreign sales are in the works, but nothing to announce yet. This will be my second book to be released in Japanese, which is very exciting for me. Not that I can read them. I always have a secret fear that they’ve taken my name and put it on the cover of a book about, oh, I don’t know, growing enokitake or something.
Also, blurbs have been coming in from various people, and I’m truly thrilled by some of them — validation is paradise, as a certain very wise and wily friend of mine notes, but validation from people whom you admire personally as well as professionally is a special sort of joy.
Oh, and y’all do know that the Virgin book has its own blog, right? I update it pretty frequently with discussions of virginity-related news items, and will be adding book events/book tour information, speaking gigs, and so on when the information becomes available.
Anyhow, that’s all the news from the little purple house in Baltimore. Over ‘n’ out.