life in New Zealand

Section 140 Entry 0001. Date: 2005 April 16 Saturday.
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Got a short story idea today at breakfast while sitting reading the 9 April 2005 issue of New Scientist. On page 4 (of the Australian edition) there's a story about biometric security. A guy in Malaysia got his car hijacked, and the hijackers cut off his finger and took that with him because they needed the digit to get past the car's fingerprint recognition system.

From a science fiction writer's perspective the actual story isn't interesting. It's breaking news: it's something that it's been done for real. But the underlying form is suggestive: X steals Y and takes along Z because Z (rightly or wrongly) is seen as being essential to Y.

The "rightly or wrongly" notion is where the possibilities for imaginative mayhem come into play. One story idea that I won't use (I'm overloaded with projects) is as follows:

An alien who misperceives certain elements of the Christian religion becomes convinced that the body of the late Pope, John Paul II, is capable of working miracles. So steals the body. When the desired results don't eventuate, the alien decides that an activator, in the form of a genuine Christian, is necessary.

Structurally, the desired Christian (whom the alien now proceeds to kidnap) performs a function similar to the amputated finger.

The Pope just popped into my mind because he's been in the news a lot recently, and, as I say, I don't plan to write this particular Pope-Christian story. But I'll keep the "Z is seen as being essential to Y" idea in the back of my mind for a few days and see if I can find something I want to do with it.

As I've already indicated, above, what strikes me as fictionally fruitful (at least for the kind of stuff that I like to write) is probably not a situation where Z technically is essential to Y (where the finger really is necessary to persuade the biometric machinery to start the car) but where someone catastrophically misperceives the realities.

Today in Devonport, New Zealand, it's yet another marvelously blue sunny day, and from my parents' CD collection I've chosen Chariots of Fire, "Composed, Arranged, Produced and Performed by VANGELIS."

And I'm sitting here snacking on raisins, a good source of iron - iron to build my hemoglobin levels.

Section 140 Entry 0002. Date: 2005 April 18 Monday.
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Today I walked down to the local branch of Diagnostic Medlab to get a blood test, the result of which will go to Auckland Hospital, where they want to know if I'm still anemic.

At the lab, there were a couple of people ahead of me so I took a seat. One woman had put an envelope on the seat next to her, claiming that additional space as her own, and that really annoyed me, even though there were plenty of seats. I don't know why it is, but I've experienced the same rush of irrational anger in Japan on occasions when someone uses their property (jacket, shopping bag or whatever) to lay claim to additional space, even when there is plenty of space.

An old guy ahead of me had not been told by his doctor that he should fast for the test he was going to have, I think a glucose test for diabetes. So he was told that, because he'd eaten, his glucose levels might be up a bit, which might mean that the doctor would ask him to have the test done again some days down the track. So he had a choice. He could have the test now or he could come back some other day after fasting.

What was interesting to me was that the old guy tried to kick the decision back to the woman at the desk. But it had to be his decision. In the end, he decided he would go ahead and have the test.

So there was a little dynamic operating, and that got me thinking about the fictional possibilities of a medical laboratory ... say, for example, a lab in a town which is faced by the threat of plague.

I've been thinking of plague recently because I've been working on my BAMBOO HORSES book, part of the background of which is an outbreak of the (fictional) red parrot fever. The "plague" idea is influenced by the fact that I got the basic idea for the BAMBOO HORSES book back in 2003, when my parents visited Japan at a time when the threat of SARS had really cut down tourist numbers (a good thing for us, as it happened, since it really reduced the crowds at one or two key tourist spots when we visited Kyoto.)

During today's visit to Diagnostic Medlab I found out that the way you get blood from a young baby (aged six months or less) is to cut into the heel. Going into a vein, it seems, is not an option, because the veins are too small, so it's a matter of making an actual incision then milking the blood out of it, "and you can feel the distress coming off the parents."

I think I'm probably not going to write a lab story, but, if I did, then that would be the kind of authenticating detail that I would be looking for.

On leaving the lab, I met a woman I know who was taking her ten-year-old daughter to the doctor. The daughter had a puncture wound in her arm from the bite of some unknown entity (I speculated that it might possibly be some kind of spider) and they were going to the doctor as the arm was a bit stiff.

Mysterious puncture wounds from unknown entities ... if I was short of material to work on then that idea would work well with a medical laboratory setting.

As it happens, however, I have plenty of stuff to press ahead with. And, after visiting the supermarket to stock up on cans of tuna and packets of instant noodles (for my standard breakfast of boiled green peas, instant noodles and tuna) I walked home and managed to put in a little bit of work on the TALES OF OOLONG MORBLOCK project.

This is a fantasy project which got started in the 1990s and then abandoned. I've recently resumed work on it. It's possibly going to stretch to a series of twelve books broken down into four trilogies. The first trilogy will possibly be called THE POWERS OF OOLONG MORBLOCK and the first book in that trilogy will perhaps be called TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER.

Blogging about the writing of the
Tales of Oolong Morblock series.

Section 140 Entry 0003. Date: 2005 April 21 Thursday.
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My fifth cycle of chemotherapy has been cancelled for the second time. The first time it was cancelled because my neutrophils (a type of white blood cell) were down.

Now the neutrophils are fine. In fact, the nice doctor who explained the cancellation new told me "the neutrophils are fluffy." (This "fluffy" probably derives from the traditional Kiwi expression "just like a box of fluffy ducks," meaning "feeling fine.")

However, while the neutrophils are fine, according to a blood test done in hospital today my hemoglobin level is down to 87, down from a level of 93 on April 14th. Apparently the norm for a man would be 120, and at about "70-odd" they would give me a blood transfusion.

Rather than just bung in blood now, they want to figure out what has happened. Most probably the manufacture of red blood cells has been knocked back by the chemotherapy agent methotrexate, in which case time is the cure, but there are other possibilities, including a viral infection of some kind or (worst case, and I'm told the likelihood is low) cancer in my bone marrow.

So this evening I had blood tests. The hospital will be my hotel for the night, and tomorrow I'll get feedback on the blood tests, I'll get a kind of "management plan" and I'll get to go home.

My feeling about this development is pretty neutral. I'm still in my "accept it as it comes" mode for the simple reason that the medical variables are out of my control.

What I can control is my food intake. This evening I ate the hospital meal, which was roast beef (reasonably well done, I must concede) but elected not to chase it with any of the sweet stuff I'd brought to hospital.

By late last year, my weight had dropped from a lifetime high of 75 kilograms to 62 kilos, but today it was back up to 72.8, and a significant proportion of that has started coagulating around my belly, so I've decided it's smart to cut back on which might be called excess food.

Still, regaining the lost weight has given me a reassuring sense that life is coming back to normal. Since my daily dose of the steroid dexamethasone has been cut from eight milligrams to two milligrams, my sleep patterns have more or less normalized. Also, my sense of taste is normalizing: before, the dexamethasone had skewed my sense of taste so red wine became undrinkable, impossibly dense and foody, but last night, at a dinner party, my first evening out for some weeks, I drank a glass of merlot with no problems at all.

When I was on eight milligrams of dexamethasone I had a ravenous appetite and wanted to eat and eat, but dropping the dose has brought my appetite back to normal.

Anyway, my day today was this: admitted to Auckland Hospital at 11:00; fluid loading started at 14:00 with benign fluids in preparation for chemotherapy with methotrexate tomorrow; nice doctor arrives at 17:30 with news that the fifth cycle has been cancelled because of my low hemoglobin count. Drip is then stopped and blood is taken for fresh blood tests, and I phone home with the news that I am to be discharged tomorrow, and then I eat my hospital meal.

Up to a point I'm living in a world of outcomes which are unpredictable and sometimes feel a little arbitrary, and maybe this conditions the "playing with images" poem I finished off today while lying in my hospital bed, a cryptic poem called "Cryptic":-