T + 413 Write On!

It was transplant clinic this morning and I saw the consultant who saw me through my transplant and the first three months post-procedure so it was nice to catch up with him.

We reviewed where I was with everything and the edited highlights are that I am going to stay on the same prednisolone dose of 5mg one day, 2.5mg the next and go back in two weeks' time.

I mentioned about how sensitive I am to the cold nowadays and have to warm up like a lizard basking on a sunny rock before I am fully functional. He said that is often a symptom of thyroid hormone levels but I'd had this tested last time I went to the clinic and he looked it up and the levels were fine. So we are just going to keep an eye on that.

I also mentioned I'd been getting a few aches and twinges in my shoulder and elbow of my right arm, not in the joints themselves but more where the tendons join. I only mentioned this in passing because I know GVHD can attack joints. I was surprised by how thoroughly he questioned me about this and got me to check my range of movement ( which is fine ) and he made a note of it in my, err...notes. He thinks it is prolly nerve related and might be a trapped nerve in my neck. Again we are going to keep an eye on it and review it at my next visit.

Whilst I was waiting between having blood taken and seeing the doc I'd taken my little laptot (netbook) computer with me and managed to write 300 more words for my NaNoWriMo novel which was a bonus.

On that topic...

NaNoWriMo

The "competition" officially got underway this Sunday. On Saturday 31st October I went along to the Coffee Lounge and met up with eight or so fellow wrimers from the Midlands region. It was nice to meet up with some others entering this year and there was a mix of ages and experiences with some people doing it for the first time and others having completed 5 previous years successfully. It was mostly ladies of the female gender and there were only 3 of us blokes there. Is fiction writing more of a female pursuit I wonder?

After a couple of hours I went back home to have a nap to prepare me for the night time write over. We met in the Thistle Hotel at 21:00 and got settled into a very nice conference suite for the night.

We had a countdown and on the stroke of midnight we began writing. The way the night went was generally 45 minutes of quiet writing and then a 15 minute break for nattering, stretching legs etc. This worked really well and by 05:30 I had reached the target I had set myself of 5000 words.

I could have carried on a bit longer but I decided I would take my leave of the group at this point and I was tucked up in bed by 06:00 on Sunday morning. Most of the rest of the group carried on until 09:00

It's been a long time since I stayed up until the early hours doing anything and it was fun. I woke about 09:30 on the Sunday and though physically tired, mentally I was reasonably alert so I got up. By midday my mental state matched my physical one and I went back to bed for a "nap" which lasted four hours. After that I was pretty much back to normal sleep patterns.

There are a couple of pics of the write over here and here

Since the Sunday I have been making reasonable progress with the writing and my current total stands at 9821 words. Which is well ahead of schedule in terms of just number of words. In terms of where I am in the progress of the story that is another matter and something I will need to address this weekend I think with some longer writing sessions.

Here is a random sentence from my novel so far:-

“Gentlemen..” Lili tried again. Still no attention. Lili put her thumb and finger in her mouth and emitted a shrill whistle that almost made the glass windows of their room vibrate. She followed this by an equally loud “Oi!”.

As you can see it's a bit of an ugly sentence with the repetition of "Lili" but it was prolly written around 3am and the whole point of this exercise is to switch off your internal editor and just write and move on. Corrections are for after the initial creative burst of November.

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