Diagnosis:SNS

So I go to the doctor today, because my neck is all of a sudden swelled up. Lumpy things on either side of it. It's my lymph nodes apparently, and it may be completely harmless, but they did some blood work to make sure. They don't what causes these things (naturally) and it might just go away on its own. Apparently this happened when I was really little, too, so I'm somewhere between being optimistic and being very, very, very tired of coming down with things that people cannot explain or treat, or both.

Good news: I've lost 70 pounds since I started my diet last year.

One thing I hope never to come down with: SNS disease. You see this sometimes; I think it happens more to folks who toil away on one book for years. They may only have one story to tell. And it's just as likely for this to happen:

The second published novel is often one that was started and even finished before the first. What the critic praises as the brilliant first book, long in gestation, inspired and innocent, may well be novel No. 8 by that writer; and the condemned second book, "pumped out too quickly", "too conscious of an audience", "a disappointing follow-up", is in fact novel No. 4 that took several years longer. Unless you know the novelist's working method intimately, you can't make assumptions.


My advice to staying healthy and free of SNS: have one in the chamber.

Got 200,000 years?

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