Prepping for AWP 2016 and for more Tests

I’m so excited for this year’s AWP. It’s not just doing the panel, which I am truly enthusiastic about, or the parties, or the book fair. It’s the idea of celebrating – in a land of sunshine and seawater in what is usually for Seattle-ites a dim and blowsy month – being writers together, loving reading and writing books. If this sounds a little squishier than my typical cynical post about surviving AWP, it’s because it is.
My recent health scare (still ongoing, more on that later) has kind of illuminated parts of my life that are important to me, that give me joy and meaning, and dang it, AWP – the chance to be with other writers, while it may be stressful and chaotic, is also a magnificent chance for accidental magic – catching a reading of a writer who might be your new favorite, or running into someone you really admire but have never met and managing to string a half-decent sentence together, the chance to actually see and hang out with friends you love but never get to be in the same space with, for geographical reasons.

Here’s Entropy’s Guide to AWP 2016, which lists our panel (Women in Spec, April 1 Friday 1:30!) as one of their picks (thanks, Entropy!):
http://entropymag.org/entropys-guide-to-awp16/

It also includes good links to other advice about AWP. I think mine boils down to: eat, drink, sleep, and wear comfortable shoes – do NOT take a vacation from self-care, and your body will thank you. Let good things happen spontaneously inside of trying to plan out every little thing – it took me several years of going to AWP with detailed plans to figure that one out. And enjoy yourself in the city you’re visiting – get out and go to the beach, a museum, a great restaurant – and LA has a great restaurant scene as well as amazing dives. (I personally am staying far out from the LA downtown center in order to make sure I actually do some sightseeing. I may be allergic to the sun, but I still love hanging out in Santa Monica and Hermosa Beach, especially.) Also, come visit me at the Two Sylvias Booth at 2 PM on Saturday at the bookfair if you get a chance! I lived near LA for a year, so I got to visit often and so it feels like I’m going back to an old familiar place, which is kind of nice. Also, looking forward to being able to get ahold of really good fresh corn tortillas (hard to find here in the Seattle area, but plentiful in SoCal.)
In medical news, I got to see – finally – a liver specialist this week, a really good one. He was nice and reassuring and called me “young and healthy” several times, which I really appreciated – although, for the young part, well, he couldn’t have been more than five years older than Glenn, ha. He had an idea for hospitalizing me for one more test before trying the biopsy. He also ran down the odds of things the solid growths could be besides metastatic cancer (yay! adenomas, hyperplasias, etc.), and the odds of something going wrong bleeding-wise with biopsy. I like numbers, so I found all the information reassuring (well, the part about the likelihood of a bleeding event during a liver biopsy was sort of alarming, but I guess not totally unexpected.) So I’ll be going back to the hospital for a whole day/night thing soon, when I get back from AWP, but I’m going in with my eyes open, and with all possible precautions taken. Hopefully this test will give us enough info – positive identification of the kind of growth that is non-cancerous – to avoid the liver biopsy all together. That’s what I want you guys to think good thoughts about, if I can ask that of blog readers.
That and me not getting sick/injured before/during/after the AWP trip. This will be the first time I’ve flown in over five years! Last time I flew, I was in a wheelchair, an arm brace from a sprain AND I caught pneumonia, so you can see how that might have made me a tad anxious about flying again. Not only am I flying, I even got TSA pre-checked and found out I basically have invisible fingerprints, so I could have been an international jewel thief all this time. Ah well. Missed my calling there.

I’m looking forward to inspiration, walking on the beach, and spending a few days celebrating being a writer with a bunch of other writers!