One thing I can say about my recent health scare is that it has gotten me writing again.  I started on a new novel which at the moment is mix of ideas.  I started with the concept of an lesbian vampire novel, (yes, I know that not original, but what is?) and setting in Richmond, with a secret centuries old anti-vampire, anti-gay group  called the LAW [the Lord's Army of Watchmen] based on a real life Baltic group,  and I notice violence against LGBT persons is disturbingly similar to violence again other people and even fantasy beings like vampires and werewolves. [Yes, I know it sounds like Dan Brown meets Bram Stoker, but it could be worse, believe me.] If one can understand the horrible monstrous things people have done out of the fear of the Other, or through a simply lack of compassion for others,  then it can be easier to purge demons from your past.  And by deliberate basing some characters on people I know, it's also helped me understand their own issues.  It was either the Roman poet Terrence or Oscar Wilde who said,  "Nothing human is alien to me."  Even though I'm a straight male, I realized I have had (and still have) a lot of gay and lesbian friends over the years, and I draw on them for the characters as well as tales told mainly by my late first wife and my having to deal with her bipolar disorder.   I had forgotten what a remarkable woman she was and drawing from her past as background for the main character,  I'm finding my own feelings about her.   By changing the protagonist's sexual orientation it also offers me some distance as well.  And a good writer--hell, simply a good human being--learns what empathizing with another person, even one whose course through your life was reckless and painful,  broadens your understanding of the human condition.

Maybe I'm being presumptuous, but in some ways it's much easier to create a character of a different race, gender, or sexual orientation that it is to create alien races, or strange beings or monsters from our ids.  I'd already been working on an idea for a vampire police detective in Oklahoma City and drawing on some real life horrific murders in the city.  But I think the characters in this project are a little fuller, and more real to me, and I think because I'm drawing on my own experiences with friends and my knowledge of events in ex-wife's life that I suddenly knew that this was a good idea.  Like a lot of writers, I'm reluctant to draw on my own emotions and experiences, but this way I can do just that as well as keeping a mental distance that's healthy and objective.  I don't know if it'll work, but it jumpstarted me and that is the best thing of all.  So far I've gotten a few scenes written and have worked on developing the secondary characters and the members of LAW--sometimes baddies are lot easier to create than good guys, perhaps because it is easier to believe villain's motivations.  So much simpler that our own--unless, of course, we are evil ourselves.  No title yet, and I'd like to avoid anything too "bloody" but that's not on my mind just yet.  But if you have a idea for a title or have a scene you'd like to see in someone's book somewhere sometime, let me know.  The worst I can say is "It stinks," which is a criticism we all faced in our infancy, and there's no getting over that.

To keep you updated on my health, i have an ultrasound on my kidneys tomorrow to check out a cyst on one that cam eup in a CAT scane, and then I'm meeting with my cardiologist and a vascular surgon. With luck, medication will control a lot of this, just as an new, additional blood pressure medication is helping with my hypertension.  All of these issue run on my mother's side of the family, so I suppose I should get made at my genes.  It's the hand I was dealt, but I don't intend to fold anytime soon.
What other choice do I have?
Till next time.

On Sunday last I was just sitting at my laptop writing when I had a spasm in my jaw.  That’s not unusual as I have TMJ, the result of a bicycle accident back when I was  in college in which I went over the handlebars and landed on my chin.  Over the years this has been controlled through wearing night-guards fitted to my upper jaw, but I have also had spasms in that jaw at times.  Usually they’re triggered by sinus congestion or stress.  They come on suddenly and the pain is horrible for about ten to twenty minutes.

This time, however, the pain went down into my neck and across my shoulders.  I even felt it in my elbow joints.

That had never happened before.  Clearly something was wrong.

I drove myself to the emergency room and was checked in, had blood drawn, a blood pressure cuff put on, and was given a nitroglycerin jell patch—as a vaso-dilator to increase blood flow.  “This may cause a headache,” the nurse informed me.

It didn’t.  I seem to almost always not have the symptoms from medications that someone tells me I will have.

 After blood work was done, nothing seemed wrong,  except that my ProTime level (associated with Coumadin, which I’ve taken since I had heart surgery in 2002) was high at 4.0 instead of between 2.0 and 3.0.  I’d had it test about a two weeks earlier and it was perfect at 2.5. 

Then, after a second test, I had a minimally elevated troponin level, with an emphasis on “minimal.”  Troponin, however, is nothing to sneeze at, as it’s often the post-event sign of a heart attack.

My family apparently has a history of heart issues.  I had surgery to deal with an aortal aneurysm—a not uncommon condition that can lead to aortal dissection and death—and ended up with an artificial heart valve and a single by-pass.  Aneurysms are an issue on my mother ‘s side of the family, as my mom and an uncle in England both had surgeries for them.

This time things were far from clear.  I was kept overnight and the next day I had a CAT scan and an echo-cardiogram, neither of which apparently showed anything senior. So I spent a second night in the hospital and the next day was injected with radio-active tracer and had a gamma ray camera take shots of my heart.  It’s hard to describe the experience of lying flat on your back, arms over your head, and being raised to within an inch or so of the massive camera, and then waiting as the camera moves slowly over you, making various mechanical sounds.  Those were the “before” shots.  I then was given a drug that simulates what happens on a treadmill (without the endorphin high that exercise gives you.)   After that, it was back to the camera, then to my hospital room to wait for the Dr. Chu, the cardiologist.

When he arrived, he gave me one of those ambivalent diagnoses:  “Your tests are normal, just not normal enough.”

Ah, the absoluteness of uncertainty.

So that meant a heart catheterization and possibly angioplasty and a stint.

It also meant a long wait.  The procedure was roughly set for 7 a.m., but was then rescheduled for 1 p.m.  So there I was, waiting and worrying, but at least I was writing in my journal, something I once did virtually religiously for about ten years, but haven’t done so for more than ten.  Naturally I wrote about an incident in my teens when my dad nearly drove us into a freight train.  Ah, nothing helps you cope with a scary, dangerous situation than recalling an ever more dangerous, potentially deadlier incident from your past.  The impeding crisis pales in comparison as a result and makes it somehow easier to deal with.

When I was at last wheeled down for the catheterization, it was almost 1 p.m.  Fortunately I’d been given valium and Benadryl^®.  By now I had grown use to being wheeled on a gurney all around the hospital—actually, just a section called the “Tower.”

It was much colder in cath lab than the rest of the hospital.  So the nurses covered me in a nice warm blanket.  The last time that had happened was when I was being prepped for surgery in 2002.

I’d had a catheterization before, as a preliminary to the heart surgery I had in 2002.  That was in the femoral artery in my groin, but this time the cardiologist, Dr. Chu, went in through my left wrist.  So there I was, flat on my back, my left arm stretched out and covered with the all the neat surgical stuff to focus the physician’s concentration.

The I was given a local anesthetic in the wrist, and a television monitor was brought over my head so I could see the procedure—although as I stared at the dark line that separated the top and bottom halves of the image I could only think how much it looked like the red line at center ice on a hockey rink.

After that, although was awake through the procedure, I can recall nothing, as I was given an amnesial through my IV tube.  Then the next thing I know I’m fully awake and alert and being told the procedure was complete, and that I didn’t get a tint because I didn’t need one.  Instead, it was to best treat with changes in my medications. 

Great news, I suppose, but it didn’t explain my jaw pain.  The cardiologist said he didn’t think it was angina, but the hospitaler (doctor connected to my PCP) thought it was.  In either case, my new meds were now to include\sublingual nitroglycerin.

At this point I was certain I would get to go home.  Except the air-filled plastic cuff on my wrist had to be carefully removed by first using a syringe to remove the air in increments 20 minutes apart.  But when the cuff was finally removed, a hematoma began to form at the incision site.  So the nurse put pressure on it, which meant the cuff had to be refitted and refilled and the whole process started all over again.   That added another couple of hours to my stay.

Nancy had come up to stay with me, despite her still having a “boot” for her broken ankle.  She’s hoped we’d get to go home together, but no go.  So Nancy had the friend who brought her up to the hospital take her home.

I, however, had to stay put.  In the crook of my arm I still had the IV, which was extraordinarily painful.

Almost as pain were the sticky backed electrodes stuck to my hairy chest so the transistor radio sized heart monitor hanging around my neck could send data to the nurses’ station terminals.  I have a very hairy chest.  The sticky on some of the electrodes often did not stick well to my skin, but extraordinarily well to the hairs themselves.  Those that did not stick initially were held down by strips of surgical tape.

Having them yanked off of my chest reminded of Steve Carrell getting his chest waxed in “The 40-Year Old Virgin.”

Over the four days I had had many of these stickers removed with a yank—mainly because no one seems to use the same leads on their heart monitors and that required replacing the incompatible electrodes with other, compatible ones.  These were usually larger and stronger adhesive.  Often at night they would be painfully torn off when I rolled over in the hospital bed.  The agony brought me rudely awake and invariably set off an alert to the nurses’ station telling them one of electrode leads was no longer connected.  The nurses then came in and used medical tape to hold the stickers back in place and place more chest hairs in peril.

Let me say that no torture, not even water boarding, equals the pain of having chest  (and arm) hairs ripped off repeatedly—and unexpectedly—several times a day.

On the plus side, it meant the nurses didn’t have to wake me up to give me my medications as I was already alert.  One positive aspect of being in the hospital was making friends with a really sweet Korean nursing assistant and with the phlebotomist, a bespectacled, talkative blonde from Colorado.  She told me about the new needles the hospital was using for blood extraction, and before I knew it she had drawn the several vials she needed and I hadn't feel a thing.  In fact, all the nurses went out of their way to be nice and friendly.  Sort of made me feel handsome and attractive. 

Finally, about midnight, the wrist incision was closed, the IV cannula and the electrodes were removed, I got dressed, picked up my things, and waited for a taxi, which the hospital kindly provided me with a voucher for.

Fifteen minutes later, I was inside my house and greeted by Nancy and the dogs, and I was able to sleep in my own bed.  Ecstasy.  In the morning I could make the arrangements to check in with the cardiologist and my primary care physician  and get my new meds.  And now I had good reason to blog about my travails.

Also, check out my review of Karen Halttunen's Confidence Men and Painted Ladies on GoodReads at <<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/692438.Confidence_Men_and_Painted_Women" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830-1870" border="0" src="https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1177291588m/692438.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/692438.Confidence_Men_and_Painted_Women">Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830-1870</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/321910.Karen_Halttunen">Karen Halttunen</a><br/>

My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/695912224">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />

A fascinating and well argued book, Halttunen's work examines not just the attitudes, but the behaviors, of a critical generation in American history.  She argues how the industrial and market revolutions and burgeoning new cities placed tremendous stress on American society and rather than accept or embrace these changes, many groups tried to adapt older views to maintain their older but increasing irrelevant values.  <br /><br />While Haltunnen limits her study largely to the antebellum era, her ideas have fascinating implications for the rest of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.  What she describes is an America that was essentially a nation of strangers where trust of others was essential, yet where it was also undermined because appearances dominated and the constant reinventing of one's self was a requirement for success.  To counter the change, advice books appeared to advise rural youth on to recognize swindlers and jezebel,  These volumes on building character and achieving material success while maintaining traditional virtues were precursors to "self-help books like Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grew Rich" and   Dale Carnegies "How to Winn Friends," although with a stronger and more explicit Protestant moral veneer.<br /><br />Haltunnen also argues that while supposedly educating people on moral behavior, it also was being undermined by a society where success involved have some of the very con-men characteristics the books warn about.<br /><br />What is interesting to me, though, is how those advice books also eventually become virtual instruction manuals on how to impersonate the moral and virtuous person in order to better con your victims. 

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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21099612-nigel-sellars">View all my reviews</a>

It's been far too long since I've posted.  Partly, because I suffer from depression  (more on that later).  And my wife, having broken her elbow a year and a half ago, broke her ankle in May and had surgery.  She was confined to bed and a wheelchair, but know has on a heavy metal boot and can use a walker.  My big problem, however, has been struggling with writer's block.  Goodness knows I have plenty of unfinished projects to complete.  But getting down to it is more difficult.  So I'm forcing myself to write what I can.

Which leads me to this, basically a book review but of a book blending several of my interests, such as history, science fiction, pop culture, and more.  So I give you my review of:

Ray Palmer has always been an important figure in the creation of modern science fiction, but few historians of the field give him quite as much credit as he deserves and others have effectively written him out of that history or, at best, given him a cameo appearance at the edges of the story.

This is in part because Palmer was also the man whom many SF fans believed had killed science fiction, both through the "Shaver Mystery" stories and from Palmer's championing of flying saucer and occult phenomena.

Fred Nadis' biography is a welcome book as it restores Palmer to his rightful place in the creation story of modern SF but also as the man who invented flying saucers and developed many of the conspiracy theories so near and dear to the hearts of the Far Right, especially the "Tea Party" movement.

With access to otherwise obscure material and with the help of Palmer's children, Nadis ably recreates the world of the bright young man whose horrific collision with a wagon wheel would leave him crippled and hunchbacked.  Those injuries, however, led Palmer to become a voracious reader.  Eventually they also directed Palmer both to the world of science fiction fandom, where he found acceptance despite his disabilities and his short, slightly dwarfish physique, and then to the world of the paranormal.

Nardis also catalogs the series of painful episodes in Palmer's life that shaped him psychologically, including the death of his beloved old brother during the Battle of the Bulge.  Palmer later claimed have a vision of his brother's death, including an apparently accurate description of the fatal wounds.

What emerges is the portrait of a man who over time carried on the vision of Hugo Gernsback by editing Gernsback's pioneering  Amazing Stories after the major Chicago magazine publishers Ziff-Davis acquired the magazine but didn't know what to do with it.

Palmer brought the publication back to life with a mix of clever hucksterism, promotion, and hard work.  While John W. Campbell and Astounding are often presented as the source of modern science fiction as a serious literary form, it is all too often forgotten that Palmer published the first stories by a number of those "Golden Age" writers, most notably Isaac Asimov.  And Palmer too both pushed space opera into the wings and developed, with Campbell, a form of "science fantasy" that went beyond the gothic style of Weird Tales and produced magazines like Unknown Worlds and Amazing's companion magazine Fantastic.

On the other hand, Palmer also perpetrated the infamous Shaver Mystery when in the 1940s he published the rantings--though edited and rewritten by Palmer--of Richard Shaver, a former mental patient.  Shaver's tales of how two competing ancient races, working in caverns beneath the Earth's surface, both created misery and joy, good and evil.  Soon these tales of deros (detrimental robots) and teros (integrative robots) came to dominate the pages of Amazing.

It remains unclear--mainly thanks to Palmer himself--whether the Shaver stories were meant to appeal to readers who believed them to be "true," or if they were simply a sensationalistic publicity stunt by Palmer to increase Amazing's  news stand sales.  And it certainly did achieve the latter.

Naris spends a great deal of time telling the tale of Palmer and Shaver, who became close friends, yet this is in some ways one of the least interesting parts of Naris' book.    In many ways the Shaver mystery is well known to science fiction fans, although Naris manages successfully to portray the sad and tragic side of Shaver as well as the genuine friendship he shared with Palmer, who often went out of his way to help Shaver financially.

Yet at the same time Palmer was setting up his own publishing firm devoted to his non-fiction interest.  Soon Palmer's Fate, Search, and Mystic appeared to promote Palmer's interest in the paranormal and the occult, rather in the fashion of old dime museums and pseudoscientific investigation.  Later, Palmer established the science fiction magazine Other World, as well as Flying Saucers and Space World.  In addition, Palmer also hired a young man names James Oberg as his associate editor.  The far more skeptical Oberg went on to be perhaps the most important chronicler and historian of both the American and Soviet space programs.

In addition to flying saucers and the paranormal, Palmer turned his attention tot the political, especially conspiracy theories about One-World Government conspiracies and the like.  Nadirs points out that Palmer coined many terms like  "flying saucer”, “men in black", associated with Ufology, and carried them over into the right-wing conspiracy theories he promoted in his newsletter, the Forum.  In an odd way, Palmer invented, revived or was midwife most of the fringe beliefs in modern society.  So one of the fathers of modern science fiction was also the creator or inventor of UFO investigations,  religions and cults and may have set the ground work for political groups like the modern "Tea Party."

Yet Palmer was also sympathetic to the hippie movement, in part because of its willingness to explore many of the subjects that intrigued Palmer himself.  He also endorsed the sexual revolution and the anti-war movement.  As Nadis points out, Palmer might well have been the only support of Barry Goldwater and George Wallace who knew and loved all the lyrics to "The Age of Aquarius" from the musical "Hair."

By the end of his life Palmer was promoting—and debunking—many of his own ideas, lik the idea that flying saucers come from inside the Earth, which is actually donut shaped and open at a both poles.  As always, one can’t be certain of what Palmer actually believed or what he saw, in the tradition of P. T. Barnum, as pure bunkum that nonetheless wer extremely popular.  Many of these ideas and beliefs Palmer both promoted and championed, and also went to great lengths to debunk.

Ultimately, Nadis has succeeded in giving up a portrait of a very American character who encompassed many of the contradictions and paradoxes of post-WW II Cold War America and largely either created, or was a mid-wife to, and promoted many of outlier movements and fringe ideologies.  Hunchback, gnome-like Ray Palmer, in the final analysis, remains as much of a paradox now as when he was alive, but that may have more  to do with the worlds he help create rather than his own complex and frustrating persona.