…But am I, today, right now, capable of being the writer I want to be?
Last year I found my yes. Many of you helped me with that by sponsoring those works, and I am forever grateful.
But I am not being the writer I want to be. I am writing, a lot. Mostly screenwriting, and also building towards some new fiction. But I am losing the time war: I am slowly but surely giving ground to a thousand responsibilities and other challenges of my life right now. I’m doing my best to find the balance. But I need more help to sustain it.
Nicola is the best partner, editor, cheerleader and wellspring of love and support that any writer can have. But I need to know that my writing matters to people who don’t wear my ring. Right now, I need my Layla’s.
I commit to write on one of my projects every day for the six weeks of the Write-a-thon. I commit to write something good every single day. I won’t be doing flash fiction on my blog — I’ll be working on long-term projects that are deeply important to me. I won’t be walking the highwire in public, but I guarantee I will be doing so in private.
And I will take my sponsors on that journey with me. Every week, I will send my sponsors an email talking about my process that week. What I accomplished. My struggles and successes. The writing challenges and the aha! moments. What I’m thinking about as a writer. Whether I’m finding the balance, and how. This writer’s life.
If you support me by donating to Clarion West, you are not only helping a wonderful organization — you are helping me. You are telling me that it matters to you whether I show up in spite of whatever is going on in my life. That it matters to you whether I write.
You’ll be giving me some everyday magic.
Last year, you got to read her magical 41-pieces-in-41-days for free. If you enjoyed that, please consider sponsoring Kelley this year. Writing isn’t always easy. You can help.
SECOND, a writer who influenced Kelley strongly (which you’ll see if you read this piece she wrote as a direct homage as part of last year’s 41 days’ Write-a-thon) was Ray Bradbury. We woke up this morning to news of his death. She writes about him here. The Guardian has a more formal obituary.
THIRD, and unconnected to the first two but important to me, Nature has a piece on fatty acid metabolism and MS–in mice, but still, it’s another brick in the foundation supporting Dr Angelique Corthals’ hypothesis that multiple sclerosis is not a disease of the immune system but the result of faulty lipid metabolism. In other words, yes, MS is a metabolic disorder.
Nicola Griffith 
Actually, the Nature article doesnt support Dr Corthals supposition. It was done in an animal model which is clearly autoimmune in nature, but does show that inhibiting inflammation decreases CNS damage. This, by the way, is true in many disease states, as the article points out. Inflammation is seen in many CNS illness, as well as pathologis of other organ systems, including Schizophrenia. I think most physicians would agree that it is being increasingly recognized that inhibition of inflammation is vital in treating many disease states, but that doesnt prove the metabolic abnormalities were causative. However, further studies in this area will be valuable and are being pursued in many areas.
Anon, we're in agreement that the Nature study doesn't prove MS is a metabolic disorder–but it does, in my opinion. support Corthals' notion that the inflammatory process which results, in humans, in MS, is connected to fatty acid metabolism.
As for being causative–as you point out, the model used in the experiment reported in Nature (experimental autoimmune encephalitis, EAE) is induced in mice by injecting them with a mixture of CNS tissue, peptides, and adjuvents to make the blood-brain barrier (BBB) more permeable. EAE is nothing like MS, really. I don't know why people continue to use it. For these mice, it's the injections that are causative.