Greetings, Earthlings.

Me and mom in the old days

This has been a wacky fall and winter. I've been a bit under the weather and keeping a lower profile than usual. My mom was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer a year ago and it seemed to hit me all at once this past October.

First with a cold that never went away. Then the tension headaches that ate Manhattan.  Oh and let's not forget the back injury I got working on my laptop IN BED (the most unglamorous injury ever) and also the knee injury earned backcountry skiing last April (a tad more respectable) that have kept me from hitting the snowy slopes and neon lights with as much fervor as I usually do.

Oh, poor me, right? Meanwhile my mom is going through chemo and losing her hair and having many awful symptoms, on top of worrying when this stupid cancer is going to kill her. She has always been so robust and active (like me) and now this monster has laid her low.

But not TOO low. Because since her diagnosis she quit her job, traveled to the Galapagos with my sister, and to Alaska with me (on the worst-weather-ever-but-at-least-the-boat-didn't-sink-cruise.) Soon she's headed to Hawaii and Russia.

Best news yet, her doctor told her this week she was in remission. Yes, remission! That was a word none of us expected to hear ever. Not that she's cured, her doctor sternly told her. This thing could rear its ugly head in another three months or another year. It will rear its ugly head again, says Dr. Oncologist.

But while the monster is in hibernation, she can take a break from chemo. Yay! She can get back the two weeks out of every month that she loses from being poisoned. Yay! Her eyelashes can grow back and food might taste normal again and she'll regain some of that vibrant energy that has made her such an unstoppable force for creativity and social justice and adventure all her life.

So that's what I've got for you.

Plus:

• I'm speaking at the AWP conference in February (along with some staggeringly famous authors). Who-hoo, freezing Chicago, here I come!
• I'm teaching an online blogging class for the Editorial Freelancer's Association starting Feb 15.
• I just finished my first screenplay, called "Planet of the Ex-Boyfriends."

Ok, maybe "screenplay" is a stretch. It's a  five-minute script. For my class at Experimental College called "Let's Make a Movie!"

Tonight we'll be voting on a script to make movie out of (anyone in the class can submit one) and I want mine to win! If it doesn't, it was hell of fun to write, which is more than I can say about a lot of things I've written recently.