Go ahead. Dream.

Hi Team. Sorry for the long absence here in blogtown. (Although, I must confess I do feel a bit egocentric thinking that anybody may have missed me. Maybe I just missed myself.) But I'm sorry especially to any new readers, who must think I'm tremendously lame.

As many of you know, I started this blog on a kind of a of a dare. One blog post a day for 60 days, to raise money for a favorite non-profit. And I did it, and it was fun, and I kept writing.

So I decided to do it again.

I took a vacation in November; not from writing, but from this blog. I got my last Remicade treatment at the very end of October - and it worked, thankfully. So in November I did something I've really wanted to do my entire life, but never had the courage to.

I wrote a book. A 61,000 word book.

National Novel Writing Month is a yearly adventure undertaken by many, many crazy people (this year, over 170,000) who attempt to write a 50,000 page book in a single month. The book has to be fiction, and it has to be from scratch, but it doesn't have to be any good. Thus, I qualified.

Writing a book has always been a dream for me, a dream I never thought I could achieve. I started the blog in part because I thought I was too sick to write a whole book. My disease kept getting in the way of my dreams. When your hands feel like flippers half the time, a keyboard does not look like your friend.

But the motivation to write overcame my fears, and I just decided to do it. The worst that would happen is that I would fail, and only my family would know about it.

But I didn't fail. Yes, I'm exhausted, and my hands and elbows hurt like anything. But I have a book now, that I can edit and mess with and hopefully, someday, maybe, publish.

I wanted to share my success with you because many of you suffer the way I suffer, and bounce from medication to medication, and think your life is doomed to be lived in a box of pain and fatigue. Many of you have given up dreams.

I'm here to tell you you're not in a box. You can do it. Go ahead and dream. I dare you.