MS Awareness Month! What MS is and How Diagnoses Happens

Hello, and happy Wednesday, good people of the blogosphere! Today, I'm getting a little personal with you all and discussing MS. So many folks don't know what it is or how it behaves, and since March is Multiple Sclerosis awareness month, I thought it was a good time to get into it. If you're not interested in learning more, feel free to move on. However, if you are wanting to know a little more about this disease and my journey with it, grab a blankie and scroll on.

Let's get into it.

Multiple Sclerosis, better known as MS (or Mister Sinister in many circles) is a nerve demyelination disease. Myelin is the soft covering over your nerve endings, and MS causes the body to attack these soft parts and destroy them. That's the simplified version. We'll get more in depth here in a minute, but first, I'd like to tell you about my personal journey with this disease.

I traveled via airplane to see my son graduate high school in Iowa. When we were airborne, I fell asleep on the plane. This isn't something I usually do--naps don't happen for me and never have, but I passed right out. I simply could NOT keep my eyes open. I did the same thing in the car on the drive to the hotel. Weird.

I figured it was just my new glasses. You see, I'd been having some weird vision problems and assumed I just needed a bit of help. I was like that the whole trip, and I'd just fall asleep in random situations. Okay...

We came back home via airplane. It was the next day when all Hell broke loose. I woke up feeling like someone had put me on a Tilt-a-Whirl, hit the start button, and left it running. I was dizzy as all hell, nauseated, and exhausted. My husband urged me to see the doctor.

Doctor A (PCP) put me on steroids and antibiotics, assuming I had an inner-ear infection. A month later, I was still dizzy. I went back to see that doctor again. He told me to find a neurologist and make an appointment. I looked up reviews and found the best neurologist in my area. Keep in mind, I was at the height of my career and suddenly couldn't write. I was in a bad place and was sleeping all the time. It took another month, but I got in to see Doctor N.

SHE said she thought it might be MS, but she had to do a lot of tests to confirm it. Here are all the things we did:

• Bloodwork (to rule out Lupus and other autoimmune things)
• Infectious Disease Doctor (to rule out Lyme)
• Vestibular Testing (to rule out that inner ear)
• MRI (to check for lesions on the brain)
• Spinal Tap (to check for: WBC count, neurofilaments, and Oligoclonal bands [the most important])

Only then could she say, with 98% certainty, that I had MS and could start treatment for it. You see, there's no test for MS. You have to rule out everything else it could possibly be, and even then, there's a slight chance that's not what it is. However, every single one of my ducks were in a row, and my lesions were mid-brain, which impacts speech, hand-eye coordination, and several other things creatives need. There was a need to be super aggressive, so she started me on a popular drug that worked wonders.

My fatigue went away, my dizziness subsided, and my hands started to cooperate a bit better. I finished the books I was working on. Yay! I felt like a human again. Through the years, I've had a couple of flares and med changes, but overall, my MS is under control. This was in 2017. This September will mark my eighth year fighting this crap, and thank goodness for intelligent doctors. I'm not sure I would've survived everything that was happening to me.

Now, back to the potential things MS can cause.

I know you've probably put it together by now, but MS can cause a ton of things to go wonky in your body. This is one of the reasons it's so difficult to pin down. It can be literally anything because of the nervous system. If something goes down, it can seem like it's related to something else (see vision problems and inner-ear crap above). Some people lose the ability to walk suddenly, and some folks simply have a weird rash.

It varies from person to person, but an intelligent neurologist will be able to discover what's going on.

If you met me, you'd wonder whether I have a disease at all because it's so well controlled. That's one of the reasons they call it an invisible disease. Sometimes you see it, and sometimes you don't. When I'm in a flare, you see it. I can't write; hell, I can't even sign my damned name (an automatic thing your brain does). Nothing gets done because I'm just tired all the time. Not tired like someone who's sleepy, but it's massive fatigue--almost like narcolepsy. I can't hold my eyes open and can sleep for days. Pain is a constant friend, and my scale probably is at a one when yours is at an eight. I've acclimated.

Many people with MS also take a lot of OTC pain medication. Don't judge them.

So, if you know someone struggling with this disease, be gentle with them. They can only do so much. You probably won't see the pain, but trust it's there, and try to be understanding. Mister Sinister is a quiet, vicious beast.

I hope you all learned something from this post! If you have questions or comments, feel free to drop them below. You do have to have a Google account, and I apologize for that, but the SPAM has been horrendous here. Help a sister out and just log in, mkay?

Well, that's all for today, folks!

Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo

AI and Writing - A Series of Looks Inside: Part Four - HyperWrite

Happy Monday, everyone! I did end up missing my Friday post, but that's okay because I had a suuuuuper busy day getting back to Georgia. I wanted to sleep all day Saturday. Sadly, I have a hubby that drives me from slumber with promises of coffee. I didn't complain too loudly. Okay, I did, but that's neither here nor there. Let's get on with today's topic, a part of our AI and Writing series. Today, we're looking at HyperWrite, and we'll use the same parameters we used for the others. If you missed the first post (where all other posts are linked), you can check it out here.

That post talks about how AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) works. It's a great read.

Without further gabbing up here, let's get our coffee and blanket and snuggle in for the journey. Ready? Let's do it!

I'm not going to make you wade through screencaps of the signup process. I did it, and when I verified my email, these are the options I got:

We'll choose Create Document. We get this screen:

I'm going with Write It For Me. It gave me these questions:

Now, we'll answer the questions, plug in our prompt/outline, and see what turns up. Again, I'm just asking for Chapter 1. 

Here's what I input:

I need the first chapter of a YA Fantasy novel about two creatures, a vampire and a shape-shifting unicorn, who meet and fall in love after defeating an evil I haven't decided upon yet. I have a rough outline of a few chapters, and I only need chapter one written. It should be about 3000 words in length. My audience is teens between the age of 15 and 19. There are no other restrictions. Here's the outline of the first six chapters:Chapter 1: Elara, a lonely vampire, hunts in the forest. She senses a strange presence.
Chapter 2: A unicorn, Rhys, shifts into human form. He's lost and confused.
Chapter 3: Elara finds Rhys. She's drawn to his innocence, despite her vampire nature.
Chapter 4: Elara takes Rhys to her secluded home. He learns about vampires and her solitary life.
Chapter 5: Rhys reveals his unicorn origins. Elara is shocked but intrigued by his magic.
Chapter 6: A growing attraction sparks between them. A threat from Elara's past emerges.

It output it all in chat, so I had to click Add to Document, but it did so seamlessly. Here's what it looked like:

Here's what we got (all 877 words of it). We'll also dive into the actual writing. :) Italics are mine, as always.

Chapter 1: The Hunt

The moon hung like a broken fang in the violet twilight sky, casting weak shadows through the ancient oaks of the Blackmire Forest. Elara moved between them with the silence of falling snow, her boots barely disturbing the carpet of dead leaves beneath her feet. Three hundred years of hunting had taught her patience, but tonight something was different. Tonight, the forest held its breath.

This part actually isn't terrible, and I do like the way it compared the moon to a broken fang. Nice name for the forest, too. I'd like some mention of death to grab reader attention, but other than that... *shrugs*

She paused, lifting her nose to the wind. The usual scents were there—decomposing leaves, damp earth, the musty fur of small creatures that knew better than to cross her path. But underneath it all lurked something else. Something that made her centuries-old blood sing with curiosity.

"What are you?" she whispered to the darkness, her voice barely a thread of sound in the growing night.

Honestly, I'm not a fan of anything other than an action tag or dialogue tag. Mixing them has always felt off to me. It's like a stutter in the story. Decide. Editing wise: We need to get rid of the em-dash, shorten the second sentence, and combine sentences two and three. Sentence four isn't even a whole sentence. I'll shut up now and let you read. :)

The hunger gnawed at her insides, a constant companion she'd learned to live with but never truly befriended. Elara had sworn long ago that she wouldn't become like the others of her kind—the ones who haunted cities and treated humans like cattle. She chose the forest instead, feeding only on what she needed to survive: deer, wild boar, the occasional wolf that grew too bold.

I can't help it. I never said she didn't feed on humans! Why is every AI doing this?

A twig snapped somewhere to her left, and Elara's head whipped toward the sound. Her enhanced vision cut through the shadows, but whatever had made the noise was already gone. Still, that scent lingered—like summer rain and starlight, if starlight had a smell. It was maddening.

She pressed her palm against the rough bark of an oak tree, its age nothing compared to her own. The forest had changed so many times around her, generations of trees living and dying while she remained. Lonely? Perhaps. But loneliness was safer than the alternative.

The strange scent grew stronger, and with it came a pulse of energy that made her skin tingle. Elara's fangs extended involuntarily, pressing against her lower lip. Not from hunger this time, but from something else. Something that felt almost like... fear?

She almost laughed at the thought. What did a vampire have to fear in these woods? She was the apex predator, the nightmare that kept other nightmares awake. Yet here she was, heart racing like a newborn vampire's, all because of some mysterious presence that danced just beyond her perception.

A flash of silver between the trees caught her eye—too bright to be moonlight, too pure to be natural. Elara moved toward it, her preternatural speed carrying her across the forest floor in silent bounds. But each time she reached the spot where she'd seen the light, it appeared again several trees ahead, leading her deeper into the Blackmire.

"If this is some kind of trap," she muttered, "it's not a very subtle one."

Still, she followed. What choice did she have? Three centuries of the same routine—hunt, feed, retreat to her solitary cabin, repeat—had left her with an insatiable curiosity for anything new. And this? This was definitely new.

The silver light led her to a clearing she'd never seen before, which should have been impossible. Elara knew every inch of the Blackmire Forest, or thought she did. Yet here was this perfectly circular space, where the trees stood guard like silent sentinels around its edge, and in the center...

Nothing. The light was gone, the strange scent faded to almost nothing, and Elara stood alone in a clearing that shouldn't exist, feeling, for the first time in centuries, completely out of her depth.

She circled the clearing slowly, her enhanced senses straining for any clue about what had led her here. The ground at the center was disturbed, as if something large had recently lain there. When she knelt to examine it closer, she found a single hair that gleamed like liquid moonlight between her fingers.

"Curiouser and curiouser," she whispered, tucking the hair into her jacket pocket. The hunger that had driven her out to hunt in the first place was forgotten, replaced by an entirely different kind of appetite—one for answers.

A distant howl echoed through the trees—a normal wolf, nothing supernatural about it—and Elara realized how long she'd spent chasing shadows. The night was half gone, and she still hadn't fed. With one last look at the mysterious clearing, she turned and headed toward the areas where deer usually gathered at this hour.

But as she moved through her familiar hunting grounds, Elara couldn't shake the feeling that everything had changed. That single strange encounter had awakened something in her that she thought had died centuries ago: hope. Hope that perhaps she wasn't destined to spend eternity alone in these woods. Hope that magic still existed in the world that could surprise even a creature as old as she was.

And somewhere in the back of her mind, a small voice whispered that this was only the beginning. The silver light, the impossible clearing, the otherworldly scent—they were all connected to something bigger. Something that would shatter the careful solitude she'd built around herself like a fortress.

For the first time in three hundred years, Elara smiled as she hunted, her fangs gleaming in the darkness. Change was coming to the Blackmire Forest.

And she was ready for it. 

*******************************BREAK BACK TO ME*******************************

For the love of the em-dash. Ten is too many. That's more than one for every 100 words. No. What's up with AI starting sentences with but or AND? Does it realize there's a comma and a lowercase b or a in there in 99% of cases? What writing is it studying to get these ideas?

Also: Now I need someone to tell me what starlight smells like...

If you check this model out, be sure and click over to the tools section. Marvel at the sheer number of tools available. I nearly peed my pants. This is just a few of them (click image to enlarge).

Overall, HyperWrite did an okay job, but so did the others we've looked at so far. It's a start of something. It's wasn't overly flowery, which is good, but it also left a lot to be desired. I asked for 3k words and got 877. That means I have to find places I can insert things. :(

I hope you all enjoyed this post and learned a little! Wednesday, we'll be back on the train with Rytr. 

What do you think? Are these snippets getting better? Worse? Do you have any answers to my questions above? Drop me a comment.

Well, that's all for today, folks!

Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo