Lydia Kang's Blog, page 26

This week's Sisterhood of the Traveling Blog question comes from Deb Salisbury who asks:

What type of book do you read for writing inspiration, and why? Do you read fiction or non-fiction, and what genres? Mysteries and YA, or archeology and astronomy?

Good question Deb! I guess I need different kinds of inspiration.

For book ideas? Recently, I read through a copy of Scientific American and got so many new sci-fi ideas. I love mooching off the latest technology for ideas. The Little House books by Laura Ingalls inspired my second novel about a kick-ass, flint-lock rifle-shooting gal in the upper Mississippi territories. I wanted to take a smart, strong frontier girl and amp her up a notch. Someday I'll revive Polly Sterling out of that shelved novel.

But truthfully? Most of my ideas don't usually come from books or magazines. I have a running fascination with the human body, disease, mortality, and fertility that keep cropping up as themes in my writing and poetry. 

For writing style and plotting? YA books for sure. When I'm sad that I've hit the last page, or have to reread a paragraph just so I can turn of words around in my brain again...*sigh* These books make me sweat and work harder (No inspiration, no perspiration!). Here's a teeny, tiny list of books and how they inspired me:

The Hunger Games: Make every sentence earn its existence. There is no superfluous fluff in there.
Harry Potter: Keep the MC's goal very clear and the reader desperate for a resolution. (JK should have renamed the book "That-Which-Cannot-Be-Put-Down")
The Scorpio Races: Flawless world building. Loved her non-stagnant, lyrical prose.

There are so many other books that inspire me (as well as many that have taught me what I don't want to do), but then this post would be waaaaay too long.

Is there a particular book that's inspired your writing?

This week, Melissa Sarno has a great question.

She has a teen protagonist who is a serious classical pianist. She needs some sort of injury or illness that would make it impossible for her to play. Melissa also has a few stipulations:
If possible, she'd like it to be a strange and mysterious illnessShe can't physically lose her handIt has to be relatively sudden in nature *cracks knuckles* *ow that hurt*

Okay, here we go with some possibilities. There are a lot of diseases that can cause hand or arm problems in teens, but many of them may not show up suddenly, so I tossed them.

Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (Specifically, Systemic Onset Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis, previously called Still's Disease, or if over age 16, Adult-onset Still's Disease)
any joints can be affected, so the hands and wrists would work in this scenarioa pink, spotty, flat rash also occurs often around the armpits and waist. It often accompanies...a high spiking fever that can occur for days on end and is not responsive to antibioticsMultiple Sclerosis
less common in teens but certainly can occursymptoms for Melissa's character can include numbness, tingling, and weakness of her hands and arms. Other problems include unsteady gait, vision problems and weakness of other parts of the body.unlike adults, children and teens with MS can also have lethargy and seizuresMS can be very mysterious for people who don't understand it. The cause is unknown and it's not contagious, but can be quite debilitating and wax and wane in severityTrauma (okay, these aren't "exotic" but might be a realistic possibility for a teen)

Car accident. A hand can easily be traumatized in a car accident from rollovers, crush injuries, or contusionsRing injuries. Ever heard of the kid who climbed a fence, got their ring stuck, and fell? Sadly, it happens. Catching a ring can cause a "de-gloving" injury that is repairable but debilitating.A penetrating injury like a knife cut could injure a tendon. Though repairable, it could impact playing for quite a while.Sports injuries. Think broken fingers, blunt impact, stuff like that. If you can think of others, please add to the discussion!

If you've got a fictional medical question, let me know! Post below or email me at
All I ask is that you become a follower and post a link on your blog when I post your answer. This is for fictional scenarios, only. Please check out the boring but necessary disclaimer on my sidebar --->Also, don't forget to stop by Laura Diamond's Mental Health Mondays and Sarah Fine's The Strangest Situation for great psychiatric and psychological viewpoints on all things literary. :)

Now follow Medical Mondays on Twitter! #MedMonday

Okay, I did just say I was going to be blogging a wee bit less lately, but this is too good not to share!

From Publisher's Weekly:

Stacey Barney of Putnam Books for Young Readers acquired world English rights to Scan and a sequel, Burn, by Walter Jury and S.E. Fine. Jury is a manager/producer for film and television, and Fine is a child psychologist; this is their first collaboration, and it's a high-action YA thriller about a 16-year-old boy who has been prepared his whole life for "something important," only to discover it means he's one of the last humans left on earth. The first title is due out in 2013. Joanna Volpe of Nancy Coffey Literary & Media Representation did the six-figure deal.

Kathleen Ortiz at Nancy Coffey Literary also did a huge amount of work for this too, and deserves a shout-out!

I've been keeping CIA level mum-ness about this for weeks. As you guys know, Sarah Fine is also a wonderful blogger, child psychologist extraordinaire, and I'm proud to say she's a great friend.

Finally, I can do this officially (cover your ears, if you have delicate drums...)

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

Congrats Sarah! 

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Also, the wonderful Beth Christopher interviewed me for her "On the Trail" series. It was super fun and if you want to see one of my favorite places to hike, check it out!  

Okay, I did just say I was going to be blogging a wee bit less lately, but this is too good not to share!

From Publisher's Weekly:

Stacey Barney of Putnam Books for Young Readers acquired world English rights to Scan and a sequel, Burn, by Walter Jury and S.E. Fine. Jury is a manager/producer for film and television, and Fine is a child psychologist; this is their first collaboration, and it's a high-action YA thriller about a 16-year-old boy who has been prepared his whole life for "something important," only to discover it means he's one of the last humans left on earth. The first title is due out in 2013. Joanna Volpe of Nancy Coffey Literary & Media Representation did the six-figure deal.

Kathleen Ortiz at Nancy Coffey Literary also did a huge amount of work for this too, and deserves a shout-out!

I've been keeping CIA level mum-ness about this for weeks. As you guys know, Sarah Fine is also a wonderful blogger, child psychologist extraordinaire, and I'm proud to say she's a great friend.

Finally, I can do this officially (cover your ears, if you have delicate drums...)

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

Congrats Sarah!

No, I'm not talking about a new type of mold.

No, I'm not talking about watching Stanley Kubric films at odd times of the day.

And no, I'm not trying to quote the movie Clueless . As if!

For the next nine weeks, I'll be helping to run a weekly writers' workshop. It's the same workshop that nurtured my early attempts at poetry and prose, and let to writing fiction. But this time around, I'm a leader in the group. *Gulp* I'm kind of nervous, because I'm basically a self-taught writer of fiction and poetry. (Ooh, maybe now is the time to whip this little certificate out!)

I wonder when that "imposter" feeling will go away.

Anyway, because I'll be devoting several hours a week to this workshop, you'll notice that I'll be pretty sporadicus with my blog posting. (Remember, purposeful misuse of silly words is charming, not idiocy. Or so I tell myself.)


How about you? Have you had a chance to mentor budding writers, or been part of a writing workshop?

Do you suffer from Imposteritis when it comes to hanging out with other writers?

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Don't forget to stop by Laura Diamond's blog, where she answers this month's Sisterhood of the Traveling blog question! Next week, I'm up. :)

I've had a few requests to do more herbal medicine/toxicology posts. Here's one I love.

Does this look familiar to you?

Photo credit Vinca, or periwinkle, is a commonly used a decorative ground cover. It's native to Europe but found in North America, parts of Africa, and Asia. It has ever blooming periwinkle-colored flowers with waxy, drought-resistant leaves. In some places, it has a bad name because it can get quite invasive. 
Whenever I see it, I think "pretty." Then I think, "chemotherapy." 
There are many active compounds in the Vinca species. In the Catharanthus roseus species, the chemicals vincristine and vinblastine have been extracted and are commonly used to treat leukemia and lymphomas today.
Catharanthus roseus can be pink, white, or a combination Photo credit In traditional Chinese medicine, it has been used to treat diabetes, Hodgkins disease (a type of lymphoma), and malaria. 
If the plant is ingested orally, it is VERY dangerous. It can be hallucinogenic, and may cause kidney and nerve damage.
Vincristine and vinblastine work by inhibiting the rapid division of cancer cells. Jargon alert!-->Specifically, it polymerizes microtubules needed to allow mitosis to occur.<--Jargon alert over! Unfortunately, it also effects other cells that divide rapidly in healthy human tissues, such as the cells of hair follicles. Hence, many patients on these medication will have chemo-induced hair loss. 
Other side effects include neuropathy (numbness and tingling of the limbs), low sodium levels, and constipation, among others. 
Vinca is so pretty and so fascinating, isn't it? Can you take a moment and imagine how you could use Vinca in a story?
If you've got a fictional medical question, let me know! Post below or email me at All I ask is that you become a follower and post a link on your blog when I post your answer. This is for fictional scenarios, only. Please check out the boring but necessary disclaimer on my sidebar --->Also, don't forget to stop by Laura Diamond's Mental Health Mondays and Sarah Fine's The Strangest Situation for great psychiatric and psychological viewpoints on all things literary. :)

Now follow Medical Mondays on Twitter! #MedMonday

I joined Goodreads a few years ago, but I'd been horribly stagnant. After all, I can barely handle Facebook, Blogging, and Twitter. Google+ has become an odd country where (mostly) strangers add me to their little Google crop circles daily. (And thus I run farther and farther way. Might as well call it Google negative bajillion, at this rate.)

Anyway, sometime in the last two weeks, my book mysteriously popped up on Goodreads. I didn't put it there. My reaction?

I stared at the "book cover image not on hand" icon. Then I twitched and proceeded to dive for the safety of my comforter.

Holy freaking macaroni, my book is up on Goodreads. 

So then, I did what any normal person would do. I visited my book on Goodreads, like, forty times that day to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. Then, another weird thing started to happen.

People started adding it to their to-read list.

What the--?

I know, I know. You're thinking, "Lydia, be reasonable. Some people actually might want to read it."

But "to-read" possessed way more of a "will-check-out-your-underwear-drawer-and-medicine-cabinets" kind of vibe.

Anyway, after I unstuck myself from the bedding, I put up a blurby short something about the book (90% of which is taken directly from my original query--so yeah, if you ever wanted to see my query, that's pretty much it, minus one paragraph with spoilers), started adding friends that I should have added a million hours ago, and began Goodreads obsessing.

THE FOUNTAIN is on the YA Novels of 2013 list, and it's hovering at #50. What qualifies for the buoyancy of 50, rather than 150, or 5? Apparently a mathematical equation that involves voting it up, and how many people want "to-read". However, I'm convinced that the Goodreads fairies came up with this far more accurate equation to determine ranking:


[(# marked "to-read") + (#votes up)]  ÷ [(facial pore size / general anxiety level)]
- [(time spent driving over speed limit) ÷ (probability of showering by noon that day)]  = RANK

Oh yes. You know it's right.

All I know is, Goodreads is going be the death of me. 

So I am vowing to stop the madness. It's cutting into my writing time, adding unnecessary stress to my life, and making what little hair I have fall out.  No more checking GR forty times a day and no more looking at ranks.  

I am not a number.

I'm going to use Goodreads for the good things. I've been cataloging my TBR pile so I can access it when it's time to buy a new book. If you have written a book that I haven't added, please let me know. 

And it's been fun finding my Goodreads friends (er, mostly you guys, my bloggy friends) and seeing what you guys are reading. That is muy awesome and I'm finding new books to read that way.

So. Do you do Goodreads? How much of your online life does it occupy?

p.s. I don't do reviews on GR. I'll explain this behavior in another post someday.
p.p.s. I vow to never respond to good or bad reviews, on GR or anywhere else.

Mindy McGinnis, whose debut NOT A DROP TO DRINK (Katherine Tegen/Harper Collins) is coming out in 2013, has kindly interviewed me on all things blogging and writing.

Pull up a chair.

Have a virtual cup of latte, on me.

And thank you much for the visit, if you do drop by. :)


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Please take a moment to visit Deb's Sisterhood of the Traveling Blog post on Wednesday, when she answers this question: "Where do your expectations for your writing (career/skill/quality/achievements) come from? Is the source internal, external, or both? And how do you cope when you don't meet them?" Check out recent answers by Laura, me, and Sarah! 

A while ago, Krispy at A Nudge in the Right Direction asked me a question about picking out a slow disease to attack a character.
One of the diseases I considered were prion diseases. First off, the name "prion" sounds sci-fi, and as you'll see below, they are like no other disease you've ever encountered.
What's a prion? Prions are proteins that are folded in an abnormal state. They have no DNA or RNA, like most living things. They are difficult to destroy and are infectious. 
How do they multiply? Prions propagate themselves by causing nearby, normal proteins to fold abnormally like them. Once those proteins misfold, they too cause other nearby normal proteins to misfold, and on and on. (Kind of like the Borg and their assimilation).
How do you destroy prions? With a lot of effort. The normal way we disinfect things to destroy viruses and bacteria often don't work on prions. High, prolonged temperatures, high concentrations of formaldehyde or caustic solutions are needed.
Is it animal, vegetable, mineral, or alien? Prions are not technically alive, in that they do not need food, or respond to their environment. They defy the biological definition that living things have nucleic acids (the building blocks of DNA). However, they replicate. They spread. And their very existence appears to have one effect--to make more of itself. Sounds alien to me.
Where did they come from? Okay, okay. They probably didn't come from another planet. There is a gene in humans on chromosome 20 for a similar prion protein that is a normal protein in humans. Mutations in this gene have cause inherited diseases with prions, like Creutzfeld-Jacob disease (CJD), Gerstmann-Straüssler-Scheinker syndrome, and Familial Fatal Insomnia (Death by Insomnia).
Can human immune systems fight prions? In a word, no.
What other diseases in humans are caused by prions? Mad Cow Disease (or bovine spongiform encephalopathy) has been theorized to have been transmitted to humans and causing variant CJD. Kuru is found in a native population of New Guinea that practiced cannibalism. There are several diseases that affect animals too, such as scrapie and of course, mad cow disease.
Symptoms? All prion diseases are neurodegenerative. They are slow diseases that primarily effect the neural tissues (brain, spinal cord). The symptoms can range from progressive dementia, difficulty walking or standing up, jerking of the limbs and tremors. Familial Fatal Insomnia causes...well. The name says it all.
Is there a cure? No. They are uniformly fatal.
Why aren't we all dead from prions, if they are so hard to kill and there's no cure? When cows are infected, there are low levels of prion in milk and meat, and it's not easy to absorb by eating. You also can't get prions from other people through casual contact. You'd need to be exposed to brain or spinal fluid tissues, or though organ donation.
How common are these diseases? As of 2011, there have been a total of about 211 cases of variant CJD worldwide. As for random, non-inherited, non-Mad-Cow related cases of CJD? 1 in a million cases worldwide, per year. Basically, pretty rare.
Did I just hear a collective sigh of relief?
If you've got a fictional medical question, let me know! Post below or email me at All I ask is that you become a follower and post a link on your blog when I post your answer. This is for fictional scenarios, only. Please check out the boring but necessary disclaimer on my sidebar --->Also, don't forget to stop by Laura Diamond's Mental Health Mondays and Sarah Fine's The Strangest Situation for great psychiatric and psychological viewpoints on all things literary. :)

Now follow Medical Mondays on Twitter! #MedMonday

Today is Part Two of a series on blogging.

See here for Part 1, on Why Did You Start Blogging?

When I started, I figured I would blog about writing. I was deep into my second novel, trying to get an agent, and I figured I needed it for platform. Also, to vent! (Carefully, mind you.)

Early on, I decided to tackle a huge paranoia I had. I feared that other writers would shun me because I had this whole other career as a doctor. I wanted my blog to focus on the writer part, but I felt like a sham. I thought, maybe embracing it would be a better idea.

And so, Medical Mondays was born, along with Mental Health Mondays with Laura Diamond, who uses her skills as psychiatrist for writerly questions too. Sarah Fine came on board later on, to add her knowledge of psychology (specifically, child psychology). It's been a trifecta of goodness.

I am so glad I took that shaky step! Not only do I get a chance to help others, I also learn something fact-checking and doing research for every single post. As for that paranoia of mine? Poof. It disappeared when I realized people embraced these different sides of me and were okay with it. The icing on the bloggy cake is that Medical Mondays garners the most page views and sends the most strangers to my blog from search engines.

The Wednesday blog chain started soon afterwards. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Blog has changed a few members, but every month we're challenged to answer our own question. Deb, Sarah, and Laura have been great sisters, and great supporters.

I added other themes, like Plot Devices. Deus Ex Machina (after I got the spelling right) was illuminating for me. I also found out what a MacGuffin was (not a slobbish, overweight MacGyver. Who knew?)

Then weird science-related things that caught my attention. The Zombie Ants post was a runaway hit. The Luna Moth one still takes my breath away.

In August, I started doing some Author Spotlights on Fridays. That has been fun, and it came at a time where I was running out of fun things to blog about. Lately it's died off a bit, mostly because I slacked off on finding authors, plus I wanted to blog on Fridays for myself again. BUT if you want to be spotlit for a Friday, email me. I'd be happy to have you. :)

I guess after doing this for two years, I figured out a lot.

Sometimes taking a chance on content can pay off big (personally, and in page views)Be willing to change and experiment. It's your blog, after all.
Make your own rules, and stick to them. For me, I stay away from cussing, religion/spirituality, and politics. I do not do book reviews. I don't show pictures or names of my family members, and obviously, I don't blog about specifics from my day job. (Can you say HIPAA violation???)
Be yourself. On my blog, I'm silly. I doodle cartoons. This is what I'm like, on a personal level. Yes, my patients and my boss can probably see this stuff, but people and patients I work with know I keep my work sphere very distinct from this one. I've decided I have different facets, and I choose when to show those facets. I am not all things at all times. I am complicated, and I'm okay with that.

One big upcoming question will be about self-promotion. I will have a book coming out on 2013. Yes, I will make announcements on exciting stuff. But no, I will not be shoving my book in my reader's faces on every post when the time comes. I don't like reading that on other's people's blogs, and I won't have it on mine.

My blog, myself, my decisions.

So. How did you decide what kind of content to have on your blog?