Author

I HAVE A BOOK DEAL AND NEW HEADSHOTS!!!!

/ D.B. Sieders / 20 Comments

First off, HUGE news! My amazing literary agent, Barbara Collins Rosenberg, landed a publishing deal for me with Rowman & Littlefield!!! I’m honored, thrilled, and still squee-ing! So, stay tuned for Talking to My Tatas: A Breast Cancer Researcher’s Adventure With The Disease And What You Can Learn From It.

Here’s the Working Blurb – it will likely change based on guidance from my amazing editor, Suzanne Staszak-Silva, but it will give you a taste of what I intend to share (my story) and spread (scientifically sound information) with this book:

Can I talk to you about my personal relationship with my breasts?

I’ve spent twenty years working as a biomedical breast cancer researcher. Then, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I thought I knew breast cancer before it whacked me upside my left boob and left me bleeding on the curb of uncertainty. Turns out, I had a lot to learn. The purpose of this book is to share my personal adventure with breast cancer, from the laboratory bench to my own bedside, and to provide accessible information about breast cancer biology for non-scientists. I say adventure, because I’d rather think of it as an action movie with some really cool side quests instead of another tragedy-to-triumph saga. I’m not big on sagas. I am big on kickass intellectual badassery, pathological nerdiness, and talking about my sweet, sweet rack.

Why do we need another cancer memoir? In a sea of inspirational stories, celebrity survivor stories, and physician memoirs that bring a clinical perspective, nothing I’ve found in the current market tackles breast cancer through the lens of a breast cancer researcher who became a survivor. We live in an age of fake news and pseudoscience, made worse by the pervasive anti-intellectual and anti-science political culture gripping the United States and much of the world. The Internet and social media are plagued by scammers selling “alternative medicine” and woo woo “cures” for cancer. Through Talking to My Tatas: A Breast Cancer Researcher’s Adventure With Breast Cancer And What You Can Learn From It, I offer accurate, evidence-based science that is accessible to laypersons, including the more than three hundred thousand individuals diagnosed with breast cancer every year*, their caregivers, and their loved ones. 

Knowledge is power, and lack of it can lead to overtreatment, unnecessary pain and suffering, and can even be deadly. By demystifying the process from mammograms, biopsies, pathology and diagnostics, surgical options, tumor genomic testing, and new treatment options, I aim to offer hope in a story intended to blend the humor and delivery style of  Jenny Lawson’sLet’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) with the integrity and scientifically sound beauty of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

*American Cancer Society Facts & Figures 2020

I’ve got some work to do! In addition to writing and fleshing out chapters for my editor to review (and work her magic on), I’ve been busy working on figures and visuals for the book, cover art forms, marketing and promo plans, and getting a new headshot! The one I currently have on this page and all over the Internet is absolutely gorgeous, fun, and from 2012. A LOT has happened in 8 years, and I have aged. I’d like to think I’ve aged gracefully, but at any rate, it was time to update the image.

Lillian Boeskool is MAGIC! She made me look so good and captured the essence of my personality in a series of amazing headshots (If you’re in the greater Nashville area and need headshots or other photography, HIRE HER). I have two favorite images and I cannot decide which one to use for this page and the book. I invite y’all to enable my decision-making disorder vote for your favorite!

Photo Credit Lillian B Photography

This one on the left is super fun and catches me trying not to laugh at something funny Lillian said and/or did. It captures my mischief, my sense of humor, and really makes my face look nice.

And, unlike the previous headshot for which I straightened my hair, this one highlights my popping natural curls!

I’m almost 48 years old. Anything that makes my face look nice is gold.

Told you she was MAGIC!

Photo Credit Lillian B Photography

There’s just something about this next one on the right that speaks to me.

I think it captures my sass and tells my readers that I’m going to take them on a really funny adventure that will make them a smidge uncomfortable but will ultimately leave them laughing and glad they went along for the ride.

That’s me in a nutshell.

I can’t decide between the two!

And…just to throw a monkey wrench into this whole program…

Photo Credit Lillian B Photography

This one is my husband’s favorite.

It’s nice, too.

I’m glad he thinks I look good in all of these photographs and still thinks I’m beautiful in spite of time marching across my face and body and in spite of cancer leaving me with a janky left breast-in-progress*.

He’s pretty awesome!

I think I’ll keep him.

*Janky left breast-in-progress on display in the first two photos as the line of discoloration just above my shirt collar. Lillian asked if I wanted to Photoshop it out, but I said no. It’s where I am right now. It’s why I’m blogging, writing this book, and becoming a breast cancer patient/survivor advocate as well as a breast cancer researcher. It’s a badge of fucking honor and it stays!

Fundraising for Tanisha

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Tanisha Jones MBC & Renal Failure Fund

From Goodreads

I’ve met and admired many survivor sisters over the years. After my diagnosis, they held me in their arms and lifted me up so I didn’t have to face breast cancer alone. Before I was diagnosed, I got to know a really cool woman named Tanisha Jones. We were represented by the same literary agency at the time, writing romance and urban fantasy* and trying to break into the fiction publishing world in a big way.

*Side note: If you’re a fan of Anne Rice and J.R. Ward, TREAT YOURSELF to Tanisha’s The Fallen Series. This exciting series is full of vampires, Fae, Weres, demons, and other supernatural beings hiding in plain sight in New Orleans. Throw in a hot homicide detective with some supernatural abilities of his own and you’ve got one helluva story!

Like me, Tanisha works in academics (one of her many jobs). She also has a daughter, just a little bit older than mine. She has hopes, dreams, highs, lows, a wicked sense of humor and a drive and work ethic to rival any I’ve seen in my almost 48 years on the planet.

Like me, she has breast cancer. Unlike me, she’s living with metastatic breast cancer (MBC). While there is no cure, she hasn’t allowed MBC to define her life or steal her dreams. She’s still writing – she published Unbound, Book 3 in The Fallen series, this month. She’s still raising her daughter. Due to health issues related to MBC, she isn’t working at the moment but she’s worked since her diagnosis in 2016.

Because America is still balking at the idea that healthcare is a human right rather than a privilege reserved only for the white and wealthy (and healthy), like many Americans, Tanisha is struggling financially due to the cost of her cancer care. I could write an entire rage post on the topics of American healthcare’s failures that include the real possibility of financial ruin, disparities in access and care, and the lack of healthcare equality and equity that is still VERY much a problem in 2020 in this country, and I will.

But right now, what matters is helping my friend who’s struggling with breast cancer.

Tanisha’s family also has a GoFundMe initiative (you know, the largest healthcare “plan” in the United States) to help her. Click here to donate what you can. It helps. It matters.

I have taken the extra book royalties I earned in November plus a small windfall that came to me at just the right time to support Tanisha. I can think of no better person in whom to invest.