Aiken Posts First Medical Records; Tells Us to Get Back to Work

Authors Guild Executive Director Paul Aiken has posted his first two sets of medical records pertaining to his ALS diagnosis: results of MRI, CT-myelogram, and x-ray reports from December 2012 through April 2013, and results from blood tests done this year. The reports appear at his n=2 blog, which he launched on Friday as the Guild sent out a press release announcing he had Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

Aiken says that he expects to have other pertinent medical records posted later today, including electrodiagnostic reports and neurologists’ evaluations of the tests.

He also says he’s still the boss, and we have to get back to normal blogging, pronto. The Guild has a 100-year history of not reporting medical news to members, he says.

Aiken also says we should tell people that we do welcome self-published authors into our membership, so long as they earn at least $500 in writing income in 18 months. He says the Guild truly doesn’t care whether a writer’s income is filtered through a publisher, the whole point is to provide professional support to those who earn at least part of their livelihoods through writing books and articles. He says we should post a link to our application form and a separate link to our eligibility requirements, even though they’re kind of hard to decipher.

He says he’d been intending to get to that, but things got crazy busy for him lately, what with Google, HathiTrust, Penguin and Random House getting hitched, developments regarding the Justice Department’s cavity search of book publishing, Washington’s moves toward significant copyright reform, getting word out on how Obamacare affects our members across the country, and all.

Aiken says his condition is “oddly liberating,” and that he feels good. (Knock wood.)