A Journal of the Pandemic #22

Hey, so I took a COVID-19 test this week.

Yeah. First time. Last weekend I was sick. It wasn’t a bad cold. It wasn’t even a particularly different one, for me. It actually seemed to be pretty easy to get over (except for this wonderful lingering cough I’ve got). 

But it was a cold, in the pandemic era. Of course I thought COVID-19. Actually, just before the pandemic blew up I had my other cold of the year. Didn’t get tested for that one, obviously.

This time I didn’t think there was much choice. The very strange thing I discovered is that it’s still hard to get tested. Here it is nearly 2021 and you’d think that after nearly a year of this it’d be, you know, easier to get tested.

Well, in my experience, it was not. Finally on Tuesday I got tested. I thought it was going to be one of the rapid results tests, but it wasn’t. I was told I might not hear results until, well, today. I didn’t expect to hear anything yesterday, but that’s actually when the computer system told me: negative. As great a Christmas present as there ever was, I suppose.

I did get a call today, by the way. 

I spent the week isolating at home, except that trip Tuesday to get tested. I mean, it’s not that hard for me, and even easier in pandemic time, with libraries closed or as good as. If nothing else I would’ve gone there, with extra time. Anyway, so that was my week. 

I got some writing done. I read. I watched stuff. Mostly, though, I thought about actually having COVID-19. Because my symptoms were minor, I mostly thought about anyone I might have potentially infected before last weekend. I mean, I’m good at wearing a mask at work. That’s when Mogo socializes (comic book reference). But you never know. That’s the whole point of isolating, once there’s doubt. 

I spent a lot of time during this pandemic not really thinking about actually being infected, and then I got sick, and it turns out it wasn’t COVID-19, but suddenly it was a very different experience. 

So yeah, that happened.

My Year in Oz

This one still needs to be written up even though things didn’t work out as planned. So: My year in Oz.

This is the third year I’ve ended up spending unplanned amounts of time on a single literary topic. One year I read multiple variations on The Iliad. Then I spent another immersed in Don Quixote. 2020 with Oz ended up being a little more deliberate, and maybe even the most appropriate way to characterize a very, very strange year.

Now, again, A Squire’s History of Oz, and “Falling Toward Oz,” is a dead project. It will become an artifact topic here on the blog, sort of fictional, unavailable for consumption in the real world. It was a nonfiction work, an attempt at a unified look at L. Frank Baum’s original books and the famous and most visible, and even most recent, projects that were inspired by them. 

The funny thing is, I found myself writing about things I had never actually experienced. Losing the manuscript probably spurred me on to doing so. I finally watched The Wiz, read Wicked. I enjoyed Diana Ross in Wiz. I see there was controversy surrounding her casting, that the movie itself sort of caused a massive backlash. I don’t really see why. I think she was a good fit. And I loved discovering, at last, that moment in Michael Jackson’s career where he sort of became himself. I did not really enjoy Wicked. I found it pretentious, indulgent.

Early in the year I read a work of fiction I found at the airport, concerning Baum’s widow and how her life eventually led to a wish-fulfillment (on the part of the author) of someone actually being there to give Judy Garland some support on the set of the famous movie, the one that for most people has become the only legitimate Oz experience. Later I finally read a young adult version of Oz I found at Walmart a few years ago, that was as generically a young adult version of Oz as it could possibly get. 

I rewatched Tin Man, the TV miniseries, for the first time since watching its original broadcast.

And I wrote George & Gracie. This became “Falling Toward Oz” redux for me, most of the elements revisited, in a new form (once I managed to remember a few of them!). This was a story I had wanted to write for a few years, and finally wrote because I lost all that other material. 

It still feels weird to talk about George & Gracie at all, as it happens to be the title piece of this year’s Christmas collection, a phenomenon that is otherwise strictly a family thing. The collection is packed, otherwise, with family elements, somewhat impenetrable to outsiders, and deliberately so: it was absolutely written for them. Even “George & Gracie” itself means more in family context, getting all the references. 

But it feels good to know it’s out there, and is probably more valuable than the project it replaced, and is going to be a wonderful reminder of a most peculiar year, one spent in Oz, in more ways than one.

A Journal of the Pandemic #21

Hey, you may have heard of something called COVID-19? Kind of a thing that’s been happening this year?

I haven’t written an entry in this series since September. As I write this one, we’ve become entangled in the winter surge, that thing that was looming nebulously all year, and now it’s arrived. Or as HBO might have put it, “winter is coming.”

Obviously plenty has happened since September. Biden won the election. As a result, we’re scheduled for a shutdown early next year. I’m kind of looking forward to it. At work it seems as if in order to get any real response done management needs for someone else to make a decision about how seriously to take the pandemic.

And let me explain that. We lost a couple staff members mysteriously this week. Nobody knew what was happening. By the end of the week we learned unofficially that they of course were tangled up with COVID-19. Nothing was done except replacements brought in as necessary. And they were staff members who absolutely intersected with the whole facility. We had a whole class quarantine for two weeks without signage being hung explaining why. Measures were subsequently put in place to prevent cross-room contamination in playground areas...after it was totally ignored that the one class had absolutely interacted with other classes in playground areas before its quarantine.

(Here I’ll include a parenthetical update on my baby room. As I reviewed what was happening when last I wrote we had just gotten our first two new babies! We ended up getting two more regulars, although it was three until one went on reserve status, their dad sort of permanently out of work because pandemic time has made it difficult for him to be a barber. Three young wiggly babies making strides at tangible mobility, one older baby making strides to standing! Walking! Independently! For all the occasional hiccups, it’s, for me, an inexpressibly irresistibly magical age.)

And I get that the bottom line is always money, that it would be inconvenient to have made any other decisions than have been made.

But.

Here I will once again clarify that I never believed for a moment that draconian methods were ever necessary, but once the decision was made, nearly everywhere, globally, it became irresponsible for anyone to deliberately skirt them without justification, without a clear, honest, transparent method behind the reasoning. Which I’m certain I am not alone in experiencing.

Because of the heavy political polarization at least here in the States, we tend to assume that skirting mandates equates a conservative agenda. That’s the kind of useless simplistic reasoning that absolutely needs to end. I guarantee it isn’t that black and white, and never was. 

My private life continues apace. I published a collection of short stories a few weeks back, collecting material that had previously been earmarked for a friend’s anthology they decided against pursuing in favor of a movie website. (I still have no idea why they couldn’t do both, but apparently some people can’t multitask; I’ve been dwelling recently on the amount of blogging I used to do, and still trying to rationalize how none of it really made an impact so it’s just as well to not continue in that fashion.)

I also published my Christmas collection and sent it out to family. The past few years I was circulating it only to my niece, but figured this year of all years I could expand back outward.

Working on those two publications was a necessary culmination for the year I’ve been having. They were, in their finished forms, a response to the death of my previous computer. I had to totally rewrite the Christmas collection, but in a weird sort of way it was a good thing, therapeutic, as part of it allowed me to simultaneously resurrect the best of the lost Squire’s History of Oz material, the short story I’d written, now reworked as an original story, one I had been planning to write for a while.

I’ve also been plugging away at Space Corps, including replacing ideas that were eaten by the previous computer, which again turned out to be okay. One book I’ve been outlining I had the chance to completely rethink again, and plans for two more had chances for fresh perspectives as well, including the last one in the whole cycle, which took on a drastic new shape inspired in part by some genealogy work I did a few months ago, trying to figure out where exactly my roots lie.

I’ve been staying mostly home. No huge change from any other year, just more so, some by necessity (libraries here are only just beginning, cautiously, to reopen, so my weekends remain home bound, a stark contrast to what was happening a year ago). I did shop on Black Friday, at a comic book store, where I seemed to spend the bulk of my time away from where everyone else was, catching up with recent comics and seeing what I could find in the used collections (where I scored a copy of Steven Seagle’s It’s A Bird). Ironically, the generous back issue sale that enticed others I had already decided to stay away from, having read, perhaps, enough random old comics this year.

This week I kept being reminded how much I miss my niece. Last Sunday was a good call with dad, who hasn’t gotten to see his two Maine-based grandsons since March, partly because my brother has decided he can do without him. We had a rare phone conversation about that a few months back. I tried to make a case for dad, but it obviously left little enough impression. I wonder how many families are losing shape because of the pandemic, and how long, if mended at all, these altered states will endure.

Edgar Wright watched a lot of art movies. I watched a lot of movies, too, but not a lot of overlap there. Kenny Omega just made history. So things are interesting.

And maybe they’re going to be interesting in a positive way.

IWSG December 2020

 The first Wednesday of every month ye members of the Insecure Writers Support Group wake up cold (wait, that isn’t right; that’s me, today) or maybe blog, typically responding to a given question, which this month is:

Are there times of the year you’re more productive?

To which I will say...No? Recently, anyway, I’ve tackled smaller projects all year long. I haven’t really tackled (well, without it being eaten by a computer, may ye Rest In Peace, Squire’s History) (“ye” apparently being my word of the day) since about...2013. When I was rallying back in 2016 after the death of my mom, I really thought I was getting back into the flow of it, but I still have yet to tackle another original book-length manuscript. 

Usually I will wait until I can’t wait anymore to write, when everything seems to have percolated, or it just feels right. With shorter works this is easy enough. With longer works, at least recently, I seem to simply come up with even more concept revisions. The Great Computer Eatening did that, but I imagine to the benefit of the project I still think is next on the docket. I had another significant breakthrough on what needed to happen the other week.

Which is to say, maybe I start before the end of the year? Or the start of the next?

All of which is to say, if this be ye group for insecurity, my chief insecurity as a writer being...not having a fixed pattern. Thanks a lot, Question of the Month!

IWSG November 2020

 The Insecure Writers Support Group blogs on the first Wednesday of every month, which this time means fretting over who won the election. I’m writing this as...we still don’t know! Ahhhh!

Fortunately the group has a really easy question to ask this month, which is:

Why do you write what you write?

Ahhhh!

I have no idea how to answer this! I’m that idiot writer who when someone in the real world asks me what I write I can never give them a straight answer! Making that the toughest question! And this one the second toughest!

I try to write the ideas that interest me. They can usually be found in some genre context, but the catch is that most often I find myself caught up in the psychology of why this situation is happening.

So I guess I write what I write to try and figure things out, either for myself or for potential readers. 

Citizen Wayne

 Tim Burton’s 1989 reinvention of superhero cinema, Batman, is a lot of things. In some ways it was the dawn of the modern blockbuster, the first truly successful “tent pole” blockbuster to capitalize on the success of Star Wars, in part because it transformed Darth Vader into a Dark Knight in black rubber. It was a gangster movie when it wasn’t really cool to be a gangster movie (and kickstarted that, too). It was Burton and Michael Keaton achieving the seemingly impossible, what no one could have expected from any of their previous movies.

And it was also kind of Citizen Kane.

Which is to say, it’s an unlikely example of truly exceptional storytelling. Most viewers are going to begin and end their thoughts on it as being a superhero story. That’s fine for them. For most people the simplest explanation is always going to be the best one, even if it’s simplistic and even inaccurate. The most interesting things can play to this kind of interpretation, but they have a lot more going for them.

Batman certainly does. From the moment we meet Billy Dee Williams’ Harvey Dent under a giant banner of his face, evoking Charles Foster Kane’s campaign poster, one can begin to ascertain Burton’s ambitions. Naturally you’d expect his Kane to be Bruce Wayne (there’s of course a later Batman comic written by Brian Michael Bendis called “Citizen Wayne,” where I borrowed the title for this post), but Burton and Keaton’s Wayne is such an anonymous individual he’s introduced without the other characters even being able to identify him. He’s the opposite of Kane. Wayne Manor, as opulent as Xanadu, is as foreign and curious to Wayne as his guests. He isn’t bursting with boundless ego, he’s secretly a vigilante who wants common street thugs to tell their friends about him. He’s an urban legend, not plastered across the newspapers of an empire he himself owns.

And even by Burton’s second movie, Wayne, and Batman himself, still kind of seems beside the point to the flashy villainy around him.

Wayne’s parents were killed in an incident much like the one Burton stages again at the beginning of Batman. Kane’s whole story is dominated by being forcibly adopted into wealth. Kane lives a life dominated by ambitions that are never really his, with a wild goose chase trying to solve the riddle of what was really important to him. Wayne’s mystery isn’t that hard to decipher, but it still drives him to achieve something even more impossible than Kane’s wildest dreams. And he never even pretends it’s possible. He doggedly tackles one problem at a time.

Kane’s love life is about buying love; Wayne’s is about what he never really believes possible, someone truly understanding him, a recurring problem that keeps looking like it has answers but, for someone like Wayne, probably as forever as elusive as his other goals.

You might say that this is beside the point for a superhero, but that’s what really makes the character interesting. In the comics, it wasn’t really for another twenty-five years that a guy named Tom King figures this out. In all the ways Bruce Wayne isn’t Citizen Wayne, it makes him so human it actually makes him seem dull, but he’s anything but. Even lost behind a mask, sometimes lost to it, he remains a fascinating case study of what can be accomplished if someone is truly motivated to use their resources for the good of others. Wayne runs his business well, but he never loses sight of doing right by those he encounters along the way, as if it means nothing at all to him, but really because it just seems so obvious. And as Batman, he tries to go that one step further. He’s as impossible as Kane, but in a way we seldom get to see the good guy, especially in the past twenty years, when it seems we’ve become far more interested in Kane figures, men driven to bad impulses as a matter of course, never thinking, sometimes even when it’s too late, that their lives have gone astray. And Wayne made a vow to do the right thing when his life had fallen definitively apart.

All of which is to say, even a simple idea can be complicated. A simple idea should be complicated. That’s great storytelling. That’s the whole idea. 

A Fruitful Day for Ideas

 Today turned out to be a good day to get back on the horse, or at least the beginning of getting back on it.

Since the death of my previous computer, I’ve kind of slowly gotten back to work. Looking back over everything I’ve already done this year, I see that I was busier than I sometimes allow myself to think, a lot of projects (some since lost, including the big revision project for a contest I’m reasonably sure I won’t be winning because Submittable wasn’t letting me attach the file but still somehow let me “submit,” and at the time I convinced myself it had somehow worked out despite the issues the site was having...) that were all in themselves well worth tackling, and all of which in some ways built on each other.

Anyway, one of the things that was eaten was a new vision of Collider, a long-term project a quarter century in the making that’s the first Space Corps story I ever began working on. Today I did a fresh take of the outline as I recently radically reconsidered it, building on elements I developed during Terrestrial Affairs, the novella from a few years back. It’s strange how much can change but still the basic shape remains as first begun in the mid-90s. Realizing this was possible was part of the reason I didn’t completely freak out over my computer dying and erasing the last version.

I also tackled an outline for George & Gracie, the novella I’ll be including in my Christmas poems collection this year (which is another project being revisited, with the novella being a substitute for two shorter works I lost and don’t want to rewrite). These collections are for my niece, the Burrito, although this year I plan to send the results around to family, in the hopes they might actually begin to see me as a legitimate writer (and not as “gee wiz that dude who keeps trying to make that happen,” which is the recent impression I kind of got from my dad). Anyway, it’s something I’m really excited to tackle, and will be the first thing I work on actually writing.

I also came up two other ideas today, “Kingslayer” and “Old Brown’s Daughter,” though I won’t really talk about what exactly they are here, although they reminded me about an idea I had earlier in the year, “Old Wizards,” and how much that would be fun to get back to. (“Old” being in a title twice is probably a coincidence.) These are ideas that practically told themselves when I conceived them. You don’t take such ideas lightly.

Plus today was the second day of my latest comic book scripting project, Catman/Batwoman, which nominally is a riff on Tom King’s real comic, Batman/Catwoman. It’s going to be the shortest to date, twelve script pages. But nine panel grids every page! (For those who don’t know, “Catman” is an actual DC character. The “Batwoman” indicated is actually Barbara Gordon, the original and most famous Batgirl, who has never actually been referred to as Batwoman. Except in this project. Because: symmetry.)

IWSG October 2020

 This was the first Wednesday of October, which meant that I definitely did not need the Insecure Writers Support Group Facebook page to remind me that it’s that day where we blog...

Nope! That’s definitely not what happened!

(In my defense, I skipped...many, many months of membership duties. I was dropped from the rolls an’ everything.)

Anyway, we have a question to answer, as always:

What does the term “working writer” mean to you?

I can only interpret it as a writer, such as myself, who has a job and writes in their spare time, so that being a writer is not the title they use for tax purposes.

And I have been doing that for many, many years.

At this point I actually have a job that feels like it’s a productive use of my time, that people see me as some benefit other than as an anonymous face. I mean I don’t need my ego involved, but it’s nice. It just feels less like a job, sometimes, this way.

But strangely, sometimes I wonder if actual job fulfillment could get in the way of being productive as a writer. I worked on a lot of things over the past year, including the “bonus pandemic time,” but I wonder if it’s comparable to what I might have accomplished if I were working a less satisfying job. I know, it sounds crazy! Not being overly miserable at work is a bad thing??? I wrote all of my manuscripts (except one, which was during my first experience of unemployment, and then others that weren’t book-length so I’m not counting them) while working versions of soul-crushing jobs. It almost felt necessary!

And yes, it still sounds crazy. Maybe that’s just what I told myself, and what I’m continuing to tell myself. Maybe this is continued fallout from giving myself a little time before truly breaking in the new computer (I plan to get some work done over the three-day weekend, I swear!), I don’t know. Maybe!

I’ve certainly written some interesting things in the two years I’ve been at this job. I’ve written extended comic book scripting projects for the first time ever, for instance. I even spun off one of them some original ideas (because both were based on existing DC or Marvel concepts), and maybe I could work on that next, if I felt like doing that again. And besides, I feel like I’m getting closer to writing new manuscripts. I plan to write a novella for the rewrite Christmas package for my niece (there’s only one element from the previous one I want to revisit, riffing on something she was singing while MASTERING RIDING A BIKE AT ABOUT FIVE YEARS OLD) (not that I’m bragging for her) (and to be clear, a two-wheel, no training wheels bicycle).

So that’s what “working writer” means to me. Complicated. But interesting.

A Journal of the Pandemic #20

 Here we are reaching an eighth month of the worldwide response to COVID-19. Somehow! Pandemic time is otherwise immeasurable. Well, in some ways it is, and some it isn’t.

Absences are measurable. Reunions are measurable! At work it’s been a season of reunions. Some of my colleagues who’ve been out since this started have finally returned. Some of the kids who’ve been out have started trickling back. I’ve seen a couple kids I haven’t seen in forever! One of them I had to forcibly remind myself I last saw before our shutdown, because that crazy time has actually begun to blur, because in some ways what I was doing immediately before and immediately after was so similar I wasn’t really distinguishing anymore. But of course recent months have been all about acclimating to my new building, and that’s been a whole new era.

Speaking of which! I got a plush room assignment a while back, in a baby room, after it seemed I would exist in floater purgatory indefinitely...but then we had no babies. The one who had been showing up transitioned to a one-year-old room, and the other babies nominally assigned to us weren’t coming in at all. I mean, one did! For a single day! But then none. For what seemed forever! Then finally we got some new babies enrolled, and one starts on Monday (baby brother to a preschooler we have in another room) and our second a week later (daughter of a former coworker!). 

Lots of parents are still teleworking. Obviously the whole country has been working toward reopening. Infection numbers are sort of ticking up again as we anticipate a full-blown second wave (which is already happening in Europe)...But the thing is, what’s that even going to look like? The panic is over. There are still many people taking this very seriously, but...Another shutdown is highly unlikely to occur. What we’re going to see is an abundance of caution. My job is going to have a slow trickle back to what things were like at the start of the year. Most of our rooms are still single ratio (previously every room was routinely double ratio, which basically means we really only need one teacher per room instead of two, although of course at the moment we’ll have two or three teachers around at times just because we have that many and we’ve been in the process of at least operating somewhere close to normal, which is why all the teachers have been coming back). 

I went to the movies last Friday. Friday, and out of two movies I watched, a total attendance of...three. And that was for the second, later movie. (I had planned on seeing three movies. Doubt very much there would have been anymore viewers even then.) I mean, movie attendance has been ticking downward for years anyway. The huge box office numbers we’ve seen for Avengers movies, for instance, have still been a relative drop in the bucket historically. That’s inflation talking, not attendance. Mass popularity has taken a hit with the extreme proliferation of avenues across all mediums. It’s not just movies, it’s everything. And the pandemic is going to make it that much harder to find common experiences. Except the pandemic.

Just think of how much your own life was disrupted, how your experiences have diverged from your typical social circles this year. Personal narratives have taken on new meanings. That might become an obsession in nonfiction in the years to come. 

I got my new computer this morning (and a case! and a generous flash drive!)...But I’m hesitant to crack it open. To get back to work. It was just about a month ago that I was finishing the last work I did on the old one, before it died its horrible death. I’ve been processing what I can do with the stuff I lost, that I have to tackle again. But it really feels as if there’s a mourning process that still needs to play out. 

Anyway, this is pandemic time. Nothing makes sense like it used to. I’ll keep you posted.

The Computer Ate My Homework

 Well, it’s official. My computer ate my homework. Which is to say, my computer died and took my files with it.

Three weeks ago I got stuck in the rain, and I happened to have my tablet with me. It was a horrendous downpour. I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t get it to a shop until the end of the week, or if it died more or less instantly, but the end result was, because it was such a compact instrument, it was a complicated business just to answer whether or not my files were retrievable even before the diagnosis, and certainly out of the question after.

So I lost material. I lost the whole Oz affair. I lost Squire’s History of Oz, the greater nonfiction work, and “Falling Toward Oz,” which for me was far more valuable. I talked about this stuff here. It was actually some of the last material I actively talked about here. If COVID-10 hadn’t hit, this would not have even been an issue. I don’t have Wi-Fi at home. I travel to get it. This was far easier pre-pandemic, and even beyond that, when everything closed, it was more or less around the time I was completing this work. I’d’ve self-published it months ago. 

But now it’s been eaten. If I wanted, I could reconstruct the book itself and even tackle the story again. I’m not feeling especially motivated to do that at the moment. I’m not grieving. I kind of figured this was going to be the result, and so I made peace with it the day I turned the tablet into the shop.

I lost the manuscript I carved out of In the Land of Pangaea, something I didn’t really talk about here, something I did earlier in the summer and submitted to a contest. All the work on that is lost unless by some miracle it has legs in the contest. Again, I could be okay with that. I loved working on that thing. It was if nothing else an excellent exercise in revision. 

I lost this year’s Christmas poem package for my niece! I wrote it ridiculously early as it was, so I can always rewrite that well before the end of the year. I know the bones of what I wrote. I can either attempt to replicate or do something new. It’s okay.

I lost some plotting for Space Corps! I didn’t lose the major Space Corps material. I have the Seven Thunders manuscript, and notes in an actual notebook for most of what I had been working on, and copies attached to emails for other things. There’s so much already quite unwritten about Space Corps anyway, it’s difficult to say what can be lost in such a manner as this. Having Seven Thunders as it is, and in the revised form as I’ve worked on it, is the main thing, and what would’ve been the big loss in a previous computer loss.

That’s not everything, but those are the highlights. I have email copies of stories I wrote this year. I will have to revert to backups for additional poetry collections, whenever I get around to that project again, losing whatever work I had done in that regard. (I think it eats what would’ve been the next release, in the state I left it, which again would not have been a problem pre-shutdown, because I would have published it well before this happened).

Last week I bought a school-sized (rather than pocket-sized) notebook, with the intention to perhaps work on stories and/or notes there. This would not be a guarantee against loss, either, but it would offer a different level of control. I have some really old notes! Stuff dating back to probably 1996 at least, a lot of old Space Corps material. That’s how I always did it before. Then at some point I started doing it on a computer, and when I had a printer handy would carefully print it out (another backup model!). Technically I have a printer now but have no idea if it actually works. I inherited from my sister. Has been sitting on a desk I don’t work at (I find desks hard to work at for extended periods, unless they’re big, and this one isn’t).

And at some point I will buy a new computer of some extraction. And be very, very careful, especially as it comes to file preservation!

Star Wars: The Art of the Incomplete Story

 I love Star Wars. I’m one of the crazy people who loves all three trilogies. I love them, I love Star Wars, because of the storytelling. 

Famously, the second Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back, changed everything fans thought they knew when Darth Vader revealed to Luke Skywalker that he was his father. By the time I watched the original trilogy for the first time, it was in fact already a trilogy. I was two when Return of the Jedi was released in theaters. I grew up in a decade when Star Wars was an incredibly simple thing to appreciate. There were some Ewoks movies, sure (I saw those), and some cartoons, but for all intents and purposes Star Wars began and ended with the original trilogy.

For me there was no mystery about Vader’s identity. Learning how important that revelation was to the early fan community was a chance to more fully appreciate the storytelling, to deconstruct what was in each movie concerning this relationship, and how much it meant to the saga.

By the time George Lucas decided to make the prequels and explain exactly how Anakin Skywalker became Vader, it seemed as if the essential mystery of the saga had been explained. And yet it wasn’t. The prequels couldn’t explain, in detail, how Palpatine became the Dark Lord of the Sith. What I loved so much about Revenge of the Sith was a sequence in which he implies his origins. For me it’s every bit as essential as Vader revealing his identity, though the moments could not be more different if they tried. Palpatine’s conversation with the young Anakin is slow, contemplative, deliberate. Vader’s exchange with Luke is a desperate moment at the end of a terrible duel.

 In the sequel trilogy, Rise of Skywalker reveals that Rey is Palpatine’s granddaughter. Some fans remain baffled by this, especially as it relates to the title of the film. Naturally I love it. The mystery remains, what kind of lives did her parents lead? 

It could easily fill another trilogy, just as I immediately began envisioning the possibility of a trilogy around Palpatine’s ascension within the Sith.

But this is Star Wars. This is the art of the incomplete story. I don’t think it counts unless it’s in a film. No comics. No cartoons. No books. Some fans grieve stories that played out in the aftermath of the original trilogy once the sequels negated them. Some find answers to sequel mysteries in new material of the very same kind.

But it’s not official, for me, unless it’s in a film. Star Wars films are things of epic grandeur. From the very beginning, when a Rebellion destroyed a Death Star, these are stories that make the most sense when they are captured in the grandest form of filmmaking. There’s a reason why movies tried for so long to capture the Star Wars magic. It took twenty years. Nothing like it had been accomplished before, and at least as far as I’m concerned, nothing has come close to the full scope of Star Wars even now. 

And the scope is in the willingness to leave gaps. The instinct is to fill in all the gaps. That’s why it’s so common for the comics, books, cartoons, to try. But they never understand that the magic lies in the scope of it. Why focus so exclusively on the Skywalkers? Aren’t there more stories worth telling? Well, sure, but the depth of Star Wars is in the resonance. Stray too far from them and it could be anything at all. Basically, my opinion of all that material became, it basically was. 

Rey embraces the Skywalker legacy because that’s the heart of the saga, that’s what the story is all about, the ability to face great obstacles and still complete the hero’s journey. And what makes her journey so interesting is that she makes leaps of faith that defy all logic, just as Luke before her, and his father before him. These leaps are not about Jedi finesse, but the ability to embrace the art of storytelling, as few examples in film have dared.

The idea was never to simply leave fans wanting more. Three separate times the saga concludes. But leaves room for more, often in the past rather than the future. And sometimes it dares embrace the challenge. This isn’t laziness. This is brilliance.

A Journal of the Pandemic #19

 I was kind of hoping that when I reached the nineteenth installment I would be able to say we were nearing some version of the end. But we are not.

It’s true that COVID-19 doesn’t fill the news anymore. We started reaching for other topics months ago, but the fact is the pandemic is still happening. We’re in a process of undoing measures that were put in place to help contain the spread, and whatever your feelings on those measures, your personal experiences with the virus, now we’re about to see everything in a whole new light.

Someone who used to work at my facility lost her mom to the pandemic recently. It rattled one of my coworkers. It’s actually been rare, given your geological location, to have first-or even secondhand experience with death as part of this thing. Knowing people who’ve gotten sick is one thing, but knowing people who have died from it is another thing entirely. You hear horror stories at certain epicenters about mass casualties and massive piles of bodies...but for the majority of us, that’s not what we’ve experienced. I didn’t work with this woman (at a previous job I ended up making friends with someone who’d been employed there before my time just because he visited frequently to see old coworkers, and he was a nice guy, so it was just natural), but my current colleague was obviously rattled by the news. We tend to limit ourselves either to our own experiences or blindly accept those of others. It’s difficult to find some middle ground (as in all things). So to say it’s easy to understand the pandemic just because it’s been inescapable is reductive and unhelpful. 

The reopening process will be more difficult than we might have imagined. My facility is actually actively hiding a diagnosis rather than address it as it might have been months ago. We always post a diagnosis (of anything, such as pinkeye) on the door of the affected room, so everyone is aware. To deliberately avoid doing so now can only mean it was determined, at this stage, that it would be counterproductive to the overall desire to bring operations back to normal. That’s been the big push for the past few months, slowed when numbers in-state started to surge, but never outright halted. We brought back most of the staff (less than a handful remain at home). Paycheck protection measures are ending. 

Based on the initial reactions to the pandemic, which the loudest voices insisted weren’t good enough even then, the assumption would necessarily be that we would handle new cases the same way as the old. The school year has begun. Even if most kids are distance learning, that still leaves a substantial new set of potential cases waiting to develop, as has already been the case. Schools here have been open for a few weeks already. 

If only. If only we had allowed ourselves to make reasoned decisions at the start. If only we had allowed ourselves to calculate what to keep in operation, not based on need alone but on a reasonable assessment of measures that could be employed, distancing possible within a given space. If only we had stopped for a moment to think about how this thing spreads in real terms. If only we had considered, in real terms, how our measures provoked reactions that led to more spreading rather than less. If only we had taken the time to do all this in April. 

It’s not a measure of how right you are to condemn someone for how they react. A reaction is a response, not a decision. You give someone a situation that totally disrupts everything they previously took for granted, and the result will be difficult to contain. You can be wrong by being too right. (This is an absolute proven by the fact that the reverse cannot be true: You can’t be right by being too wrong.)

I wish this were something that people could understand. But for some people, being righteous means the inability to question their thought process. It’s not merely a religious thing. You can be righteously wrong and have no concept of faith at all, except in your own misguided convictions.

Now we struggle to piece things back together. There will be missing pieces for a long time to come.

IWSG September 2020

 The Insecure Writers Support Group meets virtually (well before it was cool) on the first Wednesday of every month (except in 2013, but we don’t talk about 2013) and generally follow a prompt, which in this instance means answering a predetermined question (letting members ask, and answer, their own led to Phil being banned, but that’s another matter entirely).

This month’s question: Which writer, living or dead, would you love to have as your beta reader?

This is a ridiculous question, because for me there’s only one right answer, and that’s the late Chilean genius Roberto Bolaño, who is best known for his novel The Savage Detectives, which is not about detectives (in the conventional sense) at all but a community of savage poets (the only kind worth being a member of) who track two members in general (based on Bolaño himself and his best friend) in their wild international adventures.

Bolaño was a literally genius. He considered himself first and foremost a poet, but he was a novelist of the first order (2666 is the best book I have ever, and will ever have, read), whose specialty was short novels, in which he would sometimes ruminate on his country’s little-reflected-upon history with Nazi exiles. 

The portrait Bolaño so casually paints of a country (a series of countries; he spent many years traveling, and in Spanish exile; many of his experiences, like Savage Detectives, are reflected in his work, such as in The Skating Rink, in which he spent a summer bumming it) filled with poetry workshops, like they’re libraries or something you just kind of visit in your neighborhood at your leisure, it’s intoxicating. I’ve never encountered anyone who literally seemed to breathe literature like him. 

I’ve tossed in little odes to Bolaño in my work, sometimes outright borrowing his most frequent fictional alias (Arturo Belano), or riffing on his stories. Although I have a lot of wild ideas, sometimes I think it could be a lot worse than to find success the way he did, by writing about the very heart of his experiences.

So to work alongside him...Yeah. Roberto & Tony...those crazy detectives of the world’s insanity...

Not-the-Tonys 2020

 My blogging buddy Squid does this every year, and I thought, why not? Why not do a best-of yearly stamp, this of all years? Very slowly I’ve been rethinking the idea of having multiple blogs but only talking about my writing (mostly) on this one, especially as I’ve slowed my blogging in general, and it gets a little depressing talking only about the pandemic here (which is what I’ve done for months here). So here are some highlights of 2020 so far, and what lies ahead the rest of the year:

Favorite Writing Project:

Let’s start with a writing thought on a writers blog! On Monday I submitted a story to the IWSG anthology, and it involved my Space Corps saga, and, regardless of how it fares with the judges, I think I did something really good with it. I’ve been taking a lot of creative risks this year, and I think it’s starting to pay off with my work. (Monday it also rained on me and potentially wrecked my computer and lost me a lot of material...but I think I could actually be okay with it. Mostly. I can rebuild Bionic Man style.)

Favorite Family Memory:

A few months back it was a year ago I stopped actively participating in my niece’s life when she moved on to Texas. I had a meltdown over that but was able to recover. As of earlier this month she’s a big sister! So another adventure is just beginning. I’m happy that she has new experiences to look forward to as she continues to grow up. It was always her life anyway, and I was always privileged to play any part in it, and now I can more clearly see where it’s her journey and I am a privileged observer. (But yeah, I write yearly Christmas poem chapbooks for her. I already wrote this year’s. Or will get to write it again, depending.)

Favorite Work Memory:

Like everyone, work has taken some interesting turns this year for me. (And I never forget how privileged I’ve been to be relatively unaffected.) Early in the year I was given pre-pandemic curveballs that created a lot of stress. I took it as an opportunity to grow and to put money where my mouth was, looking at challenge babies as a challenge worth taking. I saw real progress as a result! Similarly, during the pandemic I was given another curveball, and can honestly say the last day of the particular challenge I ended with a real victory. Every moment isn’t a victory. There are defeats. The reward of victories makes them worth it.

Favorite Book (New):

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, his second book, published a decade after his first (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe). Yu is a brilliant writer capable of viewing his topics in truly unusual ways, which here means exploring the Chinese-American experience in ways we don’t tend to consider. In a year where BLM once again surged in the public consciousness, Yu’s work is a great reminder that all minorities face challenges.

Favorite Book (Old):

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev, another great Russian novel, exploring the idea of social change in surprisingly relevant ways.

Favorite Book (Comic):

Folklords by Matt Kindt, a miniseries I randomly sampled and then felt compelled to finish, about a fantasy world where the youth take on an adventure as a rite of passage. The lead character dresses in a suit like our real world and wants to prove it (our real world) exists. Kindt is a more than reliable talent, and so this was a nice new project to discover.

Favorite Movie:

Obviously the release of new movies has been compromised this year so far. Early on I got to indulge in the fact that Colin Farrell is my favorite actor when he appeared in Guy Ritchie’s new movie, The Gentlemen, a gangster ensemble flick with a fun conversational framework. Farrell ended up acclaimed for his supporting role as a surprisingly fierce ordinary neighborhood coach. The same day, the first and only visit to a theater so far this year (though I’ve caught up with a few more 2020 movies via the archaic DVD technology), I was able to catch my previous favorite actor’s cinematic comeback, Jim Carrey in Sonic the Hedgehog. Obviously he’s great in it, absolute classic form.

Favorite TV Show (New):

Star Trek: Picard (I’m a Star Trek guy, okay?), an elegiac, ambitious reprise for a beloved character (or two or three or four or five) last seen nearly twenty years ago.

Favorite TV Show (Old):

Folks, I discovered Letterkenny. And folks, I absolutely adore Letterkenny. Honestly, I was interested in it at all because Pat Dilloway saw it and hated it, and I was naturally curious. Sorry, Pat. It’s brilliant.

Favorite Music:

Honestly, my music consumption has deteriorated over the years. I don’t blame the new music. At the start of the pandemic I saw the Strokes had a new album called The New Abnormal. Still working my way into it. Seemed eminently relevant even though it was a total coincidence. Otherwise I cycle through older stuff. 

So what does the rest of the year have going for it?

Writing Projects:

 I don’t want to jinx them talking about them here. I’m starting to feel like Grant Morrison, who talks about some of his projects maybe too ridiculously early sometimes. There’s one that probably will never happen now I still check in on hoping in vain for updates. At times I’ve written about projects here that I’m really excited about...but don’t exactly get actually working on. So I’m going to be more cautious about that. But I will be working on things!

Books:

This is easy to project. For most of the year I’ve been ignoring my reading shelves by skipping ahead to more recent acquisitions. But I’m finally working on those shelves again! I’m going to be reading a lot of Thomas Pynchon soon. I love Pynchon, so this is quite exciting for me.

And...the rest will play out. Hopefully happily! But I have to be okay when it doesn’t. Always a process.

Books into TV shows

 In classic Hollywood if a book was going to be adapted, it was for the film industry (or radio). There wasn’t really a question about it. When “prestige television” became a thing about twenty years back, it opened up a new avenue. There had been, some forty years ago, the concept of miniseries, such as The Thorn Birds or Roots, but regular TV stuck with regular TV concepts. Then HBO started leaning heavily into original programming, and the stakes were raised. Today it’s as easy to find a book adapted into a movie as a TV show.

The only streaming service I have is because I’m a Star Trek guy, and since I don’t have cable and I finally broke my network viewing habit (I used to very easily have something to be excited about every night), my discovery of new shows has become more limited than I might’ve previously imagined. Recently, though, I’ve been watching a lot of shows adapted from books.

I just finished the first season of Get Shorty. Based on the book by Elmore Leonard (and previously adapted as a John Travolta movie), by the end of the season you can kind of guess that it was inspired in part by Breaking Bad, a show about a guy who becomes a gangster somewhat accidentally. Admittedly, a large part of what broke my TV habit was the spate of shows everyone admired that I found deplorable. I see nothing worth liking about Walter White. The more critics embraced antiheroes who were probably straight-up villains, the less interested I became in the results. But Chris O’Dowd, in the final episode of Get Shorty’s first season, is literally looking at the camera as it dawns on him that his scheme to escape gangster life by becoming a movie producer has...completely backfired.

The whole season has shown how inextricably the process played out. There’s no mystery, no ambiguity, no pretensions that he started out with the best of intentions but somehow ended up in a position he could never have imagined. He suffers no illusions, his best friend has fewer scruples but actually seems more innocent, and his family, for whom he too is attempting to do this, is lost to him in quick order.

Anyway, so it’s an interesting show. The highlight is an apparent dimwit actor who’s unexpectedly brilliant while performing, a revelation that comes late in the season, a subplot that’s mostly in the background, never especially emphasized (except with a random flashback). It epitomizes the rich possibilities of this version of the story, which uses different characters but the same basic premise as the book and the movie. (We get one nod to the original lead character, Chili Palmer, who arrives at the movie studio at one point just ahead of our actual cast, just the back of Palmer’s car and his last name being used.)

I enjoyed HBO’s Watchmen, a sequel to the original comic. I adored Catch-22 with George Clooney. Good Omens was a hoot (all three of these were miniseries, admittedly). BBC’s Dirk Gently was pretty great, a show that lasted two seasons. It’s based on a couple of books (and an incomplete one) by Douglas Adams. 

Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is currently being developed by Netflix. Attempts have been made for years to get an adaptation done. This is one of the great comic books, a true literary marvel that incorporates...everything imaginable into its plot (Morpheus, the King of Dreams, has been imprisoned for years, only to discover freeing himself results in confronting everything he did before). If approached even remotely for the scale it deserves, the Netflix version would necessarily be something quite special as well.

Admittedly with my Space Corps stories, with the lead one anyway (Seven Thunders), I was always envisioning movie adaptations. The bulk of them, though, were actually outlined as TV seasons, even though I’ve been working on reverse-engineering them for book format (ha!), which has meant removing overly episodic elements (I’m a Star Trek guy; that what I had to work with, okay?). The funny thing about these recent TV shows is that they basically function as extended movies. The much-discussed Snyder Cut of Justice League is basically going to function as a miniseries in this fashion, four hours cut up into segments. Even Star Trek: Picard was described by producers as a nine hour movie, which has apparently become the way these things are routinely talked up.

TV has come a long way. It becomes easier to create cinematic experiences, at least cosmetically, and the storytelling draws established movie actors. Films then become a medium of compact art. (Almost like a really good TV episode.)

I wonder if any of this affects how books are written. You can’t really say that a TV show is necessary to capture all the beloved details of a book, since shows like Get Shorty can reinvent them anyway, and besides, if you wanted all the details of the book, you already have the book. Different mediums ought to produce different results. Will publishers seeking TV adaptations (this is easy to see with comic books, where a creator will lean heavily into a concept without bothering to develop it, because the movie version will do it for them) look for ways that will streamline the process?

We’ll see!

A Journal of the Pandemic #18

Reopening...! That's the hot topic now, right? Reopening schools, with the new year beginning or about to begin around the country. This involves two segments of the population who have kind of sat out the last few months of dramatic developments. The students, of course, who stayed home for a kind of regular summer vacation, and the teachers. 

These were also two of the most visible segments of the early pandemic, engaged in the strange new world of virtual learning. That’s how the school year ended. Optimistically, the next one might have had slightly less to worry about. We know, of course, now, that this will simply not be the case. 

The slow process of figuring out the (temporary?) new normal has been developing as people have tried to figure out how to open up the shutdowns. Here at my childcare facility we’re recalling staff that haven’t been active in months. Not everyone’s back yet, but it’s already provoking further complications of absorbing the extra staff from my original building; apparently we have a surplus of caregivers. For me, that means a lot of standing around waiting for something to do. The assistant director has remarked several times to me that with my degree I could take advantage of the circumstances and pursue a teaching career.

Which, for any number of reasons, I’m still hesitant to do. One of them, now, is the idea of swooping in and claiming a spot that’s empty mostly because someone else is feeling uncomfortable in this new environment, whether the concept of distance learning or not wanting potential exposure to the coronavirus. It’s not just kids, after all, who will be newly vulnerable to it, but the teachers, many of whom are alarmed about it. 

We’re at a point, though, where I think impatience is setting in, not in the ordinary folk everyone likes to blame for spikes, or the most visible politicians, but the decision-makers running the regular operations. Even those who tried to stick it out are starting to feel the pinch. DC Comics just announced massive changes to its internal structures, for instance, this after already months earlier upending the distribution process of the medium, all as a result of the pandemic. Change is always going to happen, but some change is absolutely attributable to the pandemic. DC has been confronting its future throughout the year anyway; before the pandemic it fired its longtime publisher Dan DiDio, accused of too much editorial meddling and continuity reshuffling. Now, who knows?

Last Friday I had a good phone conversation with my brother in Maine. It was actually about our dad. Like me he’s been struggling with how to perceive our dad, but he’s been having an even harder time of it. On Sunday I talked with my dad, as usual, and...I sort of realized all over again that there are things I don’t often think about in regards to him, how his sense of community is considerable, for instance. He’s involved in his community in ways that objectively put me to shame. His priorities are very different from mine. His life is very different from mine. This is part of why I try so hard to appreciate the differences, work with them, and maintain my relationship with him. Because the funny thing is, no matter how different we are, we can still have conversations, which isn’t always true, not for me, and maybe not for a lot of people. I consider it a very good thing that this whole thing has put such a spotlight, for me, on my dad, for good and otherwise. 

Yesterday I finally got to submit some stories to a comic book publisher I’ve been waiting on since the pandemic began. This publisher prides itself in stuffing its comics with bonus material, which means you can submit to them on this basis. They say they look at more than just microfiction, but that’s all I’ve personally seen them include, and all I’m currently interested in sending. They periodically open, and then close, the submission portal. It was supposed to open in March, but then of course the pandemic hit and threw everything into disarray, and comics were hit like everything else, and the portal remained closed until this month. That’s a long time to wait! I had written two stories for the company early in the year, and that’s exactly what I ended up submitting. I could have written more, and obviously I still can, but that’s two, and now I want to see if either is accepted. I like ‘em both, besides (but hopefully I do, right?), so I guess it was just hard to give them additional competition from my own material.

This week I read Ted Chiang for the first time. Chiang wrote “Story of Your Life,” on which the film Arrival was based. Arrival is one of those movies I loved instantly and somehow began to think even more highly of as time went on. So the story, and Chiang’s storytelling in general, had a tall order to follow. For me he isn’t really up to it. He’s more of an idea guy, who wants desperately to impress but kind of hopes the ideas alone will do it. As fate would have it, I’ve been working on a lot of ideas lately, and Chiang’s ended up feeding into that. That seems good enough.

Finally watched Josh Trank’s Capone, with Tom Hardy, one of the movies that managed to get released during the pandemic (and not as a Netflix release, or some other premium streaming platform). Hardy is Hardy (which perversely is harder and harder to impress with), and he portrays the famous mobster in his inglorious final year, in which his diminished mental abilities drastically affect his affairs. Too often we either glorify our famous figures, or vilify them. This is a rare instance to see something else.

And, today, as I have throughout the pandemic, I ordered Dominos. And as of a week ago yesterday, my niece is a big sister!

IWSG August 2020

I haven’t been a very good member of the Insecure Writers Support Group (which blogs the first Wednesday of every month except the thirteenth one, in which case obviously it does so on the thirteenth day), but as I’m planning on entering the latest anthology contest (with about a month left to write something) at the suggestion of Smilin’ Alex Cavanaugh, I figured I ought to dust off the ol’ “support” part of the IWSG and participate again.

(Here I remind readers that I’ve been unable to leave comments on blogs since the pandemic started. I don’t know why my phone doesn’t want to let me, and even when I checked in with my notebook recently I couldn’t. Don’t know what that’s all about.)

Anyway, the group likes to lead discussion with a question, and this month’s is:

Have you ever written something that became a form (a poem, short story, novel) or genre that you hadn’t intended on? Or do you choose that in advance (and stick to it)?

The second novel I tackled writing turned out very differently than I expected. The first one, written under the auspices of NaNoWriMo, was something I had switched to on the day I started writing it. The idea of NaNoWriMo is that all the work, and all 50,000 words of it, is done in November (that’s the “mo” or “month” at the end the funny title). I think some people plot out in advance but still do the writing itself during the month. In 2004 I tackled NaNo for the first time, and for the next two years continued the story (each with a new timeframe and other considerations, but technically I cheated the second two times by having something preexisting). On November 1 I thought I was going to be writing one thing, but switched to a different idea just as I sat down to write (or earlier in the day; I can remember some thoughts as they were occurring that month, but not all of them!).

When I sat down to tackle the second book, I had a very specific idea of what I wanted to write...but I had done next to none outlining. It was very vague. So as I began writing, my necessary improvisations changed the book substantially. It was no longer anything like what I had imagined. I mean, there were the elements, but the end result...basically helped me learn what it might look like for me to write a wholly original story of my own. To that point the bulk of my fictional output was Star Trek fan fiction (but even that was always fairly recognizably unusual), and then of course what I produced over the course of those three NaNos, but even then I had been borrowing from a familiar playbook.

The results, to my mind, were very interesting. Other people did not necessarily agree. But the experience has continued to inform my literary career. What can I say? It’s important to know what’s important to you as a writer. If you only write what anyone could write, it’s not really critical for you to have written it, unless you’re a writer who’s okay with that, and many are, but I am not. So this was a crucial learning experience for me, and directly informed the novel I wrote next, which was considerably more focused for it.

And then I had a better idea how to do this sort of thing. And am gearing up to do it all over again.

A Journal of the Pandemic #17

So, the pandemic is still happening.

Last week at work was kind of a grind. A few people were on vacation, so I worked more hours. I still don’t get why the first and loudest response to COVID-19 wasn’t to shut down nonessential interstate travel. I’ve had multiple coworkers travel out of state in the past three months, and none of them has had to quarantine upon returning. This is literally how it spreads, folks. It’s pointless to try and contain it from person to person six feet apart when someone from, I don’t know, Boise can take their filthy Idaho potatoes to Maine (we grow them, too!) just because they want to visit someone there, and bring COVID-19 along with them, completely asymptotic. But, and not to keep making the same point over and over again, but the political points some people are determined to make over this (it doesn’t matter which side) keep hammering the same points but ignoring the greater problems. 

This is all kind of ironic because at the beginning of the pandemic I was pretty mad about having to cancel the birthday party reunion. Apparently we can’t have anything nice. If we could have been bothered to put in place reasonable restrictions with reasonable measures and reasonable demonstrations on how to actually pull them off, instead of what we actually got, all of this would have been a lot easier.

On Thursday I had my first Zoom experience. Since it wasn’t a cast reunion thing it did not make the news cycle, although that would have been a lot more fun. (The cast of Competition Piece back together! Although sadly would’ve been incomplete with the death of the lead actor earlier this year.) It was the annual suicide prevention course. But it kind of reminded me all over again how everyone in my life has taken for granted that the one dude living alone is just sort of busting it out. I’m okay on my own, I really am. Most of the time. But last week was another rough patch. I wish being social weren’t seen as inherently reciprocal. 

On the other hand, I had a great phone call with my dad last Sunday. It involved a lot of reminiscing. I don’t know if he had a particular need for it at the time or if that’s just the way the conversation went. As with any family stories I’d heard a lot of it before. Some of it seemed new! I liked that. At one point, though, he talked about one of the dogs in his past without mentioning the name, where in the past he’d always used it. It was a momentary hiccup, and maybe didn’t mean anything. The weird thing is that I’ve always had a hard time remembering the dog’s name, but am pretty sure I have it (Duke, which became easier to remember when I made the connection to John Wayne, who was my dad’s favorite actor) locked in now, so it was, I guess, disappointing, if anything, not to get that affirmation that I’m right about that.

Anyway, my WriteClubCo buddy last night said he was scrapping the anthology I sent him seven stories over the course of the last few months for inclusion. (Sending those stories provoked me into leaving my pandemic comfort zone, which has otherwise shrank back some things I’ve been doing that theoretically have nothing to do with socializing. Far less blogging, recently, for instance.) It’s the most I’d sent him in the three anthologies he worked on putting together. It’s disappointing, because I hate submitting my material. I don’t have a great track record of publication outside doing it myself due to feeling, well, rejected by rejection, so I saw the guy as a reliable outlet. He instead is moving forward with another project. I have to fight the instinct to question why he’s abandoning the project outright, but then small market publishers implode randomly all the time. They have far less incentive to be professional. I was a part of it once myself. Someone decides they want to walk away and the whole thing collapses. 

Part of why last week was hard was exactly because not only did I work more hours, but just when I was getting around to feeling motivated to write again, and even settled on a new project, I suddenly had to readjust all over again. Recently I’ve had a lot of free time that felt almost embarrassing, and it was consistently in the morning, and then I went back to an early shift, and that required adjusting, and...

So I guess this stupid pandemic experience has begun to be sort of consistently frustrating at this point. Not in a medical capacity, or in being caught up in one of the many tangential crises (unless you’re still participating in protests, there really wasn’t something new last month, which was a first; but of course those protesters somehow provoked a federal response, which surprised them, but probably no one who was surprised their protests were somehow still happening despite no one talking about them until the federal response), but in the act of just trying to figure out “the new normal.” 

So perhaps as a result, I ordered a bunch of stuff, again, recently, just like old pandemic times...

(I don’t actually have a grudge against Idaho and their filthy, filthy potatoes. But yeah, Maine has better potatoes.)

A Journal of the Pandemic #16

It’s been a little while since I last wrote. Sort of in an indeterminate period here in Florida. Don’t want to rehash things I’ve already said. I think the early pandemic was botched, and because of that it’s more difficult to get things done. So the numbers are bad here and last week I had a ridiculously long conversation with my trainer at work, which  for me because of how ridiculously long it was I expressed my frustrations at how things have been handled.

Well, anyway, as I’ve said, my daycare center has three buildings. I worked at one for about the first two years of my employment here, and spent a few months working at another, some of it sort of lended out because I was actually transferred to the other one. This week I’ve been working at my new assignment, and they’ve sort of been seeing what I’m made of. Honestly, I’m writing a post today because as of today, I think I’m starting to really like it here, and I feel like I’m being noticed, and although I’m not an overly egocentric individual, it’s nice to feel acknowledged every now and then. 

And anyway, the week also finally saw the delivery of some stuff I ordered nearly a month ago. The whole process took a lot longer than this vendor has typically taken in the past, so that was another thing that’s been bugging me. I wanted to write about these frustrations before. I wanted to talk about the way my dad’s been handling the pandemic, but I guess I wasn’t feeling very motivated.

Concerning my dad, he’s taken a sharp turn toward outright dismissing the pandemic. He’s older, but the big problem (aside from the fact that he’s even saying, now, if he catches it and dies, then that’s just what happens to happen) is that so much of his life depended on his socializing that from an early point I noticed it was affecting his cognitive abilities. My two brothers haven’t helped in all this. The one who lives in Maine won’t let him visit (lots of people have gotten around this with even “car visits,” where they stay in the car, things like that), and the one in Colorado early on took the severe reaction that wasn’t needed for the whole country and only spoiled the ability to be strategic about it when and where and as necessary. And of course everyone my dad interacts with affirms his thought process, as is true for most people, regardless of their conclusions, and so the more he’s settled back into his routines, the more his reaction has been affirmed.

I wish this weren’t the case. I call him every week, and it’s sometimes hard, because I want him to know where we agree as well as where we diverge, and like a lot of people he’s just not interested in going far past his conclusions. It’s not like I’m advocating extreme thoughts contrary to his. I just want to talk with him. I just want to know he’s okay. 

Anyway, I finished up my latest writing project a few weeks ago, and I haven’t really gotten into another one yet. I poked around. I opened a lot of files. I could start something new, or work on old things. But this pandemic is starting to feel, well, interminable. For so much of it I immersed myself in projects, one after the other, when I wasn’t working, even when I went back. Hopefully as things begin to settle again, and hopefully happily, I’ll feel motivated again. 

I binged all six seasons of Lost recently! A lot of fans grew disenchanted along the way, mostly because they were disappointed with how the mysteries were being answered (which is why binge TV now has short seasons and few seasons), but I never lost (heh) interest. I think this might have been the first time I revisited the last few seasons! It remains the absolute pinnacle TV experience for me. 

A Journal of the Pandemic #15

Yeah, I'm starting to become annoyed.

 

Wrangled with Pat Dilloway on Twitter a few days ago about how he keeps insisting I haven't been taking the pandemic seriously.  I don't even blame Pat so much as how Twitter is being, well, Twitter. I know I already said I wanted to just back off Twitter again, because I have no history of heavy usage, and the pandemic period saw me use and learn more about how to use it than I'd ever done before.  As it turns out, just as everyone on Twitter lost their minds on every possible crusade.  One acquaintance I have there from back in my Colorado years noted how depressed he was getting from all the negativity, because he thoroughly identifies with everything Twitter is upset about, so I tried pointing out to him that what he needed was a break, because as it turns out regardless of how you view it, viewing that all day long every day is not going to be good for you.  I have no idea if he actually took it to heart, because soon after, despite taking a break from making his own posts about these things, he continued viewing and "liking" the tweets others were making, and...So, I'm just going to back off of Twitter. For real this time.

 

Obviously, what a lot of these people don't for a minute understand is that these crises are happening because there's a lot of pent-up frustration from the pandemic that needs a release valve, and there's nothing possible except getting angry about something, anything.  This is not to say these causes don't have merit, but that the ways they're being addressed right now are surely being affected by factors that have nothing at all to do with them, and maybe nothing at all to do with politics, either (to even address that would needlessly drag this discussion into politics, and I'm somewhat sick to death of politics right now...and there's still a massive election at the end of the year!).

 

I worked every day last week.  I know when I last wrote I was optimistic that there might be some sort of concession to the spiking numbers here in Florida and other places...but there wasn't.  Not in any appreciable way.  There are people who will blame politics for this, that woe is the leadership who won't do anything now and only did something then out of massive pressure...But that's the problem.  There was not a "one size fits all" approach to the early pandemic, and yet everyone was forced to react as if there was.  If reasonable measures had been put in place to begin with (work on getting masks for everyone, cutting off out-of-state, let alone out-of-country, travel except for truly essential purposes), we might have been able to see what the shape of this thing really was.  The United States is a big country.  We reacted as if everyone everywhere was faced at the same time with the same problem.  And that just wasn't the case.  But all discussion was muted because any discussion was deemed to suggest that the pandemic wasn't "real," that anything but the central narrative was counterproductive.  Which was and is complete hogwash nonsense.  We knew early on who the most vulnerable segments of the population were.  We knew who was most likely to die.  And yet the most shameful outcome of the pandemic to date, the nursing home deaths, remains all but ignored because it's not convenient and is not a big enough number for the number itself to shock and appall.  Well, I remain shocked and appalled.  These are invisible deaths, but they are still tragedies.

 

But the numbers spike and now, because we were bullied once, we seem more reluctant to respond as we did before.  Of course I'm annoyed.  I didn't want the response to be irrational in the first place, but that response was forced on all of us.  My job shut down for a month.  We reopened, cautiously, and slowly increased the numbers.  We were about two stages in last week, and by Wednesday, as per the announcement I heard and wrote about last time, technically all the kids I watched last week should have gone back home.  Their parents were not first stage essential workers.  That was a demonstrable fact.  Leadership decided otherwise.  Likely they decided they were simply going to freeze at the point they had reached, rather than continue incrementally increasing the numbers at the pace they had previously set.  I don't know.  Probably.  Hopefully?

 

Working with the one-year-old age group was interesting and challenging. This was the group I worked with the first year of my current job, before moving on to babies the second year, but I had never been in a room alone with them (given ratios and waiting for security clearance to finally happen, this wasn't surprising), so even though these were three-hour days it came with a learning curve.  This weekend I bought a few flashcard packs to help fill out the time, given how the kids responded well to that sort of thing last week.  Part of my spike response was just trying to escape the responsibility and challenge of it, but on that score I seem to be doing reasonably well. 

 

I continued working on the In the Land of Pangaea project, having renamed this second act The Pearls That Were His Eyes.  I hit a roadblock with the longest chapter, but broke that up (partly because of how last Monday played out in general) between two different working days, and soon enough had wrapped things up, happily figuring out a few more changes that needed to be made and how to handle them along the way.  Out of all the writing projects I've tackled during the pandemic, this was the most interesting. 

 

On that score, things are working out.

A Journal of the Pandemic #14

Well, the numbers started spiking in Florida...

So we are probably going to be sliding back to previous restrictions. They mandated masks inside public buildings Friday evening. Assuming it holds, at work they’re going to revert to the lowest level of numbers by midweek. Today was the first of what was supposed to be at least a week of helping out with the further expansion from previous levels. Guess that’s going to change...Again, if what I heard was accurate, and I understood it properly, none of these kids will be here by Wednesday. But I guess we’ll see.

Strange to be a part of the surge. Again, everyone expected Florida to be a hotspot early on, which never happened, until three months in. So I guess this COVID-19 business will just keep being interesting...

As I talked about last week, it’s now been a year since my niece, the Burrito, went to live in Texas. By midpoint last week I was having a hard time with it, and once again vowed to myself that I was just going to go cold turkey and put her behind me. But I got to talk to her a few times later in the week. I didn’t give up. Sometimes when you’re absolutely convinced about something, you can still end up changing your mind, even if it seems impossible. 

I mailed her a box for her birthday, which like my two-year anniversary at work and the year-mark with Texas, is a reminder that time is still passing. I’d been piling things up for months, for her, her coming baby brother, and my nephews in Maine, most of which, for them, had been waiting since last December, when I was supposed to see them, or maybe March, when again I was supposed to see them. Shipping those boxes was a good feeling. I don’t ship boxes very often. I do most of my Christmas shopping on Amazon (it’s convenient, okay???). I’ve sometimes felt, during this, that I haven’t done nearly enough for family, not that any of us are doing badly, but that staying connected, keeping spirits up, feels like what everyone ought to be doing. For a guy, even with family, who hates to initiate conversation, I hope I’ve at least done okay. Sending the box to my nephews felt especially necessary, because I really haven’t been able to do much with them since 2017, when I left Maine with my niece, and I cherish them greatly.

Anyway, so the transcription project with the second act of In the Land of Pangaea has been going well. When I reached the longest chapter I kind of hit the pause button, because transcribing is hard! Especially if you want to get a whole chapter done in one sitting! It doesn’t take much time, in the grand scheme, but it’s like writing longhand for a long time. It takes a toll. So when I finally tackled it this morning, I got about halfway, started feeling really good about it....and of course I was called in early at work! But I had gotten over the hump, and that’s what mattered. I’m almost done. I just have a little more to transcribe, a little new stuff to write, and then...!

I’m a troglodyte when it comes to entertainment platforms. I still buy DVDs. This weekend someone placed a box stuffed with old DVDs in the laundry shack.  The one movie I absolutely wanted (Burn After Reading), which I’ve sort of been obsessing over since talking about it with the Armchair Squid a few years back...the case was empty. But there were a few others that looked good. That was a pleasant surprise. I get that other people live in the modern age, but I don’t mind benefiting from their moving on. No movie in the box was particularly recent. For some reason there were two copies of Troy (I already have it, and the director’s cut). I just hope the box was there for good reasons, just making space. 

Oh, and got a Tom Brady Buccaneers t-shirt. Just a small reminder that good things have actually happened in the recent past...

A Journal of the Pandemic #13

It actually feels wrong to continue this journal, as the pandemic seems to be fading almost completely into the background, somehow, except in matters of slowly reopening things, and flare-ups. A quick thought on the recent flare-ups, though: One of the regions facing this is Florida, where I currently live. Back when all this started a lot of observers expected Florida to be hit heavily, which never really happened. Now that we’re ticking back up, I wonder if it has less to do with reopening measures and more the pandemic reaching here in numbers that just hadn’t happened previously, sort of the way the pandemic hit South America hard & heavy in recent weeks after having previously been virtually nonexistent. All of this suggests, to me anyway, that our response never really took a measured approach, that we went straight to panic, denounced anyone who contradicted this approach, and...But I guess this is the era we live in. I desperately wish there was a mainstream voice of reason, because all we seem to get is kneejerk rubbernecking that doesn’t stop for a moment to consider whether or not it’s remotely helpful. 

Anyway.

At work last week was easy. Two days of light duty at the center that’s closed, cleaning things up a little (there remains the possibility that if we return to full numbers and need to, we will...not actually keep the center closed until it can be renovated). My third and final work day was spending the day with a one-year-old I hadn’t previously had a lot of interaction with. But she was great! It was a good day. This week today was supposed to be my first day of work, but more busywork, but that was called off, and so I’m writing this. 

I’ve been immersed in the transcription process from the second act of In the Land of Pangaea. Honestly, this has been some of the best revision experience I’ve ever had. I know there are writers who do this all the time, but most of my writing has been directly to computer, except in instances where I’ve written passages in a notebook. This is material I really haven’t even looked at in five or so years. I knew this act was the strongest, but didn’t have active memory for most of what I’d actually written, and so I’ve been surprising myself. There’s been some of the material I’ve completely rewritten, and some I’ve tweaked considerably. And again, this is the sort of thing a lot of writers do anyway, as a matter of course. I’ve been getting into legitimate revision with some of my projects in recent years, but this feels like a whole different level. If I had this kind of time previously, and printed works-in-progress, probably this is what I would have been doing all along, especially seeing how it plays out. Always looking to grow.

On Sunday it will be one year since my niece, the Burrito, moved to Texas. It’s weird living a life where I’m not actively devastated by this, because I know intellectually I absolutely am. It helps to be working with kids, even in these current conditions. Losing my niece is second only to gaining her in the first place in terms of significant life developments for me. That’s how important she is, the void she left behind, how much I wish she were still an everyday part of my life, how much I want to be there for her, to help in any manner I can. One year, and this is still only the beginning. What’s it going to be like in five years? Ten years? Will I still be considered important to her? 

The effects of the pandemic are still only in their infant stages. We don’t know, for instance, just how dramatically this will have affected movie theaters. For people like me, who if I had the money would probably see every movie, just...every movie, released in theaters, this is cause for considerable concern. But my niece is a more significant question. That’s where I am, in terms of the pandemic.

A Journal of the Pandemic #12

Obviously since last I updated the United States became embroiled in another crisis, sparked by the death of George Floyd.  Last weekend mass protests broke out and some became riots, and this is what has been happening for the past week.  Black Lives Matter. 

 

I am not black.  I'm white.  In high school, in college, in Maine and Pennsylvania, black people were so rare they were almost novelties.  In my freshmen year of college I joined a club called Diversity 101, which predominantly featured black members and concerned itself with the black perspective.  The most dramatic thing I did with the club was attend a march on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which might have seemed easy enough, but it was a frigid day in January, and I don't know if it's just colder in Pittsburg than in Erie, but...yeah, they looked at me like I was crazy, the organizers, not because I was white but because I was stupid enough not to bring warm gloves.  Eventually someone let me borrow some.  All I remember about it was how cold my hands really got.  I grew up in Maine.  I delivered newspapers every morning for five years.  I'm pretty sure that January morning was the coldest my hands ever got.  But it was worth it. 

 

I haven't attended any events.  I actually more or less quit Twitter for real because I was sick of the anger.  Angry tweets don't solve anything.  Have we learned nothing at all from Trump???  Maybe it's strength of solidarity, strength in numbers, I don't know, but it makes for a lousy social experience.  On Tuesday, when everyone was supposed to quit tweeting personal stuff, everyone pretty much went silent entirely, because at that point, despite repeated reminders of what the day was supposed to mean, everyone who was going to be participating was only angry tweeting anyway.  They had nothing else to say.  I checked back in yesterday.  Some of Twitter is back to normal.  But now it's just weird.  I talked before how I was going to quit because it's damn hard to be social when you suck at being social, even on the internet, even though I kept trying, and made a few tweets people enjoyed, but it's weird, trying to look at it the same way, after everyone decided they only wanted to say what everyone else was saying.  I love the sentiment.  I don't need everyone saying it.  Well, I don't.  It's an echo chamber.  That's the biggest problem we have today.  Everyone's indignant, but they're all complaining to everyone who already believes exactly what they believe.  What's being accomplished?  Everyone becomes convinced that they're absolutely making their points that whatever it is they want is definitely going to be accomplished...

 

Listen, and I don't want to get political (hey Pat! here's where you don't need to make a comment that I already know you would make), but this has become a problem that's only increased since 2016.  Since 2016 the absolute same things have been said repeatedly as if they're absolutely new, every single time, and...That's just not something that interests me.  I purged Facebook in 2016 because of this, because it's not just that there's no possibility of dialogue, it's that the people who talk about these things all the time seem to forget there's anything else worth talking about.  You're not saving civilization.  You're kind of destroying it.

 

Anyway, amazingly or not, the pandemic is still happening.  At work we had enough babies back for double staff ratio this week.  It was also my last week, as it turned out, as a part of the particular building staff I'd started out with two years ago, the last week I would have with my babies.  There are three buildings in the childcare system, as I've mentioned.  The one I started at needs to have renovations.  Finally the decision was made to reassign staff to the other buildings, and I ended up assigned to the other building, not the one we're been sharing the last month.  I don't know yet my specific fate, if I will even still be working with babies...!  I'll get to reunite with some staff that had been reassigned last fall, and with kids who went with them, most of whom I haven't gotten to see since then (the kids; I've managed to see all the staff in some capacity; I'm not social, so the chance of seeing them outside of work is remote).

 

I'm going to miss the babies I've worked with for so long, but at least of the ones we've had the past month, I can once again say I've gotten to enjoy seeing them make real and fantastic progress, which will always be rewarding.  I saw a one-year-old yesterday who...probably forgot all about who the heck I am, but suffice to say we enjoyed many great moments together in the baby room.  That's the nature of the job.  You're always saying goodbye.  That's really what this is, again.

 

Last time some of you expressed surprise that management would play so fast and loose with continuity.  I completely understand.  A part of me is horrified about what's happening with the staff.  Continuity is crucial!  But that's also...parenting.  I don't want to make this an ego thing.  I'm not the only person capable of caring for these kids.  It might sometimes seem that way, but, at the end of the day, the control I have is only as much as a day at a time gives me.  That's all anyone can say.  Some of us use that time wisely.  Some of us have no idea the impact we have.

 

Anyway, the pandemic will help the transition.  The numbers are low, and that's actually a blessing.  Some of these kids, as I've suggested, are forming new bonds with their parents.  Some of them are forgetting what it means to have an outside world, and that will produce its own challenges.  My sister used to be concerned about her daughter's socializing, what she might be missing out on if she stayed exclusively under my watch.  These are all kids who had that socializing.  Not everyone's me!  Some of us like hanging out with other people! 

 

The effects of the pandemic unquestionably fed into the reaction to George Floyd's murder.  It might even be argued that George Floyd died as much because of the pandemic as because of a callous police officer.  The arrest happened because he was attempting to use fake money.  I don't know why he did that.  I can only guess that he did it because he thought he had to.  I don't even know if he was employed at the time.  Black people are particularly vulnerable in this economy, and I can't imagine they weren't hit particularly hard by the shutdowns.  I don't know.  The rush to report outrage usually leaves these kinds of things unobserved.  If it wasn't economic reasons there was still unquestionably pent-up reactions to the shutdowns themselves.  There needs to be serious reflection on a lot of things.  It's not enough to say we have social safety nets.  We need to be able to have the courage to say it's not good enough for anyone to be privileged at the expense of anyone else.  This will hit black people, and it will hit all manner of other underprivileged segments of the population.  That's the whole point.  We live, as every society ever has, on unequal footing.  The idea of the American Dream always said that if you make the effort you can achieve anything.  Why does it have to come with strings attached?  Why do some people have to scratch and claw and others get a virtual free ride?  You don't have to look far.  You can see it in your own life, if you're honest.  Everyone benefits, or suffers (or, both).  Can you say which you experience?  Or if you have ever done something about it?

 

This is a moment in history built for reflection.  We have the time.  Let's call it something like a New Horizon.  Let's give each other the chance to see their dreams come true, without telling them they don't deserve it inherently.  Let's be honest.  For a change.

A Journal of the Pandemic #11

I guess I kind of waited for this latest week to be over to write another update.  Work was weird.  We went back to the one-on-one-off schedule, although technically a version of that was supposed to happen last week except instead of working two days I worked all five for a number of reasons, although by the end of the week I was quite okay with that, as I got to work with a baby who as it turned out made some excellent progress in the month or so since I'd last seen her.  What's frustrating about that is that from the little feedback I was able to get from other coworkers (we're working single-ratio and so not really working with each other these days), the same fog that tends to penetrate perceptions still claims this particular baby, a "problem" baby in that she craves a certain level of security.  I never understand why this is so hard to grasp.  This week I saw a version of this difficulty play out with another baby (part of an adorable set of twins I was particularly anxious to see again!) who cried at unfamiliar faces.  Both twins were unusually stranger-danger prone, but that's kind of to be expected in these unusual times, right?  Except this coworker (who, to be clear, was not the same one as mentioned earlier) went out of their way not to help her feel at ease.  A huge part of the problem anyone, parents, caregivers, seems to face is the irrational approach to "problem" kids.  If it's a simple solution (putting in the effort to make them feel comfortable) it's almost as if that's the worst possible suggestion to these people.  If it's a difficult solution (dealing with truly problematic behavior) it's as if the automatic response is to give in to the behavior, which only ever enforces it and makes it more difficult to handle, both for those caving in to the behavior and those left dealing with the results...

Anyway, so out of four work days this week (Monday was Memorial Day, for those either unfamiliar with American holidays or still adrift in the sea of days), on this one-on-one-off schedule, I actually worked...two days!  And it turned out to harder than working every day.  When you work in an environment where your coworkers can't be counted on to perform adequately (which can literally be any environment and is therefore every environment), it's tough relying on others, bad enough when you have to work alongside them, worse when you're left picking up the strange (at best) pieces they leave behind.  That was this week. 

I guess part of it was that in getting those days off this week, it began to remind me of how strange these pandemic days really are.  When it was the month sitting at home, at least then I could adjust on my own terms, and didn't need to react to whatever anyone was doing (even on social media I've been getting more fed up recently, possibly because hysteria is returning to the news cycle, one way or another, and this never plays out well on social media).  Now it's an attempt to continue those strange listless days and incorporate the demands of work, sporadically, back in.  And it's difficult, especially when on my days off I expected to be called in, as happened last week, although it caused more anxiety at the end of a shift than waiting in the morning to receive word.  I talked briefly with a dad last week about this kind of uncertainty.  Even though he'd spent the last month working every day, he suggested knowing he was working every day was probably easier.

I got in one of the masks I'd ordered, and it was...not worth having ordered.  Again, I got masks before I went back to work, locally, Pat, so I no longer needed those masks, and thank goodness!  I know at least one of the two remaining masks arriving in the mail at some point will be equally worthless, because it was from the same company.  I didn't like the elastic ear loops anyway, so I'm glad one of them instantly detached.  How does anyone wear that style??? The local ones are all cloth and are not at all a bother to wear, except if you're breathing heavily and wearing glasses and...But what're the chances of that?  I figure it'll be worth having these worthless masks anyway, as a souvenir of the pandemic era.  I seriously doubt Americans are going to be wearing masks indefinitely, no matter how long it persists in the relative future.

I sent along two more stories to my WriteClubCo pal in Colorado, including one I wrote inspired by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett's Good Omens, the TV adaptation of which I was finally watching when Gaiman's Twitter account reminded me the book was now thirty years old.  On Twitter if you're a creator you constantly retweet every reference to your work, or so seems to be the case with everyone I follow.  Gaiman kept doing that until the unfortunate business of his split with Amanda Palmer.

Anyway, I finished my Marvel Girl: Like A Phoenix comics script project over at Sigild, and while Pat was not amused it accomplished everything I wanted it to.  (That's two projects in a row Pat didn't like.  Oh well.)  I didn't want to write a particularly long script project this time.  I came up with more material for Marvel Girl than I actually used (I only realized last night that I never revisited one particular character I introduced, and if one were to find a plot hole that character would be it, but then I realized, I said so little about them I could easily change what they were supposed to be and it wouldn't affect anything at all, or actually improve the whole thing to do so), a lot of character concepts that were originals but whose roles would only have diverted from the plot or needlessly extended it.  Anyway, it's always fun to work on something.

In other news, I might finally begin transcribing the manuscript for In the Land of Pangaea, which I wrote and printed out at work five or so years back and so one paper copy is all I have of it.  I learned of a contest a few days back but have no time to credibly write something new, so I might tackle the transcription project with one of Pangaea's three acts.  The first and third acts are the ones I'm constantly wondering about anyway, the second the one I've consistently been most pleased about, and the one I wrote most about here back then.  With Marvel Girl done and less interest in wasting time on social media, I think I'm ready to tackle more ambitious material at last.

Finally, the way this week worked out, I started with a three-day weekend and now ending it with one.  I hope to use that time wisely.  Hopping onto a wifi connection always helps, rare as it is these pandemic days.  Now to go leave some rare comments on other people's blogs...