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.)