A Journal of the Pandemic #23

Well, I don’t know about you, but at this point it’s no longer a question: There are people who talk about COVID-19 numbers being purposely inflated, but at my workplace there has been a consistent, concerted effort to downplay infections.

Is this common? For everything that’s been said about the pandemic, I personally have seen very little chatter about what it’s like to actually experience it. There has certainly been plenty of talk about the effects on the job market, schooling, sports, but not much on what people have experienced in their everyday lives. Maybe glimpses into isolation, but, well, I don’t know. That’s a large part of why I’ve been writing this series. I wanted to document my thoughts along the way. This is as significant a moment in history as I have yet lived through, something that has extended to very close to a year at this point, and of course whatever the effects of vaccine rollout, will linger for probably much of 2021 at least.

The stimulus money, for me, has been a bonus. The second installment I decided to use in part to read comics, DC’s Future State slate, which is a repurposing of what was originally intended to be another line-wide revamp, akin to the Silver Age, a new generation of heroes inhabiting familiar roles. So far I’ve really enjoyed it. One month down, one to go. I’ve been ordering them from Midtown. I panicked this past week because I ran into a roadblock for a release for the first time. I thought speculators had spoiled the second issue of a Teen Titans story featuring the in-continuity debut of Red X, a character previously featured in the cartoons. But then it became available soon enough, and I made Midtown even happier by ordering even more...

I joined the first decade of the new millennium a few weeks back by actually getting a Blu-ray player.  By the end of this decade I might even have a Netflix account! 

My sister just retired from the Air Force after twenty years. The pandemic prevented me from even considering attending the ceremony (which I had been looking forward to ever since my brother-in-law’s). Well. She’s a full-time mom now, about six months into the life of her son (the Burrito’s baby brother). I sent her a card in which I tried to express how proud I am of everything she accomplished in her career.

The Super Bowl is in town! I’m not attending, and won’t really explore the attractions, but obviously this is not a normal Super Bowl and as such the economic and visitor rush is not going to happen, and really, the small sampling of neighborhoods I took this morning does not reveal an abundance of excitement (maybe elsewhere in town the Gasparilla faithful decked themselves out for this, too). At work there were a lot of jerseys. I made a deal with a coworker I can’t possibly lose concerning the outcome (because win or lose Tom Brady already makes further history just by being in the game). 

But it’s been nice to hear about all the healthcare workers getting tickets. Actual tickets were priced to highly discourage attendance, although there will be some of that, and another coworker will be moonlighting, so I will know someone there. As they say round here, “Raise the flag.”

I actually have been writing recently. This year will be a little interesting in at least one regard: I’ve got a project where I will write a new chapter once a month. Thankfully, before last month was over I even figured out how to write the thing. And of course Danab Cycle business, in a variety of ways, including a short story collection. I did a lot of small projects last year. This year the goal is larger scope. One being the first full-length manuscript in about seven years. My work schedule is (probably) changing in a few weeks. It might mean less reading. But if so, then more writing. Or maybe balancing both. 

We’ll see!

Danab Cycle

Recently I have been having one breakthrough after another with Collider, which is part of what here I’ve been calling the Space Corps books, but perhaps will be known as the Danab Cycle, so I’m transitioning that label with this post.

This is a story, Collider specifically and Danab Cycle in general, that I have been working on for a quarter century. I was a kid spitballing a version of Star Trek when it began, but over the years the idea has grown in sophistication and nowhere was it more necessary than in fleshing out what exactly Collider itself is supposed to be. There was no coherent story originally, but funny enough there was a broad arc that needed to be supported, and as I saw that more and more clearly, I better understood what the book itself should look like.

Writing is a bit like excavation, or even the old anecdote of Michelangelo freeing an existing statue from stone. It’s not always clear what the story is. Sometimes it comes to you in little thunderstrikes. You realize this is exactly what it is. Hopefully on the other end, to the reader, this is how it feels, that this was the best way to do it. (As a reader, too, this is how I approach it, and certainly, there will always be interpretations and opinions, although some are better than others, just as in the storytelling itself.)

So these are the kinds of ideas I’ve had recently; “Why didn’t I see that before???” Characters, sometimes minor ones, sometimes the most important ones, finally hitting their marks. 

And I think it’s getting closer to being ready to be written. 

IWSG: This time it’s kind of permanent...

I’ve been a part of the Insecure Writers Support Group off and on for years. I’ve taken breaks, I got dropped from the rolls, found my way back on. Well, this is where we say goodbye.

Last fall I experienced a dramatic turn in my writing career. I submitted a story to an IWSG contest, and that was literally the last thing I ever did on that computer. I made my peace with losing things, and then moved on.

It’s just, I guess I wasn’t quite done with that process.

I honestly don’t really get how the IWSG is supposed to work. I get that it’s a blogging community like any other I’ve encountered. You theoretically get what you give. And I stopped visiting a lot of blogs a number of years ago. I get that it blogs once a month every month, and the point is to give encouragement to other members. 

I guess I kind of reached the point where it no longer made sense. I am not the kind of reader who will read books because it will make an author feel better. I read books I think will give me a transcendent experience. I read a lot of books, and I don’t always prove my choices right. 

I did find out that books blogging friends write are not necessarily what I want to read. They have different goals. So I stopped pursuing that a number of years ago.

And as far as I can tell, that’s the opposite of what communities like this one are about. I can’t tell for certain, but a lot of the IWSG is people who will read and/or support anything so long as they know the author. I can’t do that. The material always comes first for me. Well, unless I have already read the author and loved, or at least enjoyed, the results.

I may be missing out big time. There may be writers in the IWSG that would absolutely be up my alley. If there are I honestly have no idea. And that’s part of the problem. When everyone gets a glowing endorsement for everything it’s hard to know where the quality really is.

So I don’t see a point to continue on with the group. I’m not really the kind of writer who needs general encouragement. If someone has something specific and useful to say about my writing, that’s something. But I have had no one in the group appear at all interested in my actual writing. 

That’s kind of what I want if I am going to have connections in a writing community, or someone who is willing to work with me, help me specifically find specific resources that would help me. Not have resources available. Someone who took an active interest. In me.

That’s what really makes me insecure as a writer, the crushing loneliness, the isolation I have always experienced, and that the IWSG never really changed.

The impetus for this decision is absolutely petty. I admit that. I lost a contest. Ten writers at least were deemed to be demonstrably better than me. In hindsight I don’t even know why a group about insecurity is actively giving its membership more reasons to be insecure. That’s bush league. Someone somewhere has time to at least give feedback, to at least acknowledge members that contributed, to give them encouragement. Not make them wait months until the file and the cover were already finalized. 

So I will continue my writing journey. Rejection is a part of the job. But it doesn’t need to come from the people who are supposed to be there to give you encouragement.

Goodbye, IWSG.

IWSG January 2021

Hey Insecure Writers Support Group,

It’s always going to be easy to feel insecure when your own group continuously rejects you.

Well, just lost at another of your contests. 

Feeling insecure. 

T-Shirt Guy

That’s a picture from a year and a half ago, or maybe a lifetime ago, I don’t know. Anyway, it’s also a picture of me, and it’s also a picture of my niece (the Burrito). 

It’s also a picture of one of the many t-shirts my sister (the Burrito’s mom) has gotten me for Christmas over the years.

I feel like an idiot for realizing that this has in fact been a tradition of hers, and having only just realized it a few minutes ago. Yesterday I got her somewhat belated Christmas present in the mail. It was of course another t-shirt (Chateau Picard!). And a few minutes ago I think I also finally realized why my sister has had this tradition:

I’m a t-shirt guy. I mean, it’s not unusual to wear t-shirts. It’s not even unusual to have t-shirts with pop culture references. 

It may be unusual to keep restocking the wardrobe with new ones, year after year, decade after decade. And to have a sizable, rotating collection worn daily. Again, I am not wholly unique in this regard. I get that. But I think in my family this is one of the many things I pursue differently than the rest of us.

And my sister noticed.

And so pretty much without fail, she’s been helping me add to the collection at Christmas. Hey, I added to it last year myself, quite happily, with a Buccaneers Tom Brady t-shirt. I sent a picture of it around to the family. We’re New England folk. Everyone else might think the past twenty years were a fluke stoked by cheating, but for us (okay, some of us are traitors) Tom Grady is unquestionably great, and yeah, I was pretty pleased that when he finally left the Patriots, he ended up here in Tampa.

So yeah, I’ve got a lot of t-shirts, celebrating various things. I’ve got one I just wore the other day, from a party I attended in 2007 the same day the last Harry Potter was released, the same day I got copies of my first book. I’ve got a t-shirt celebrating Moxie, which is an old timey soft drink my hometown adopted. I’ve got one featuring Gasparilla, the Tampa pirate festival. Some people wear the same treasured t-shirt memory endlessly. Me, I’ve got dozens of those.

Sometimes, sadly, the collar frays. I have to concede to stop wearing it. I keep those, too, of course, add them to my “archives.”

What can I say? I’m a t-shirt guy. And thank you, Burrito’s mom, for being a part of that.

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.