Why on earth is it that I’ve been hearing so much talk of writers drying up, slowing down, staring into writer’s block hell during this damn pandemic? A writer friend tells me she has. Writers on their podcasts say they have. And all the while I’m saying, not me – I have too, some, anyway.
I have just completed my first draft of Book III, a month later than planned. My pace slowed, I stared more, and I didn’t even write here or much at all on my FB page. What’s up with that? I honestly thought I wasn’t affected. But, apparently, we all were. We all are.
I think this is week 13 working remotely. Okay, I looked on a calendar; yes, 13. Three months. A quarter of a year. A quarter of a year away from the newsroom, away from my work mates. And yet we put out our papers, like clockwork. We run our websites. My biggest wish is the company does not decide, hey, you can do this remotely just fine – newsroom be gone!
That won’t happen. But it’s a small concern in the back of my mind. I started doing Google meetings with my team a couple of weeks ago. I’m in touch by text and messaging and email and phone calls. It’s so nice to see their faces, hear their voices. It’s nice to feel my voice when I write, but it hasn’t seemed as important as it did before all this. But I have picked the pace back up, some. My cover is being developed as I go into editing mode. And then, once it’s pubbed, I’ll focus on marketing. See what we can do with the series. And then – get into the next one.
I’m excited to begin my next series. It’s a noir-ish, first-person mystery series set in the 80s, pre-cellphone. Back when phone booths were important, there was no internet to speak of. Grunt work got our nails dirty. We were outside more, walked more, ran much more. I’ll get into that more later. For now? I think I’m back. Back to some semblance of me, if not back to whatever normal was. Got to. This new normal stinks. No, not for me. Time to get going.