Still Writing

Last time I posted about anything other than books, I noted that I'd fallen into the pattern of providing a writing/life update every two months. Naturally, that meant it was time to deviate, so here I am three months later with another update.

Things are okay, at a personal level. The current and impending stages of the pandemic terrify me, but I'm incredibly fortunate that my household can still mostly isolate at home. We're also lucky that being here together all the time doesn't bother any of us too much, too often. It's been a bizarre year for sure, not getting to hang out with local friends aside from very occasional outdoor visits, but I didn't have the most hopping social life before this. Now I tend to have more engagements, between reconnecting with far-away friends and attending a lot of virtual author events that I wouldn't have been able to get to in person.

It's a huge relief to be on the far side of the election. (Remember the election? We're still in the same month as the election.) Between the Biden/Harris win and all the promising vaccine news, I'm feeling hope for the future again. That future is still some long, slow months away, but we'll get there.

After an extended stretch of heat and smoke, the Bay Area shifted into pleasant autumn weather this month, with mild temperatures (highs in the low 60s, generally), blue skies, and better air. Our leaves have changed colors for the fall, and I've enjoyed taking pictures on my daily walks.

And I'm writing! Or rather, I'm revising, which anyone who follows this blog will know is always an endless process for me. I'm now wrapping up the third draft of that short story I wrote back in August. My progress has been (as usual) extremely slow, and I'm often not able to focus the way I want. But at the beginning of September, I committed to at least looking at my document every day, even just to reread a sentence or type a few words, and that's made a big difference for me in getting back into the story whenever I have time to work. My assessment of the story at this point was going to be "I think it's pretty good," except that's exactly what I said about it back in August, so I'll raise that to "It's even better now!"

I wish you all for things to be better, and then better still. Stay safe.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Literary Hub, Lincoln Michel offers a way to look at realist and science fiction literature as more than a binary: "Take Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde’s play is 'realism' in the narrow sense of taking place in our world—gravity is the same, there are no dragons or vampires, etc.—yet the plot revolves around a series of intentionally absurd coincidences and the characters speak in polished bon mots. Wilde, who hated the trend toward realism, was certainly not attempting to recreate reality. But there's little in common between Lady Bracknell and a Balrog."