Home Posts tagged "pandemic"

Tag: pandemic

Meandering in Not-My House

I am a good provider. I don’t know exactly when it became a big deal to me. Well, yes. I do. It was probably hanging around before the pandemic, but when COVID hit and nothing could be counted on, when I couldn’t even reliably find toilet paper—that brought it to the front. I needed to make sure I was providing for my family. And I have, I do. Probably more than I really should, but hey. We all have our hangups, and there are worse ones. For instance, Christmas dinner. Child 1 wanted ham. Child 2 cannot eat ham. Did I override child 1? Did I just get something small for child 2? No. No, dear reader. I got a ten pound ham, and an eight pound rib roast. For four people. And dessert? I love pumpkin pie. It’s necessary. If it’s available, I’m having it. In order to take it easy on us in a strange house and awkward kitchen, we decided we’d get dessert from Costco. But child did not want pumpkin pie. They wanted Costco’s wonderful tuxedo cake. Fine, then—I would get both. Only when I got there, all the tuxedo cakes were gone. So I got a cheesecake along with the pumpkin pie. And a chicken pot pie for Christmas Eve dinner. Can you say “leftovers?” One advantage of this house is that the fourth bedroom is part of a mother-in-law suite. So it has its own refrigerator. Thank goodness. It’s been such a plus that…

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Re-entry, Part 5

[CW: pandemic, mental health] It turns out there’s no clean way to exit a pandemic. Not for the world at large, and especially not for individuals who have been deeply affected for one reason or another, like me. So I’m still edging back into a new kind of normal life, still taking steps and hesitating to take other steps. I’m still wearing a mask on public transit and sometimes other places indoors, gradually getting looser (and going out to restaurants more). I have some travel coming up later this month and don’t want to do anything that might jeopardize it, but after that I plan to push myself gently to drop the mask more often. Though I have to say I don’t miss the constant colds and occasional flus…so I intend to keep wearing it on public transit. The travel I have planned will be my first contra dance trip, first non-family trip, and first cross-border travel since February 2020 (let’s just say we were very very lucky that time). It’s a road trip and then a week-long dance camp (!!!) at a summer camp venue in MA. The pandemic precautions for the camp are pretty robust, and people mostly stay on-site all week, so I felt safer going there than to a typical urban dance weekend with everyone eating in restaurants and such. Plus, it will satisfy my annual craving to get out of the city once summer hits. In the meantime, though, I’ve been gradually increasing my in-office…

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Writer’s Block Sucks

Man, I haven’t been this blocked in years. Usually, it’s when I’ve taken a bad turn in the plot somewhere, and I need to start over from that point and figure out what happened and how to fix it. Usually, I’ll use a few different methods such as Tarot cards, freewriting, brainstorming, and even playing various writerly “games” to get at my subconscious and the answer—or, at least the beginning of the answer and over the hump so I can start writing again and in the right direction. (The writerly “games” are courtesy of Holly Lisle’s Create a Plot Clinic – an amazing book that I highly recommend — and I do not make any money from this; I am just a huge fan of her fiction and nonfiction). However, I’ve had a fair amount of upheaval in the past few years. We’ve got the pandemic, of course. My ongoing sleep issues, which are getting better, but aren’t perfect yet. We’ve got my usual chronic illness stuff. My business, which is thriving, but also takes a lot of time and energy. I’m still working on that part. I think a lot of this is effecting my creativity. I wrote 6,000 words in 2021. Abysmal, but things were crap that year. Last year was much better at 20,000 words. Yay! I’d said at least double 6,000, and I’d made that and a bit more. This year? I’m at about 2,000. Granted, we’re only into April, so there’s time. And I’ve been…

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Christmas is in…how many days?!

Is it time to panic? I think it’s time to panic. To be fair, my family’s been hit pretty hard with some challenges this year. My husband just tested positive for COVID, despite all efforts toward being safe. Three years he dodged it. Only to be hit with it five days before Christmas. What terrible luck! The good news is that it seems to be a mild case, and he’s already feeling a bit better, so we may have a chance of having our holiday celebration on Sunday. However — and here’s the tough part — we’re worried about anyone else coming down with it in between. We are quarantining, distancing, masking, and doing everything we can to avoid catching it, but you know how that works — sometimes it’s just the luck of the draw. If anyone does get it, then it’s game over. We are already having a second celebration the Wednesday afterward to accomodate my sister, who can’t be with us for Christmas due to having to work, so we could, theoretically, have the whole thing that day — if everyone’s okay. But prep-wise, which my mom and I are doing (as usual, and in some considerable pain as we both have a genetic hip/back issue that’s acting up), we don’t know what to do yet. Do we make the food as if we’re having it Sunday? Or do we wait a bit? I already cleaned the bathroom (my usual job) because regardless, that needed doing. But…having…

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Re-entry, Part 4

KD is still off having adventures, so you get bonus Siri this month! [CW: pandemic, mental health] Last time I wrote a re-entry post, I’d just gotten back from visiting family in Montreal, and I wrote about how big a step it was for me and how exhausting I found it. Well, I’ve just had another Montreal visit (to see a very small human and their parents — my third bit of travel this year, all for family reasons). I’m pleased to report that it felt much more doable. My stamina for peopling was better — I did need frequent introvert-recharge breaks, but that’s always been true for me. I kept my mask on during most of the long train ride and on public transit, but not in a coffee shop or on busy sidewalks. (Also, the weather and the leaves were gorgeous, as has been the case every time I’ve visited in the fall. Highly recommend October in Montreal, especially if you can get there by taking the train.) I’ve started going to contra dances again — masks are still required, which makes them feel much safer, and it’s wonderful to be back with my dance community after so long. My spouse and I have been cautiously eating in restaurants now and then, as long as they’re mostly empty and/or there’s a lot of airflow from open windows. I still wear masks on public transit and mostly in stores. I’m in no hurry to risk going anywhere crowded —…

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Re-entry, Part 3

[CW: pandemic, mental health] Here in Toronto, the world hasn’t fully started up again yet. Lots of white-collar workers are still working from home at least some of the time, and downtown is still pretty empty. My contra dance group has just held its first dance since February 2020 (though I didn’t feel comfortable attending…maybe next time). And I’m tiptoeing back, one step at a time…but there are an awful lot of steps to take, somehow. (Case in point: this is my third re-entry post.) My spouse and I just got back from our first trip since summer 2020 — we took the train to Montreal to visit family for a week. It was wonderful to spend time with some of my immediate family members again, as well as hug a dear friend and pet a kitty and visit a bilingual indie SF&F bookstore. The travel and associated “new” experiences were less anxiety-inducing than I’d feared, especially since I had a really hard time with going back to the office pre-Omicron. My anxiety from earlier in the pandemic still flares up sometimes, but it’s back to being more manageable now. As long as I’m able to keep my mask on, I’m okay. (It gets harder as the hours stretch on or when I need to take the mask off in close quarters.) The part I found more exhausting was all the “peopling”, that is, spending time around people (other than my spouse, who doesn’t count). I’m an introvert and have…

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Writing Through a Pandemic, Two Years In

It’s been just over two years since we learned the phrase “social distancing”. A lot of the writers I know have been struggling. Turns out it’s hard to be creative when there’s bone-deep uncertainty washing away at your foundations. Related: the romantic myth of the writer in a garret. It’s also hard to be creative when you’re scrambling to fulfill basic needs like housing or taking care of your health and/or loved ones…even without a pandemic on top of that. (Here we give a nod to musicians, many of whom have been determinedly putting up livestreams and online concerts while their main source of income was cut off. Those have been a huge source of comfort to me, and I hope to the various musicians as well.) I’ve had plenty of creative struggles, too, during this time. I barely wrote at all in 2020, although I did manage two installments of my clockpunk serial (I’ll get back to that one day, I swear!) and a few thousand words during NaNoWriMo. During most of 2021, I could only write short pieces that all confronted the state of the world head-on, from pandemic-themed poetry to flash fiction. (We won’t talk about the short story I started in 2019, set at the Olympics during…a pandemic. Oops?) Then came NaNoWriMo 2021. I’ve talked before about how I made my secret stretch goal of 10,000 words on my unashamedly escapist feminist fantasy WIP. It felt really good. I had energy again for a few months.…

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The Mighty Vegetable

Like many people, my spouse and I have been rotating through various pandemic hobbies… Mind you, we’ve both been working full-time and dealing with pandemic exhaustion and a certain natural tendency towards inertia, so our hobby attempts have been pretty minimal. (Wordle is good for that.) No new side hustles or DIY remodelling here…though we did get this done: Now? It’s on to vegetables. See, cooking is something we do together, to decompress after work (or at lunchtime, while we’re lucky enough to both be working from home), to get out of our heads and away from our screens/keyboards, to spend time together, to do something hands-on and also delicious. And I’ve become passionate about eating local. A few months after the pandemic started, we signed up for a small grocery delivery service that partners with local farmers and other producers. (I first wrote about them here.) Between that and our vegetable garden, we’ve been doing a lot of seasonal eating. This winter we’ve eaten so many roasted carrots and parsnips and squash that, uh, one of us finally rebelled. To be honest, the other one (me) was getting bored of our go-to vegetables, too. So I’ve started adding one new-to-us locally grown vegetable to every biweekly order. (Full disclosure: In the alternate weeks, we get delivery from one of the big chains and buy some non-local produce.) It started with rutabaga/swede [the big yellow and purple root vegetable, not the smaller white and purple root vegetable–apparently there’s some overlap…

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Not Dying.

Earlier this month, I wrote up a post with my goals on it for the next 30 days in a forum I frequent and I literally wrote as one of my goals “To not die.” Seriously. The past, oh, year has been particularly rough, not just because of the pandemic, but because of severe sleep deprivation. Things just aren’t going well in dreamland, and I have been feeling like crap — and my overall functioning hasn’t been 100%. Obvi. But to add insult to injury, technology has, once again, given me the finger. My phone, which is a fairly new iPhone 12 Mini, began inexplicably not returning to my home network after I was out and about. We ended up running through a whopping 75% of our data plan and got a text about it — gee, thanks AT&T — and finally I figured out the problem. Because I was the culprit, and we’d had a power outage recently, and yes, I had been checking my email (for business purposes!), but not that much. Sheesh. So I figured out that after coming home from the vet and finding myself still on cellular and not on Wi-Fi. Many hours later. Ugh. An update fixed that. But not after struggling with it for weeks. Then my battery started draining extremely quickly. I mean, lightning fast. That’s still kind of happening? A bit. It’s improved after the update, but I still feel like it’s not in keeping with my usage. And my battery…

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2021 at Turtleduck Press: What Just Happened?

*looks around wildly* Was that a year? Or was it a millennium? Did anyone see where it went? Or are we still living in it? WILL WE EVER ESCAPE? *starts humming “Hotel California”* Regardless, the numbers on the virtual calendar seem to have changed, so here we are again, trying to take stock of, as Kit put it, a liminal year. In 2021, KD saved our necks and pulled off the astounding feat of not only writing a book during a pandemic (writers tend to be sensitive, anxious overthinkers, which does not lend itself to creativity during an ongoing crisis) but writing a good book during a pandemic. May the Best Ghost Win is a Halloween novel, but can be read any time of the year if you’re a lover of haunted houses, reality TV shows about ghosthunting, magical secrets, found family, and banter (all the banter!). We also kept writing shorter work: an ongoing ocean-based SF serial by Kit (starts here) a ghost-story serial by Erin (starts here) poetry by me (here and here) and Erin (here) and more! And as always, we continued our weekly blog posts, which are slightly easier than stories because we writers are used to processing our thoughts through words, and blog posts don’t require higher-order thinking skills or the careful coordination of right brain and left brain. (Usually.) Still, they do require some crafting, so we’re grateful to you for taking the time to read them. We made it through the deca-um, year.…

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