Oof, 2021 started out well, didn't it?
I mean even with the spike in Covid-19 patients, and the continued lies spread by the President and his allies about the election, I had a feeling on New Year's Day that we'd escaped the awfulness of 2020. That we'd turned a corner, the case numbers would be coming down soon, President Biden would be in office in just a few weeks, and we could start the work of rebuilding everything the Republican Party has destroyed over the last four years.
Even the Georgia elections (!) gave me hope. My fellow citizens in GA turned out in such numbers that they put the two Dems over the top, putting an end to the use of the Senate as just a roadblock to legislation. Exciting times!
And then came the coup.
I know, I know. Attempted coup. Or riot. Maybe insurrection, if you're a journalist and you're feeling spicy.
And suddenly all of the mental habits I'd tried to shed from 2020 were back. Reflexively checking the news every five minutes. Doomscrolling on Twitter. Cognitive dissonance from looking out my window, seeing a bright January day in SoCal, and then hearing reports of shots fired in the Capitol building.
Texting friends living in DC, to see if they're okay during the madness.
I called my brand-new freshman-clean House Rep yesterday, not just to urge her to impeach Trump, but also to check in and see if they were safe.
What a country.
Difficult to think in such times. Difficult to write.
But so far, I've managed to do it. Each day, closed out Twitter, stared at the screen, reading over the previous days' work until I sink back into the story.
And it is sinking. It is an escape, for me. A needed one, in this case.
So I've pushed the novel up to 21,348 words. I'm almost done with the scenes I've been working on, patch-work-style. I move up and down the page, writing sections as they come to me, completely out of order. I leave visual gaps in-between them, extra newlines, to show that these are fragments. Then go back in and fill the gaps later, stitching together all the pieces until they read like a continuous whole.
It's not how I've written other novels. Not even how I usually write stories, either. But it's the only thing that's working for me, right now. So I'm using it.
Hope wherever you are, that you're safe, that you can still put yourself in the headspace to write, even if it's just a few words.
Hang in there.
