Birthday Boy

Today is Paul’s birthday, and while he generally prefers to be left out of my blog and social media posts, it bears mentioning. I’m not really sure what one can do for a pandemic shelter-in-place birthday, but I’ll probably stop at the grocery store and get cupcakes or something. We’ve also reached the point in our relationship–25 years this summer–where we really don’t bother with gifts much anymore, for either birthdays or Christmas or anniversaries; we generally don’t need anything much, as we always just go ahead and buy what we want or need when we want or need it, which makes it incredibly difficult when it comes to buying gifts for each other. I’ve always taken pride in how thoughtful my gifts are, but Paul always got me better gifts than I got him, almost from day one, so it’s also kind of nice to no longer feel that competitive impulse and stress anymore.

And yes, gifts can turn into competition, thank you very much. Anything can, if you have a competitive personality. It’s something I personally don’t like about myself, so I try not to indulge myself by giving into that particularly unattractive aspect of my personality anymore.

I’m also seeing a lot of quarantine-themed ebooks being released–primarily, the social media promotional posts about them–and I have to give credit where it’s due. Mid-March was basically when places started going on lockdown, and here we are, a mere six weeks later, seeing books inspired by the situation out there for the reading public. I guess we’re going to find out relatively soon if there’s an audience for these types of books and who that audience might be–leave it to romance to be the first genre to truly dig deeply into it. I myself started writing a quarantine noir story a few weeks ago–triggered by the realization that the construction site two lots over from my house was considered “essential” by the city–and of course, over the weekend I roughly sketched out the start of another Scotty book, set during the quarantine; which also begs the question of timing and so forth. If I start writing the book now–and were able to completely commit to it–the earliest I could conceivably have a strong first draft done would be by July, possibly mid-June; assuming I wouldn’t be able to stick to a schedule of writing a chapter a day. But even if I managed to get the entire thing written and polished and turned in to my publisher, and they rushed it through the process, the earliest it would be available to readers would be by December, and that’s really pushing it. And who knows where we might even be by then? It could already be over by then, or we could still be in the midst of it, and IMAGINE how sick everyone will be of the quarantine by then if we’re still in it. I know no one wants to think about the length of this thing, but it’s entirely possible we could still be dealing with it at Christmas.

And seriously, perish that fucking thought, right?

Nobody wants a pandemic Christmas.

I did manage to get the vast majority of my emails handled yesterday–I took the day off from the day job; I would have been working from home anyway, and yes, well aware I could have pretended to be working but I am not wired that way–and spent some serious time wading into them and answering the ones I’d been hoping might go away at some point; I also filed some of them away that didn’t require a response and deleted still others that were of no consequence. It was actually kind of lovely, and if I can manage, from hereon out, to stay on top of them, perhaps they will not build up to such a disgraceful and out of control number again. I shudder to even look this morning, to be perfectly honest. But I got both stories edited and revised, huzzah, and I even submitted one already; the Sherlock story will be sent in most likely on the day it’s actually due, or this Wednesday. I’m actually relatively pleased with it, to be honest. Is it a real Sherlock story? Perhaps, perhaps not. As I always say, I am not the best judge, and when it comes to Sherlock, what I don’t know would fill the Library of Congress and there would still be things left over.

And now I only have a few odds and ends to get finished–the Secret Project, for one, and I’d like to get some of these other stories out into the wild before I dive back into writing (or trying to write) my book. Madness, right?

Right.

And now, off to the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader.