Tag: quarantine

Desert Angel

Remember how I felt a little off yesterday morning? Like my brain was tired but I felt rested? I also woke up congested, and took a Claritin–assuming that it was my sinuses and the weather, as it generally is this time of year. Yet after the Claritin cleared my head, I realized that the entire time I was writing yesterday morning’s entry, my nose kept running. This was, of course, unusual…and then I remembered someone at work had tested positive for COVID this week, and I needed to test myself again (I was negative Thursday afternoon). Guess what? Twenty-eight months into the pandemic, after being exposed literally every day at work for the last two years plus, after traveling to New York twice and going to three conferences….I finally, at long last, tested positive for COVID. I am not complaining; this seems to be a mild if unpleasant case–thank the Lord–and I can still smell and taste things, which is great. Mostly yesterday it was brain fog, not feeling great, and a lot of fatigue. By the early afternoon I was exhausted, and of course there’s the coughing and sinus drainage issue. My throat is a bit sore, my voice is an octave or two deeper than usual with a raspiness I usually like in a singer, and the brain fog isn’t great. It’s hard for me to focus–I tried reading yesterday to no avail–and so instead watched some reality television and played some historical documentaries while Scooter snored away contentedly in my lap most of the day. Paul got home and we watched the finale of Stranger Things–I was clearly mistaken as for it being the finale of the series; that was apparent when we reached the end of the episode and I just confirmed there’s a season 5 coming which is the end.

I have already zoned out twice writing this, or gone off on other tangents. I can see COVID brain is going to be a lot of fun. I am also feeling fatigued, which isn’t great. Most of the time it feels like a bad chest cold, or a lower level flu–I’ve yet to have a fever, praise be–where I mostly feel off and tired with the occasional dry cough that hurts the lungs a little bit. My eyes burn periodically from the fatigue–which is fine, I can live with that–but I literally spent most of yesterday drifting in and out of sleep. Was it the COVID, or was it Scooter using his sleep super-power to make me nod off here and there? I did sleep through the night mostly. I woke up at five again this morning but managed to go back to sleep, same as the night before–and got up shortly after seven. I am hoping today will simply be a milder repeat of yesterday, but I am definitely feeling loopy this morning. I have a lot of work to do, but I don’t know if my focus is going to be there in order for me to get things done; if yesterday was indicative of how my brain is going to work for the duration of this illness…not good. It could have been the DayQuil giving me medicine head (for the most part, the symptoms–the cough, the sore throat, the sinus drainage–was kept under control by DayQuil; alas, the DayQuil doesn’t help with fatigue and foggy brain) but I think I had foggy brain before I took it–when I was writing the entry yesterday morning I remember thinking my brain was fatigued.

Well, at least I don’t need to come up with excuses for not going to the gym this weekend.

It’s unpleasant, to be sure, but I consider myself lucky. I don’t need to go to the hospital and I am not having trouble breathing. If this is as bad as it is going to get, I can live with it for a few days. I am not entirely sure what about my day job–I notified them yesterday as soon as I could, but the compliance officer is out of the office until Tuesday, and I think the information shared with me by upper management (the department head is also on vacation and my supervisor’s last day was last Friday) indicates that I have to remain in quarantine until five days after my symptoms go away–which means if I wake up tomorrow without symptoms and it has passed, I can return this coming Friday, but other than that I am not sure. I’m not going to worry about it; there’s no point in doing so until I speak with the compliance officer on Tuesday.

And now? I am going to go lie down in my easy chair and see if I can focus enough to read. Worst case scenario? Sitting in my chair watching movies all day. I am also a bit dehydrated, too. Yay.

Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and will chat with you again tomorrow.

Academic

And just like that, it’s Saturday again, and huzzah to everyone for making it through another week. It’s another beautiful morning here in New Orleans; the sun already high and shining bright, the sky bright blue. I have errands to run and the gym to get to, and then I am planning on spending the rest of the day reading the manuscript and editing it. It will be a full day here in the Lost Apartment, and I relish getting back to work on my book. I hate being behind–this was the month I was supposed to spend getting caught up on everything else and finishing short stories so next month I could focus on Chlorine–but delays and things happen, as always, and sure, I am in that time of life where one is acutely aware of how quickly the sand is slipping through the hourglass–but I have also learned to not beat myself up over things I have little control over. I have no control over whether I sleep well, for example, and I have no control over my energy levels. I can do the best that I can, but I exert only so much control over any of those things.

Not allowing myself to get upset or stressed over things I cannot control is a lesson I am still learning, alas.

I often feel pulled in many directions (and am fully aware that this is probably the case for everyone; it seems as though everyone is having a rough time since the pandemic shut down the world last year–almost a full year ago; we closed down services at my day job on March 16th) with an inevitable amount of endless tasks for everything I am involved in, and usually every day I have an idea of what I want and/or need to get done with every day; and yet I never achieve those goals because inevitably something new pops in and/or pops up that requires attention of some sort from me, and this inevitably results in me not getting to everything that needs getting to, which then makes the to-do list seem even more endless, and on and on. Part of the problem I’ve been having since the pandemic altered everything is my inability to sit down and make an actual to-do list–because the to-do list would inevitably require me to get through all of my emails, and I sometimes have neither the strength nor the patience to work my way through them all. Right now in my primary in-box I have 56 unread emails–I’ve already deleted the trek–and there’s about another 100 or so in there I’ve already read that probably need a response, or an addition to my to-do list.

I also remembered last night, as Paul and I watched the LSU gymnastics team defeat Missouri, that I’ve never finished watching two shows I really liked and was enjoying that he didn’t–Perry Mason on HBO Max and Penny Dreadful: City of Angels on Showtime. So those, along with a rewatch binge of Megan Abbott’s Dare Me, should go on my list of things to watch while I am making condom packs–or when I am done with work for the day and Paul’s not home. I was quite delighted that he came home from the office so we could watch the gymnastics; I am not really seeing a lot of him these days and so those moments when he is home are more to be cherished and enjoyed because of their rarity. I am a Festival widow every March, really; but this year more so than any other I am really looking forward to the Festival being over.

I also would like to get back into reading some more…I’m not sure what in my brain is broken, but for some reason I can’t read anything other than the chapter of so of Gore Vidal’s Lincoln that I get through every morning. I think it’s a combination of all the things I have hanging over my head, quite frankly, that keeps me from reading–and as I’ve also said, watching television or a movie or even just Youtube videos is much more passive than active and requires little to no brain power. I did come up with a couple of great titles yesterday for short stories as I made my condom packs and continued watching videos about queer representation in films and television from the 1960’s through the 1990’s; there was a lovely little video yesterday of how the Queer Cruise videos guy was helped to come out by viewing The Rocky Horror Picture Show when he was in high school; and that got me thinking about my own history with Rocky Horror, and what it meant to me; perhaps yet another essay someday. Is that still shown as a midnight movie? I would imagine not, given the pandemic and the fact that’s been on television and available to purchase on tape or download now for decades; I remember thinking the first time it aired on television well, that’s the end of that and it honestly did feel like the end of an era. I imagine many freaks and weirdos and queer kids no longer need something like The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a gateway to their own worlds and the possibilities that life holds for them…there’s more and more queer rep all the time, in books, movies, plays, and television; although I would imagine in more repressive parts of the country Rocky Horror would still be a revelation.

And now I am thinking about writing a short story or a book about a murder built around a midnight showing of the movie. Oy, it really never ends…

I also like this other idea for a story I came up with yesterday: “The Rites of False Spring.” I scribbled down a lot of notes about that one.

And on that note, the spice won’t mine itself, so I should probably head on into the mines.

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.

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A Different Point of View

Several nasty storm systems passed through last evening–loud and long claps of thunder, high winds, and a downpour. It was lovely–as was the drop in temperature–and there’s few things I love more than being safe and cozy inside while there’s a downpour outside.  It’s still kind of gray and hazy outside this morning, which is nice, and I am sure the weather helped me sleep better last night. I didn’t sleep well on Friday, and wound up sleeping later than I’d wanted (the same thing happened this morning as well but I slept better last night) and the day wound up a wash. I was tired and suffering from burn out, I think, and having to go deal with the grocery store was a bit much. The grocery store is an odious chore under the best of circumstances, and under quarantine it’s even worse. For one thing, I feel guilty for being out in a public space, and for another, I feel so bad for the underpaid staff who are out there risking their lives and their health so that we can buy groceries. I try to be as helpful and as polite as I possibly can, but I don’t blame them in the least for resenting their customers. My job is also deemed essential, so outside of the shifts in how everything from grocery shopping and so forth have been altered, my life hasn’t really changed that much. I still get up every day and go to work. I may not be able to go to the gym anymore (for the duration), and I may go to the grocery store less…but my life has only changed in the times I work, more than anything else, and what I do at work. I don’t resent our clients–but I would imagine, if I were a grocery store employee, I’d resent the hell out of the customers.

Yesterday was, as I said, a wash. I woke up feeling tired and out of sorts, with very low energy, and making groceries is even more draining and exhausting than it usually is. I had very little creative energy yesterday morning, and after making groceries, I did some cleaning and retired to my easy chair. Paul got us lunch from the Please U Cafe–shrimp po’boys and homemade onion rings–as a treat, and of course, I couldn’t finish the onion rings and was stuffed, not needing dinner. I was going to do some reading, but Paul and I wound up watching the rest of the first season of My Life is Murder, which I greatly enjoyed, and then we moved on to the Netflix continuation of Tales of the City, which is very well done; much better than the originals, to be honest. We only have two episodes left, and we stayed up later than we should have watching. I’m hoping to start rereading Scott Heim’s Mysterious Skin today, if I have time. Since I took yesterday off to recharge my batteries, I have to get a lot done today. I need to get that first draft of the Sherlock story finished; I need to get another story edited; and I am doing a live ZOOM panel discussion tonight for Bold Strokes Books weekend book-a-thon, which is going to be interesting. I’m not really a fan of the whole ZOOM thing, to be honest–I hate seeing myself on screen, and I really hate the sound of my own voice–so these things are like Kryptonite for me. But in this brave  new world, I need to start doing these things…which also kind of terrify me. I’m always afraid, like book signings, that no one will click to watch or no one will show up if I do a live reading on-line or anything like that. And I am so highly critical of myself…yeah, I’m not sure I want to open that door or not.

But how does one sell books in the time of quarantine? Post-quarantine? Who knows?

I am going to make chili in the slow cooker today; it’s been awhile and it will help clear my head to get writing this afternoon–there’s nothing like doing something that doesn’t require full concentration (like chopping peppers and rinsing beans and dicing up a chicken) that opens the floodgates to my creativity. I just have to make sure that I channel that creativity properly; the last thing in the world I need to do is come up with ideas for new stories–because I’ll never write all the ideas I already have as there will never be enough time in my life for me to write everything I want to write. So, once I finish this I am going to try to get the kitchen organized and cleaned up while I get the chili started, and then I’m going to get cleaned up before sitting down to do some serious writing this afternoon, and then hopefully I’ll have some time to read before it’s time for the panel.

I’m also very conscious of the way time is slipping through my fingers. I had hoped to write several books this year, and here it is past mid-April already without a single novel manuscript finished. A lot of it has to do with my usual procrastination and laziness, plus the emotional unbalance triggered by a global pandemic, creative ADHD, and the occasional bout with PTSD. I honestly don’t want to think about how many short stories I’ve started writing since the year (and haven’t finished); that goes along with the other story fragments I have started over the last two years or so. Some of them are great ideas, and I think could really turn into something; others I am not so sure about. But my goal for the rest of April is to get these stories due by the end of the month finished, and then try to get some of the others done as well by May 1st. I intend to spend May whipping Bury Me in Shadows into place so i can get it turned in; spend June doing the same to the Kansas book, and then spend July writing the first draft of Chlorine, before moving on to the next Scotty book. This is, needless to say, a very ambitious writing schedule; one that I most likely will be unable to keep. But it’s always good to plan ahead, and be more ambitious than you think you’ll be able to go with (although I am very well aware that an overly ambitious schedule presents the potentiality of setting one’s self up to fail, which can trigger another downward spiral in addition to awakening that horrible voice in my head) because even if you can’t keep up with it, you should still be able to get a lot finished. And there are other distractions along the way–can never forget that I’m the Executive Vice President of Mystery Writers of America, and that inevitably cuts into my writing time as well.

But on that note, tis time to get back to the spice mines and start getting some things done around here–and to that end, I am going to do my stretching, and get cleaned up.

Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader.

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