If you don’t know the Big Block of Cheese Day reference, then you haven’t watched enough episodes of “The West Wing.” Quick description: There are some posts here on the blog when I have different things on my mind at once, so instead of deciding on one as a topic, I put together some shorter posts inside one longer one. I’m also tagging this as part of the overall pandemic narrative as well, since each topic is somehow related to Covid-19 and its aftermath. Because what isn’t these days?
THE ACTUAL PANDEMIC NARRATIVE PART
There are more than 9 million Covid-19 cases in the United States. By the time you read this, there will probably be 230,000 deaths. Our President is a liar, and anyone who believes him when he says we’re turning the corner and the military will be able to delivery 70 bajillion doses of the vaccine in time for Thanksgiving leftovers is too naive for words.
Since the last time I updated the narrative, Covid caught up with my family and knocked back one of my blood relatives pretty damned hard. He’s doing a lot better now, thank God, and hopefully will be done with all of it much sooner than later. It was maddening when he was in the thick of struggling with it, and all my family could do was wait and see what happened. The last I heard was he was hoping to return to work in a couple days. Fingers crossed he does, and that’s the end of it for him.
Minnesota is on fire. We’re currently experiencing thousands of new cases daily, which of course means more hospital beds are occupied, and tragically more people are dying. None of this seems to have any impact on the people who have succumbed to their Pandemic Fatigue or their Covid Anger, or the cultists who still feel this is a hoax and “refuse to live in fear.” Anyone out there walking around feeling emboldened by the armor of their ignorance who wants to blather on about how Covid is a hoax? Acting with caution and living in fear are very different. I hope things aren’t going to catch up with you and show you how seriously you should have taken this. Sadly, I think that will inevitably be the case with some. I just hope getting to watch your kid take a few hikes during his senior year of high school football will have been worth it.
SHIFTING LEARNING MODELS DURING THE PANDEMIC AGE
The state and the school districts have said since back in the summer that it was likely the learning models being implemented would change throughout the school year, depending on the spread or containment of the virus. Four weeks ago, our district was considering returning the hybrid students to a full-time model. Two weeks ago, they saw that couldn’t happen. Two weeks after that, or now, they’re arranging for the secondary students to begin a full distance learning model while the elementary students remain in a hybrid. Elementary could potentially change to distance learning as well, provided the Covid data being monitored locally ever necessitates such a change.
Predictably, there are many people and families who agree with more careful learning models, as well as many who feel the amount of implemented caution is too extreme. Somehow (45) this has been bastardized into being a political issue. This is leading to a lot of raging comment threads on social media, many of which assign teachers as the most identifiable face of the school system and freely bash away at them (us) as if they’re (we’re) the ones making these decisions, instead of the elected officials and district administrators following the science. It’s really unfortunate that our community is struggling so much to come together at a time like this to and support each other through the unprecedented challenges we’re all experiencing. I would like to suggest to anyone who may someday invent a time machine that your best move would be to travel back to Harvard around the turn of the century, and convince Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend not to dump him. Then maybe social media will never have a pathway of coming into being, and everyone in the world will be happier and get along better for it.
NANOWRIMO 2020, OR RAGING AGAINST THE EMPTY
I’m just going to say it: I’m coming off a bad week. Why was it bad? I wish I knew. There was no starting point when things went from their standard neutral to bad, but it sure happened. There wasn’t a lot of smiling or laughing going on, at least outside of the time I was with my students. Sleep was more of an interruption in the darkness than an escape, when it even came. Emotions ebb and flow, however. Yesterday was net positive, and today feels nice and normal. Bad days come, sometimes stretches of them, but they also balance out. Plus there are things people can do to fight back the negative. Those things are probably different for each of us, and I feel like I have a basic understanding of what a few of my things are. One of them is definitely reading a good book. Here’s the one I picked:
It took one book for Justin Cronin to become one of my favorite authors. I met him at a book signing in 2012 for his novel THE TWELVE, which is the second novel in the trilogy that started with THE PASSAGE, a horror novel that, coincidentally, began as a story about a pandemic that started with a bat and decimated the population. As he signed my book, I mentioned I was a teacher hoping to be an author someday. He said he’d started out the same way, which of course I already knew.
Four years later when CITY OF MIRRORS came out, I was back for another book signing, but this time with a different story to share. Instead of buying my copy of the book at the signing, I brought my own, which my agent had given me as a birthday present a few weeks earlier after she somehow managed to score a copy of it before it had even been released. You might think that shouldn’t be any great trick for someone in the publishing industry, but for a high profile book like this was at the time, it was no small feat. I was absolutely blown away. When it was my turn in the book signing line, I told Cronin how things had changed for me since his last signing. He shook my hand, congratulated me, and asked what I was working on. Then he wrote this with his signature.
I know that reading a good book does something to my brain, like flipping a switch that primes it to narrate. I recently decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month again this year, so it seemed like a good opportunity to start reading a good long book and tap into that priming action. I picked CITY OF MIRRORS because he’s a really good writer, I’ve only read it one time, it contains a section that I would argue is one of the best love stories ever committed to paper, and above all it’s a horror story, which is what I’m going to be trying to write next month. I’m putting aside the middle grade work for a shot at adult fiction, and specifically horror. I’ve been looking for a good horror story to tell for a while now. When I started writing for real in college I wrote horror almost exclusively, but I still haven’t done it as a full-length novel, at least in adult fiction. I’ve had a number of conversations with my agent over the past year about taking on a project like this, and decided I had to go forward with it after she gave the concept her blessing.
I can’t say I’m really excited about it, though. I’m very excited about the story, but not so much diving into another round of writing a whole damn book in a month. First of all, it won’t be a whole book: Nanowrimo only requires 50,000 words in 30 days, and my draft should be aiming for something closer to 80,000-90,000 before editing, which would be really taxing to do in 30 days. I still win if I hit the 50k mark, and I will win at this because I won’t allow myself not to, but I’m okay with finishing the rest of the story in December.
See, I realized earlier this month that I feel better when I’m creating something. I finished revising a middle grade novel a few weeks ago, and noticed that the darkest part of October started soon after I was done with that, and continued to get more pronounced the longer I sat on the sidelines. Writing lesson plans helped, believe it or not, because there’s a certain amount of creativity that goes into that. Everyone has their own ways of proactively fighting whatever depression or anxiety they might be experiencing during these crazy pandemic days. I think my fight has to do with reading and writing, between keeping my head occupied, filling me with whatever collection of hormones are dumped into my system when the reading ignites that narrative response, and the feeling that follows the achievement that comes from writing something that brings me a sense of accomplishment. I don’t know if it’s necessarily a good thing that I seem to need that so much, but it’s probably good that I recognize it.
Okay. That’s enough for now. Since I can’t start working on the new book until tomorrow, I’m going to go do some reading instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment