What a long, strange year it’s been

I’ve been meaning to write a writing-related post for, oh…. since the Before Times. But part of what has made even that so difficult is the same thing that has made it hard to do anything creative as the COVID-19 pandemic hits different parts of the world: worry.

I don’t find I have been worrying all the time about the coronavirus, but living in a state of taking precautions, shifting all kinds of routines and daily life, and not being able to make long-term plans (and cancelling many plans already on the books), makes it hard to, say, write a novel.

So… I picked necessary but not-exhausting tasks.

In the spring, I read aloud the MS for my Icelandic-folkore-collides-with-Canadian-real-estate-practices novel, A Taste of Home, marking line edits and corrections. That took a few weeks. Then I went through the MS and made all the changes. Another few days. In May, I dusted off the Excel spreadsheet of people I planned to query on it, and started working up query letters.

Also, since finishing the latest round of submissions for my 1980s heavy metal werewolf novel Bark at the Moon, I was fortunate enough to get feedback from awesome critique partners Angélique Jamail and Sarah Warburton. Taking their suggestions to heart, I turned my attention to tweaking and making a few big shifts to that MS.

And, since #PitMad was coming up in June, I worked on some new Twitter pitches… for both novels! Why not? Seriously, why not. It was more complete-able than jumping back into my current WIP, the haunted-threatre novel Venue 13, which had stalled months ago when I put all my attention into substantive rewrites for A Taste of Home.

Over the summer, thanks to the Twitter recommendation of Delilah Dawson, I picked up Lisa Cron’s Story Genius. As someone who likes to write big ideas, and work out plot, but often falls down in the (many) early drafts on characterization, I really, really want to try her approach as I overhauled Venue 13. I ended up abandoning the 90-odd pages I’d already written, and started over from scratch.

Following the approach recommended in Story Genius, it’s taken me much longer than usual to get to a point where I’m writing the draft of the novel. But I don’t know whether that’s owing to trying a new method, or the background stress of the whole year. I’ll probably blog about what it’s like for me to take an approach that sees you figuring out major character motivations and conflicts before you start drafting, rather than my usual method of starting to figure that out after three or four drafts.

Also during the summer, I worked on a cover for Bark at the Moon so I could submit it to an online reading platform. It was a lot of fun to bust out my pen and ink for the first time in years and dust off some old Photoshop skills! But alas, getting things just right on the cover took me longer than I thought, and I missed the submission window. Maybe I’ll blog about that later, too, and show off the cover. I’m happy with the way it turned out.

Currently I’m still querying and submitting A Taste of Home, and writing the first draft of Venue 13. I wish I’d gotten more writing done this year — but I’m not complaining. The pandemic has messed up everyone’s plans, and tragically so for far too many.

I suspect all of the above (writing-wise) is a consequence of having just enough energy and attention-span bandwidth to work on small, concrete tasks, but not necessarily enough for huge, open-ended tasks like writing the first draft of a novel.

I will not get into all the other (good, useful, non-writing) projects I got into over the past year — those were mostly for my mental health in being able to keep “busy” without dwelling on the pandemic 24/7. But hey, now I can make and can jam, build raised garden beds, and er, clean the basement (just kidding, the basement never stays clean — that’s more a Sysiphean task that borders on open-ended).

In Manitoba, it we had a relatively mild first wave of COVID-19, but a much more serious second wave. And even in our province, which initially saw fewer cases and fewer deaths from the coronavirus than other jurisdictions, there have been many job losses and a lot of economic hardship. In that context, I found it very hard to focus and start working on a new novel.

So who knows? I count myself lucky to have escaped some of the worst effects of the pandemic, and I salute all those writers out there who were able to get anything done. With any luck, the next year will be better for all of us.