Here’s to Surviving 2020 and Hoping for a Better 2021!

I wrote this first paragraph back in March, thinking that we’d be back to normal by August at the latest. Foolish me. In this time of sequestering, things are not much different for a writer. We tend to hunker down in our offices anyway. But now I tend to procrastinate more than usual because what else am I going to do with my time? My husband does the grocery shopping and someone comes in twice a month to clean our house. We can now Skype or Zoom or use some other version of tele-communicating with our friends and family and we can get carryout dinners when we don’t feel like cooking. The carryout dinner thing is really cool. We order from our house, drive to the restaurant, and honk the horn. Someone from the restaurant comes out with our food with surgical gloves on and we pay. Home we go to have a nice meal.

It’s now December and this horrible year is coming to an end. Like everyone else, we’ve read in the newspaper and seen on TV news that people are dying in the thousands, not just in the U.S., but around the world. And driving 40 minutes to and fro for a meal to eat at home, got to be old in a hurry.

The good news is that my handsome devil has rekindled his interest in cooking. Turns out he’s good at it. I’m a good cook, but having been cooking almost nightly for 60 years takes the joy out of it.

The pandemic has also reduced the incoming flow of new children’s books to read and review. Which means I haven’t had much reviewing grist for my blog mill. But, being a writer and a storyteller, now I just blog about whatever comes into my head.

I have been working on some short stories, including the one I mentioned in an earlier blog. I called that one “Trust,” because it has to do with the trust between a horse and rider. I have now sent the story off the Terrain magazine and hope to hear back from them in about four months. I also finished the sketch of the bad guy’s face.

Don’t judge me too harshly, this is my first ever attempt at drawing something that I think highly enough of to let see the light of day.

I also have had a short story accepted for the second edition of Next Chapter Literary Magazine. This story, entitled “Heart’s Convergence”, is about a teen boy rescuing his would-be girl friend from a raging river. I also had a story accepted for the first edition. The theme for the first edition of the magazine was Quarantine and the theme for this second one is Convergence because New Bern—where I live and the Next Chapter Books and Art is located, is on the convergence of the Neuse and Trent Rivers. https://www.newbern.com/the-next-chapter-books-art.html

The other good news is that we adopted a kitten two weeks ago. We named her Pandie. Can you guess why? Friends have guessed Pandora, Panda Bear and other such “pandie” words. My hint is to think about what the theme of this post is.

My hope is that 2021 will be a better year for all of us. And that we lose no more friends to this pandemic. (Everyone who has died was a friend to someone.)  Have a happy holiday season.