So plague-blogging is a thing now!
I’ve gotta be honest with y’all, being shut up in the house is not doing as much for my productivity as I would have hoped. Previously I had been going to the library to get my work done, and, well, the libraries are all closed. Along with everything else. It turns out a change of scenery is one of those load-bearing things that helps put me into work mode just as much as pen and paper and reliable audio do, and without it, I get a little — how do you say — antsy. And not the good kind of oh-man-gotta-write antsy, the I-need-to-get-outta-here kind.
Crochet is very good for combatting the antsiness and keeping my hands busy (and watching new-to-me Austen movies at the same time, hello Persuasion and Emma, 1995-6 was a very good time for Austen yes indeed), but very bad for my overall word count. We’re over the 15,000 word mark on the draft now, but less than 5k written over the course of 10 days is not what I call a good sign. Of course a small amount of writing is better than no writing at all, but still.
Well …
Reader, I was trying to avoid marathon sprints, but life in the time of corona means I can go ahead and subject my eyeballs to the blowtorch and write 10,000 words a day and not have to worry about being an utter recluse (quarantine means social distancing is a GOOD thing!) or about being utterly useless afterwards.
And hey, once I finish the draft, then I’m perfectly justified in crocheting my little heart out until my eyeballs recover. Then editing, and publishing the darn thing.
Maybe I’ll even dip my toes into audiobooks. Hey, I’ve got the time for it now.
According to a whole bunch of people on Twitter (and any number of articles written in the last few days; apparently Twitter is a primary source now) Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a plague. Well, I’m no Bill Shakes, I know that for sure. But I can see how madness being a factor makes a whole lot of sense; same as witches talking about regicide in Macbeth makes sense when you take into account King James’s fascination with witches and his brush with an assassination attempt. Well, maybe my main character being shut in a tomb for safekeeping is a bit too on-the-nose for COVID-19 … but in my defense, the thing she’s hiding from isn’t a virus, just other people.
Talk about social distancing.