Actually--it was a more of a quasi-pandemic birthday. This challenging time is not quite over yet. Ken and I are still not dining INSIDE restaurants, but we do go away on overnight trips. This one involved taking our fully vaccinated bad selves to a tiny house resort--and it really did feel like the beginning of something new.
For almost two years, I had stopped writing fiction. My pandemic pivot was to engineer sound for the choir I sing in with my husband. It wasn't safe for us to sing together, so we sang into our cell phones, and I glued it all together with Logic Pro X on my computer. To say doing that painstaking work ate my life would be an understatement. But it kept the music program alive, and we're back in the church now, singing for a masked and vaxxed congregation--masked and vaxxed ourselves.
And I have time to write again.
I did keep writing poetry during those months, though, and I had some lovely things happen with that. Rattle Poets Respond took my 9/11 poem, "My Sister's Birthday Is The Day After 9/11." Autumn Sky Poetry Daily nominated my poem "On The Seven Canonical Hours" for Best of the Net. I had a pandemic poem I'm really proud of in Mobius, and published work in The Main Street Rag. I just had a poem accepted by Eclectica--a terrific publication that's been taking my work forever--and I have many of poems under consideration at other places. The first thing I did when the music load lightened up was submit, submit, submit!
Here's some big fun: Daria Voss, a romance writing friend, asked me for a poem in the voice of a shape-shifting lion for a new story of hers in an anthology called Rejected Mates. I was pleased to supply her with a sonnet. I've never done that before, although one of my own romances (my pen name for such naughty behavior is Aletta Thorne) has a sonnet of mine in it. Generally, I write free verse, but it's fun to play with form and to try something different.
So--speaking about the non-poetry part of my life... It's been tough getting those young adult novel writing muscles back into shape. I've given myself until the end of NaNoWriMo to finish Bean 5, which is the series' second book with a younger cast of characters. It's a pandemic story. High school senior Gracie Ingraham, our new time traveler, is dealing with a host of problems since she and her best friend Zoey are stuck in the same pandemic pod with Gracie's now-ex boyfriend. The only way out of quarantine is time travel to the past--but nobody knows if viruses time travel, too. I'm about halfway through a pretty solid first draft, and I keep combing back over it and sharpening character and plot. It's funny and surprisingly cozy. It'll be good. It has to be--I think it will close the Bean series, and that's a big responsibility. Here's my Amazon page, if you haven't read everything yet.
Like the rest of the world, I'm trying to figure out who I am now, and what my life is going to be like. I'm lucky. I managed to avoid being sick. So did my husband, thank God. And I'm a writer. Writing is the best tool I know for figuring stuff out. It takes time, though, and anyone who has stuck with me--THANK YOU. I'll be getting some kind of new collection of poems together soon; I have a couple of chapbooks circulating that will either get published as the short collections they are or will become a full-length book of poetry. I've got poems sitting in the inboxes of some good editors and publications. And I'm WRITING again, really writing. That's as good as the view off Thomas Cole's front porch. Stay tuned!