Tag Archives: COVID

Goodbye 2022, hello 2023

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Happy New Year!

I’m not going to use this post to hate on 2022. After all, it could have been 2020 or 2021. If you weren’t in Ukraine or otherwise afflicted by tragedy, things generally got better: the world reopened, which was at least good for those without crappy immune systems in the household.

I taught Freshman English again, which was fun, although the pandemic has clearly left its mark on students. They faded away in greater numbers than usual, which a colleague told me was the new normal. Those who remained were mostly lovely and talented, though. The pandemic also left its mark on me, since I came down with COVID twice, but I can’t say I’m any the worse for it (well, actually, I’m still leery of large groups or singing in choir).

I’d gotten pretty good about the newsletter and this blog for a while, but that went to hell.  I also let teaching distract me from the current draft of PRIDE & PRECARITY, which I’ve decided needs a little more work on the ending.

In terms of literature, this was mostly just a big reading year for me. Here’s what I say on Goodreads about the 150 books I reviewed. If they have five stars I thoroughly enjoyed them. If they have no stars I probably also enjoyed them, just didn’t feel they were literally “awesome.”

Okay, yes, there are also a couple for which I put up what amounts to short warnings, because I thought they were cynically packaged products designed to trick readers out of their money, but it’s not politic to trash a book by literally saying that when you’re an author. So you’ll have to read between the lines on those. God knows plenty of other authors either actually liked them or were willing to lie through their teeth to claim they did. (That’s one of the unspoken “team player” requirements of traditional publishing. Yuck.)

But to focus on the positive: there are some recent reads I thoroughly recommend: THE DEAD ROMANTICS and THE UNDERTAKING OF HART AND MERCY were both delightful if you enjoy witty romances with fantasy elements. SEARCH was the most enjoyable literary novel I’ve read since the last post here, but also very funny and very good, written like a memoir of a woman’s experience on the search committee of her Unitarian church. I think it’s absolutely brilliant, but I suppose you may need to be someone who has served on nonprofit boards or committees or attended a church to fully appreciate its delicious dissection of the politics involved. And THIS STORY WILL CHANGE was a wonderful, thoughtful memoir of marriage and divorce.

In terms of marketing, this year I tried TikTok for posting video reviews of other books. I then quickly tired of posting video reviews of other books. Maybe I’ll finally try to do some TikToks about my own books. At any rate, this year one goal is to actually reread my own backlist and see what I can pull out of it for marketing on TikTok or otherwise.

I started going “wide” with the books, as noted a couple of posts back, but made pathetic progress. Ingram apparently never bothered to continue with the paperback I thought they were transferring from Amazon. I’ve decided to move ahead through a different channel.

In case you didn’t see it, I also had a post on five favorite deliciously wry novels with Christian themes at shepherd.com.

I will be pushing the wide publishing harder this coming year, but I also have to get ready for my first spring semester in five years, and for a class I also haven’t taught for at least that long. We are also transitioning from one internet teaching platform to another for next fall, so I need to either prep for that or walk away from all my existing digital assets, which seems kind of dumb (if tempting).

One priority for 2022 was my health, and I continued losing weight, although the 30 pounds I lost didn’t get reflected in any way in my annual blood sugar levels. I was a bit nonplussed about that. I’m now cheating occasionally, since it doesn’t seem to matter. (Though if the A1C goes up this year, I guess I’ll know it does matter.)

For 2023 my #1 health goal is to focus on getting back in the habit of lifting weights. My aging bones could use it, and maybe also my aging brain.

That’s about it for goals. Like many of us, I’m not feeling terribly ambitious right now. Making some progress day by day, week by week, will just have to suffice. I think it would, in fact, arguably be a privilege when just surviving is hard enough for so many.

And frankly my cat sometimes makes even a little progress seem like a little bit of a stretch. This was Penny assisting me as I drafted this blog post.

a cat between the author and her laptop

Are you feeling more ambitious? Let us know. Maybe you can spark something in the rest of us!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unmasking, then COVID, then more COVID

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It’s been August since I posted here, mostly because I was asked to return to the classroom this fall by a department head suddenly short of adjuncts and I decided I would, if only for one class. After two full years out, I had a lot of work to do to get ready, so that’s been taking priority.

My son also lost his apartment and a lot of his stuff in a big apartment building fire in August, and it took a while for him to find a new place and for us to get him and his cat moved out again. (Penny the cat is so happy to have me all to herself again. Her nemesis always hogged my lap.)

Anyway, by the time my class began, I’d had my Omicron booster for a couple of weeks. I didn’t want to wear a mask in the classroom when nobody else was, so I decided to just start living life the way almost everyone out there did already, confidently mask-free. I even rejoined the church choir when it started up.

A return to normalcy! It was lovely.

Then someone in my choir got COVID and a couple of days later I came down with it, too. Of course, I could have gotten it anywhere, but sitting one pew in front of a powerful professional singer with COVID is probably a pretty good exposure.

That COVID diagnosis meant being barred from campus for five days, and then a health services interview to determine if I could go back. Luckily I had a note in the Syllabus about class moving fully online in that situation, and so it did, even though setting all that up while feeling like utter crap isn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Worse, some students either never really caught on, or didn’t want to.

Paxlovid prescribed by my doctor thankfully had me feeling better very quickly, and I had those extra days at home to try to track down errant students through email and our digital platform. Then it was back to the classroom, masked in an N95, and two normal classes.

And then I went home from that class and realized I was coming down with a cold. A bad cold. This was terrible timing, with midterm grades closing in the following week, so I was happy to get a negative COVID test. I figured my immune system was just running through all the viruses I’d missed in isolation. Just to be sure, though, I tested again the morning before the next class.

It was positive. Twice. (I really didn’t want that result!) So I took the class back online, but students hadn’t had any reason to expect my Paxlovid rebound and my emails and announcements felt like they were going out into the void (actually just out to the most engaged students, as usual, but usually in person I can hook a few more along).

I’m still hunting lost sheep out there and hoping the rest of the semester doesn’t include more exciting ways to scatter them into the hills.

As for the writing? Well, right now let’s gently (and in a safe, socially distanced way) cough and say I’m on a reading break. I hit 122 Goodreads reviews for 2022 last night. A lot of them are romcoms and Regency romances and other romances because I’m finding them very relaxing right now and also, of course, because I’m about to publish one.

(affiliate link)

I’m currently enjoying AMONG THE JANEITES, by Deborah Yaffe (affiliate link at left), which I suppose counts as marketing research since my next novel is a PRIDE AND PREJUDICE update. It’s quite entertaining if you’re an Austen fan, though this book also makes it clear I’m just a dilettante.

Yoffe records a beleaguered husband’s comparison of Austen mania (especially the balls and costume play) to Star Trek convention culture. Yep. I may have picked the wrong fandom to geek out in earlier in life. I always pretty much just hoarded Austen to myself. I’m also not into cosplay in either universe, and I’ve steered clear of Austen fanfic, unless it’s been traditionally or indie published. Not because I don’t think I’d enjoy it: for exactly the same reason, I have never tried cocaine.

Anyway. I’m still here, and feeling better day by day and hoping the grades I need to calculate tomorrow won’t be too depressing. I also hope this finds you healthy and happy and wearing only whatever costumes or work clothes or sweat pants or pajamas you want to be in.

P.S. if you ever need to take Paxlovid: I’m a big fan. It worked brilliantly! Just don’t be too surprised if you might need to circle around with the virus again, and without its benefit the second time (though in my case my symptoms were not as bad as the first time, either). It certainly doesn’t happen to everyone, but it can happen.