Last summer, like many people living through the SARS-CoV2
pandemic, though I did not suffer an infection, I was in a bad way. I
spent a lot of time in bed. I pored over my newsfeed incessantly. And
I refreshed the COVID19 statistics page, always open in my browser,
numerous times a day. And then something happened: Nisi Shawl invited
me to join a writing jam she had begun hosting on Zoom. So, every day,
I opened Zoom and spent two hours writing, framed by an ongoing
conversation with Nisi, Kristin, James, Caerdwyn, Jo, and Paul. I
organized my life around the jam. And when I needed to put my writing
aside for my Aqueduct press duties, I spent the jam’s two hours
performing those duties. (Before then, I’d let a lot of them slide.)
I started, not with the current novella in progress (the fourth in
a series of four that I’d been working on for the past two years)—I’d
dropped work on it in it in March 2020 when the reality of the
pandemic was just beginning to bite—but a story I’d drafted during the
Bush2 years with the working title of “Paulina’s Tale.” Back then, I’d
known something was wrong with the story, and so I’d put it away with
other stories of mine that needed fixing. I’d almost forgotten it. But
last July, a dream made me think of it, and so I decided to look at it
afresh...(read the whole essay.)
