So. Been a little while since I’ve written, and suddenly a lot has changed. My country as a whole seems to have decided that COVID-19 is finished. Dunzo. In the rear-view mirror. Smell ya later, coronavirus. Yeah, OK, so in a few states, cases are exploding again, but those are other states. What happened there can’t possibly happen anywhere else. Time to start going out, everyone. Get a move on! Mama needs a haircut!

Fortunately (?), being out of work means I don’t have to worry about being pushed back into the thick of humanity. My current reality is not going to change much from what it’s been since March 11. Which is just as well, because the Metro stations that are usually part of my journey to work are shut down for repairs for the summer. Even if I had somewhere to go, I don’t know how the hell I’d get there. 

But I’m watching headlines about how COVID-19 is spiking again in states that have opened up, and I watch grown adults throwing actual tantrums in public places when they’re expected to wear masks because god forbid they think of anyone other than themselves, and I watch how utterly hapless and out of its depth our current leadership is, and I feel like I’m watching a freight train barrel towards us, completely out of control. 

So I’m just gonna stay hunkered down here. Maybe for the rest of my life.

In other news, I just finished line edits for Tidepool. After I returned them, I started feeling nostalgic and dug around until I found my very first Draft Zero of the novel (originally called Blood Tide), fresh from the end of November during NaNoWriMo 2016.

Yeesh. I haven’t been able to make it all the way through the draft because it’s so cringeful, but it really does drive home that getting a draft down, no matter how awful, is critical if you want to have a publishable book some day. The very bad and rough Blood Tide became Tidepool, which I still think is a damn good story. I hope you’ll agree when it’s out.

As if the first draft wasn’t bad enough on its own, I made a total rookie error which seems funny now, but really didn’t back then.

The character Charlie Sherman was originally called Ted Sherman. At some point before the end of NaNoWriMo 2016, I decided to change his first name. And even though I’ve been through enough office disasters to know better than this, I did a global search and replace on Ted to change it to Charlie. I didn’t even specify a capitalized T.

Well. Know how many words end in “-ted?” 

A WHOLE HELLUVA LOT, that’s how many. 

(And holy adverb abuse, Batman! Remember, this was Draft Zero, not even good enough to be the official first draft. This scene is still in the novel but it’s much better now, and not just because all the random Charlies have been rounded up and fed to sea monsters.)

Also, Tidepool now has its own Goodreads page, which makes me feel all official and stuff. If you would be kind enough to add it to your Want to Read pile, I’d be very appreciative.