I quit my job in August of 2019, because I knew myself. I knew that if I was to do this writing thing, I couldn’t allow myself any distractions, anything that I could use as an excuse not to commit myself fully, and for a few months, it worked; I got up every day at 7:30, ate breakfast, exercised, showered, and got to work, and by January of 2020 I had written half a novel. Pretty good for a beginner. It was too long by half and had some messy transitions and unnecessary scenes, but even looking at it now, a year later, there’s some pretty good stuff there.

That month we holed up in a house down near the Arizona/Mexico border that my in-laws own, and I spent two weeks working on that novel, adding another 150 pages. It was called The River, Rising. Set in Jim Crow/WWII era Tuscaloosa. It told the story of Marianne “Mercy” Monroe and Ernie “The Sentinel” Evans, and their respective journeys as superheroes throughout 20th century America. I loved it very much–and still do–but its foundation relied too heavily on black folks’ trauma and was absolutely not my story to tell, so I eventually scrapped it. But before that, while I was in that little house in the desert, toiling away on that novel, our country came very close to going to war with Iran, and whispers began to emerge about a virus in China, and everything got a little, er, distracty. But I kept my head down and kept plugging along, and it wasn’t so bad.

By March we were holed up again, but not by choice, and I was finding it a little tougher to focus. But that was ok, ’cause so were you, and so was everyone else, and the celebrities sang Imagine, and we were all gonna be ok if we just did our part and stayed inside and washed our hands. The fact that washing our hands was not a thing we already did should have told us all we needed to know about how everything was going to go. That things were not going to be ok, and celebrities couldn’t save us with a song. Who knew?

Anyway, we all know how it played out, is still playing out almost a year later. Everyone struggled. Struggled to focus, struggled to work, struggled to stay well, to stay alive, in a country that values the right to work its citizens like livestock, even during a complete breakdown of every aspect of life, over anything else. It was–is–not great. But, mostly, we’ve gotten along alright, held together, helped each other in simple, everyday ways, and did our best to accomplish tasks that a year ago (four years ago, if you wanna get real honest about it) wouldn’t have seemed that difficult. We weathered the virus, the murders of black men and women and transfolk by both the state and citizens, the protests afterwards, the virus, a contentious election, an attempted coup that upon this writing is not exactly over, and the virus. On top of all of that, I lost two old friends, my uncle, and my cat this year, none of them to the virus, just general dumb shittiness. It’s been a lot. I started to think of wishes and monkey’s paws’ and whether my request for no distractions had resulted in *gestures* this. ‘Cause whatever this is, it’s definitely not no distractions.

Doing work in the face of all this, especially creative work, can seem like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, futile and a little sad, but I tend to think of it as painting during a hurricane. You tie that canvas down so it doesn’t blow away, set out your colors, pick your brushes, and hope for the best. Sometimes you get great swaths of messy color, and you don’t know what to do with it; it’s just too much. Sometimes, only a little paint even makes it onto the canvas before the rest goes spraying out into oblivion, but you work with what sticks, because for now, what sticks is good enough. The finished product may not look like what you set out to paint, but it’s something, and you made it, and that’s good. It’s honestly the best any of us are managing right now. All you can hope for is that maybe tomorrow the storm’ll be over, and you can make your choices more actively, not just react to forces outside your control.

It’s been a long year. But I’ve miraculously managed to accomplish several things. Those that I set out to do, that I planned for, never materialized–I now have four half-finished novels–but I have a novella and a couple of short stories in my arsenal that I never expected to write. I’ve submitted the novella, David, But Inside, to Tor/Nightfire, and a short story, Runners Outside the Gates, to Apex Magazine. I fully expect them to get rejected, but the act of completing them was important. It wasn’t rearranging furniture; it was weathering a storm.

I write this on the eve of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ inauguration. I’m not naive enough to think that this alone will change anything, but it will give us a new canvas on which to paint, and maybe the storm will die down enough for us to choose what goes on it and what doesn’t.

And I’ve learned that there is no such thing as no distractions. Still glad I quit my job though.