The title is a bit tongue in cheek, but this is definitely an unprecedented time for the world, so I feel it’s also fitting.

This week we just had our first case reported nearby. There had been reports in my state, but not in my area. Now things are getting serious for us. Mind you, my wife and I have been on lockdown for a week now already, but you can’t but be aware of the ratcheting tension and seriousness of the issues.

So this is week one of our plague lockdown. I was joking with my wife about how biblical things are getting out in the world. We have a dangerous demagogue in power supported by a party of craven ghouls, there’s apparently a plague of locusts in Africa, Utah recently had a pretty big earthquake, and apparently one-third of the US is at risk of flooding this spring, and NOW there’s a global pandemic sweeping through the population. It’s…it’s a lot, y’all…

BUT! In times of crisis, we must weather on. We must work to do what we can to improve things, support each other, and keep making art because it is what will give us the hope to keep going.

With all that in mind…what have I been up to?

What I’ve Been Writing

Around October/November of last year, I started working on a book with the working title The Cracked Men. And then the rest of 2019 happened, and I stopped working on it because I was tired and stressed and couldn’t concentrate. I ended up diving into creating a tabletop RPG because somehow that felt less mentally taxing — it was like a fun puzzle, most of it was just coming up with fun move names.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been digging back into it. And I’m happy with what I’ve come up with so far. I went back to the bones of the story and I’m doing some character work to get a better idea of who these folks are and what they want. I realize that sounds obvious, and yet, I was trying to just…outline with no concept of what anyone really wanted.

I’ve also come up with some setting changes and a few initial tweaks that I think narrows the scope of the story helpfully while also tackling the things I want to focus on.

I was struggling coming up with character details for whatever reason. Everything I wrote felt wrong somehow. Forced. So I decided to go WAY back to some of my early writing tactics. I looked up one of those “100 interview questions for your character” things, which I haven’t done in forever. And it broke through the wall. I’m figuring out the main character’s deal, along with his parents. And from there, I can start branching out to the rest of the main cast.

This week has been tough going for me, though. I got some very, very bad news on Monday, which left me reeling the rest of the week and gave the rest of the week’s bullshit to pile on. You may be surprised to hear this but: plagues are stressful? Global pandemics are not a funtimes romp? But I’m feeling better, and the very very bad news may have come with some “actually, it’s not that bad, just a bit disappointing” asterisks instead, which would be great.

What I’ve Been Reading

I’ve been focusing my attention on three books.

The first is Kelly J Ford’s Cottonmouths. She’s from pretty close to where I’m from in Arkansas, and I can feel it in her writing. The way she writes about these small towns feels intimately familiar in a way that I’ve only ever read in Gillian Flynn’s books. It felt like going home in the good and bad ways. I’m riveted and can’t wait to keep reading as I have time.

The second book is The Prey of the Gods by Nicky Drayden. A really interesting book about a bunch of people living in South Africa as usage of this drug called “godsend” spreads. Weird thing about godsend–it seems to give you special powers? So far there are a number of PoV characters, they’ve only just now started to overlap. I’m curious to see how these all tie together. It’s a funny, tense book, occasionally a little creepy, and I’m enjoying it a great deal.

The last book I’m focusing on is Story Genius by Lisa Cron. This was recommended by a friend on Twitter — Brittany Constable. I’m still really early in the book, but from my understanding, it’s supposed to be extremely useful in helping your character work and building out your plot from there. I feel like I’m decent at characters, but my plots tend to meander, so I’m interested to see what her actual technique ends up being.

What I’ve Been Watching

A lot of stuff. Honestly, I’ve been feeling down, so I’ve been watching a lot of Cody Johnston’s Some More News on YouTube. It scratches an itch that the old Jon Stewart Daily Show used to scratch — someone essentially holding up a newspaper and screaming, “But seriously. This is fucked, right?” And I find that weirdly cathartic.

I also recently watched a movie called Freaks on Netflix, and holy hell it was good. I don’t know how to describe it without making it sound like a lot of garbage that I have intentionally avoided (ahem…The Boys), but…it’s essentially a family-drama-thriller, horror-adjacent take on the X-Men. A little girl lives with her dad in a squalid, run down house. He trains her on basic, everyday trivial, like what baseball is and who her parents are, while occasionally screaming, “You’re not normal!” in her face to try to throw her off balance. The child actress in this movie is phenomenal. It’s unclear for a bit what exactly is going on — is her dad mentally ill? Are they on the run from someone? Since the movie is from the little girl’s point of view…is she possibly an unreliable narrator misinterpreting things that are happening? It’s a chewy, very well done movie. I loved it.

What I’ve Been Doing

I’ve been volunteering a lot with OBA this month. Our plans got a bit up-ended in all this plague business, and planning for things much more than a couple of weeks out is tough because we have no idea how the virus is going to play out — will it sweep the country and get way worse? Will it fizzle out as state governments step up to compensate for the lack of federal action? Will it die out in the summer and come back worse in the fall? We have no idea. So we’ve moved our monthly events to digital, creating Google Hangouts. I ran a run one involving writing sprints and the game What. The. Film?

Beyond OBA stuff, I’ve been laying some groundwork for bringing our old podcast back. I talked about it in a few older posts, but my brother and I hosted a podcast back in 2018 where we came up with horror movie double features and then discussed them. We wanted our show to stand out from of a lot of the other podcasts out there, so rather than just being a recap of the movie or a friendly, round-table discussion/review, we would come up with topics to research and then try to discuss the movies in a semi-academic lens. And I think we did a pretty good job. More than that, though, it was a shit-ton of fun. But life got in the way. But we’re back and doing it again!

I’ve been shopping for a new microphone — my old one was great, but I’m interested in possibly upgrading ever-so-slightly. And more than that, I had to buy a new mic stand regardless. I got a new desk a few weeks ago, and my old scissor arm won’t clamp onto this one the way it did my old one — the arms have weird bezeling that provides essentially no place to connect anything. So I’ve bought a “desktop boom mic stand.” It’s basically a short, desktop mic stand with a swiveling arm. It should be a nice middle ground between a static stand and the awesome maneuverability of the arm. I’ll miss feeling like I’m doing a radio show, though.

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And that’s it for now. How has your quarantine been so far? Are you getting stir crazy, yet? Have you come up with any neat projects to pass the time? Watched or read anything you want to chat about? Comment below! However things are going for you, I hope you’re healthy, safe, and able to reach out to people you like and love. You can drop me an email or hit me up on Twitter if you want to talk. I’d love to hear from y’all.

‘Til next time!