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In one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons, a young boy is sitting at the kitchen table saying to his mother, “I say it’s broccoli and I say the hell with it.”
Well, I say this year is over and I say the hell with it.
But, as the saying goes, “Every dark cloud has a silver lining.” 2020 had its redeeming features. It grew easier to connect online with people who were separated by distance. For those of us lucky enough to shelter with others, it was a chance to deepen those relationships. And for people with a list of deferred projects to do someday, the elusive someday finally arrived, as calendars emptied and the pace of the world slowed. Writers locked up for months on end tend to write. Unexpected sorrow and unexpected growth were two faces of this strange year, for me, and perhaps for you too?
I’m writing this on Christmas and my children and grandchildren are far away. I’ve yet to meet a grandson born In April in New York City at the prior peak of the pandemic. Another grandson will be born in California in February, perhaps in a hospital, or perhaps of necessity at home. But nothing lasts forever, not even a pandemic, and the New York Times reports that a million people have already been vaccinated. When my turn arrives, I will get on my horse and ride to one coast and then the other.
This year’s slow holidays turned out to be a great time for watching television, a form of entertainment I typically limit to an hour a few times a week. But these days everything is on television: theater, ballet, concerts. I tuned in to a new show produced by Shonda Rimes that premiered on Christmas. Bridgerton is a Regency costume drama about an alternate timeline where the British aristocracy includes people of African as well as European ancestry. Rimes is building a fascinating career upending our expectations about race and gender, as she did in her previous hit show, Scandal. In Shondaland, racism is acknowledged yet the plots play with “what if” in a big way. And those fictional models can pave the way for real change. I sometimes wonder whether Scandal played a role in preparing our collective consciousness for a black woman vice president.
In Stellaland (a relatively obscure part of the multiverse), it is gender and age where counter-tropes are at play. Ageism and sexism are acknowledged, yet the stories are about the sexual agency and passion of women after midlife. I began the year by writing a screenplay of Brilliant Charming Bastard, a story about three women scientists in their sixties who find out they are all dating the same lying dilettante and join together to plot their revenge. I finished writing the script March 2, planning to expend it into a novel. But by March 6 we were in lockdown, and suddenly the premise of a man cheating with three women was far too serious and unappealing. A cheater could be a fatal disease vector, which was not what I had in mind. So I switched gears and wrote The Erotic Pandemic Ball, a set of interlinked stories about the sex lives of women in a locked down senior community.
Meanwhile my other half (MOH) and I had been talking about the economics of publishing. Self-publishing essentially flips the numbers on their head: The standard royalty through a traditional publisher is 15% whereas the standard revenue when self-publishing is 85%. Of course, you earn that 85% by doing everything your traditional publisher would have done. We had learned a lot about book marketing and publicity when I published Aphrodite’s Pen in 2019 with the excellent folks at North Atlantic Books, and MOH decided to take that learning to the next level. He spent much of 2020 studying the nuts and bolts of online publishing, including how to format a book, how to upload and publish books to multiple platforms, and how to publish Print on Demand hard copies. Over the last few months, we published our first fruits including the FREE short story “Terraforming” and "Her Poly Pod" the FREE first volume of the three Tales of Love in Lockdown series.
Check your favorite ebook platform for all of my books - You'll find then on Apple Books, Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook, Google Play Books, and Kobo.
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