It’s been a heck of a couple years, y’all. I had been querying a manuscript in 2019 when I decided I needed to stop and do a major revision. Then I got super sick. For almost six months, I couldn’t focus enough to read or write, much less do my revision. I focused on getting better and in early 2020, I was finally ready to Do The Thing. I started getting my notes together, making a plan, re-reading the MS and commenting it.
Then March came along and the whole damned world shut down. As well it should have, mind you. I was and still am one hundred percent behind the lockdowns. I only wish more people had played by the rules so we could get it under control.
Anyway, you’d think that a major introvert would have been in hog heaven throughout 2020, but it turns out that isolation is not exactly relaxing when going out among people could literally kill you. My anxiety was through the roof. Once again, I couldn’t focus enough to read, write, or do revisions.
I don’t know what it was about the six month mark that made my brain start functioning again, but it did. Maybe that’s just how long it takes for our lizard brains to stop screaming “EMERGENCY” every five seconds. Like a car alarm, it can only keep going off as long as the battery has juice. I started reading again, and then I was able to start writing again. I finished my MS overhaul, queried for a while, and now I’m doing another set of smaller revisions.
It feels good to be creative again, but it’s also difficult to feel like I lost a year and a half to illness – both my own and the world’s.
I would say I hope to never live through another time like this, but living through it is better than the alternative.
Esmari Writes 