Pandemic Patchwork

Having several high-risk factors (age, diabetes, damaged respiratory system), I should not expose myself to any chance of getting the virus - and to tell the truth, as a writer, with a strong natural antisocial streak, I have been perfectly happy to stay home. I go out only to stroll around my neighborhood and nearby parks, camera in hand, wearing a mask and gloves (for touching handrails of walk-sign buttons) and keeping my distance. Seeing it through my camera lens has made me more and more fond of the small maritime city where I've lived for thirteen years, with its views of mountains and water in several directions.

Confession: I do not live alone. I'm by no means sure I'd be so contented if I did. My heart goes out to friends who do live alone and previously led active social lives. My husband and my sister take great care of me, and save me from having to shop.
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However, they go out to work, both of them, heroically, in retail. My sister is under so much stress from serving the not-always-grateful public that she hides in her bedroom most of the time she's home, emerging only for meals and for reruns of Star Trek  and The Office.

I have all the time and solitude in the world for writing now, right?  Right? So I'm getting my big book finished.... Right?

Wrong.

Somehow, to my surprise, I do not seem to be very productive, and I hear this (via the press, social media, and Zoom chats) from many other writers and artists of all varieties. There's something almost stifling about a lack of structure to my days.

There's also the distraction factor. My chosen distractions are, naturally, useful and important: I sew masks - increasingly, as I run out of large pieces of suitable fabric, patchwork masks - and I bake bread. When I announced on Facebook that I was running out of yeast, a woman I barely know except on Facebook brought me a jar of her sourdough starter, wearing mask and gloves, and now I try new varieties of sourdough bread every few days, from cinnamon raisin to black rye to pizza.

But one cannot live by bread alone, no matter how tasty. Thanks to my online writing critique group and our daily "Pen-demics" (pandemic writings), I've found myself writing poems. They may not be very good, and they are almost as much a distraction from my big book as the raisin bread, but they're writing all the same. In a time when it's easy to be lazy and unfocused, they use and stretch my writing muscles.

Even better - well, no, not better, but still, a good thing - I am making the effort to submit pieces to literary magazines. Not the big important ones (not expecting Granta or Ploughshares to publish my work any time soon), but a lot of smaller journals, some online, some print. Along with all the thanks-but-no-thanks, or nothing at all, in response, I've gotten one acceptance so far, and if I keep it up, I believe I'll get more.

My darkly comic (to me) short story "After the Funeral" has just appeared in online literary magazine  Every Day Fiction .  They classify it as "horror" which I find startling but amusing.  Hope you'll check it out.