The View Post-Pandemic: Next Chapters in Writing and Life

What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life? That’s the question the pandemic has made so many of us ask ourselves. If we’ve managed to make it through physically unscathed and without too much trauma, then we’ve had months to pause and ponder, what next? A writer friend posted her version of the question on Facebook recently, and I read it in an early pre-dawn hour when I couldn’t sleep because I was asking it, too: “What,” she wanted to know, “to do with the back end of my life?” 

The view post-pandemic—next steps into the future.

The pandemic has brought us to our next chapters in sometimes surprising ways. People have fallen in love—with each other, with new passions, hobbies, practices, life choices. Some have jettisoned aspects of their lives that were no longer working for them. I envy their decisiveness. But I envy more the people who have fallen in love anew with the life they already have. 

In the first week of March 2020, my daughter, Eva, was cast in a student movie by an NYU film grad student named Ajai. They were scheduled to film it a few weeks later but then, as we all know, New York City, and soon the world, ground to a halt. 

From lock down, Eva and Ajai began to communicate via phone and Facetime—she from her one room apartment in Brooklyn, he in a larger apartment in Chelsea that his roommates had fled for safer locations with their families. Over the following months, many of Eva’s friends also left, until it must have felt to her and Ajai, each hunkered down alone, that they were the only two people left in all of New York.  

They didn’t feel safe taking the subway or even an Uber to see each other, so what else could they do but continue to communicate across the East River via phone. Finally, two months later, in mid-May, when the Covid situation was coming under control in the City, they made a plan to get together. They would each walk an hour toward the other until they met on the Manhattan Bridge. 

Eva had been telling me about Ajai for weeks and I knew of their plan to get together, masked and cautious. When I spoke to her the day after their meeting, I asked how it had gone. She sounded elated and then happened to mention that she was going to order dinner from one of the many restaurants nearby. A long silence filled the phone until I said, “Restaurants? There aren’t many restaurants near you in Brooklyn, are there?” She let out an embarrassed laugh. She was in Chelsea, Covid pods joined.  

Now, one year later, they have moved into in a two-room bedroom rental in Brooklyn. They got it for a good price because so many people had fled the city, but not them. Instead, they stayed and found each other. 

I wish for each of us, myself very much included, to have such luck and clarity and joy in our next chapters. We have come out the other side of something profound. Now, all we have to do is look around, take it in, and step forward into our new, well-chosen lives.  

Author and Blogger David Abrams Does it All

After the great success of his debut novel, Fobbit, I wanted to check in with David Abrams to see what he's working on next. I've come to rely on his daily book blog, The Quivering Pen, and when he stopped posting earlier this year so he could focus on his own writing, I grew curious. David is such a vital and generous presence in the literary community, I was intrigued to learn how he manages to do it all--pen books and oversee an important and much-read blog. Here is his answer to the time management conundrum that all writers face: I'm a people pleaser.

Before you go saying, "Hey, that's great!" let me stop you by saying, People Pleasing has ruined my soul. Oh sure, it's all well and good on the surface: putting others first, altruism, the wisdom of New Testament Bible verses, etc., etc. But all that Others First philosophy means I put my own needs in second, third, or last place. I spend so much time thinking-slash-worrying about what others think and feel and need that it leaves precious little "Me Time." (To my dear wife who might be reading this: please note that I will ALWAYS put you first--just wanted to clear the air on that.) Whenever I am reading another author's manuscript for a blurb, championing a new writer's novel on Twitter, or spending hours writing a Quivering Pen blog post about literary trends, it means I'm not working on my own writing. Don't get me wrong: I blurb/Tweet/blog because I want to and because I feel passionate about what I'm reading. But the truth is, no original words of mine are being written during this time.

So, when you ask how I prioritize my work, my response will probably be: "as an afterthought." Occasionally, I'll go through bouts of creativity where I'll shake off this malignant thinking and get down to work on the manuscript waiting, dusty, in the bowels of my hard drive. The truth is, those one-off periods of inspiration need to be the rule not the exception. I'm trying to get better. I really am.

I thought I was halfway to the cure at the beginning of this year when I nailed up the shutters on my blog, The Quivering Pen, saying that I needed to Blog Less, Write More. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

That golden period lasted for about four months. I tinkered around on the novel--long overdue to my editor--which I've been trying to write for two years, and I started three short stories, which remain in tattered fragments on my computer. I did a lot of staring out of my office window and distracted myself by reading books by Michael Chabon, John Kennedy Toole, and Emily St. John Mandel which I'd been putting off for far too long. I drank multiple cups of coffee, I stared out the window, I tinkered.

Then I snuck back to the blog like an adulterous husband drunk-dialing his mistress in the middle of the night.

My problem is that in addition to being a People Pleaser, I'm also a card-carrying member of the Procrastinator's Club and am professor emeritus at the College of Spread-Too-Thin. I take on too much and end up doing none of it to perfection.

I suspect I'm not alone at these clubs (I see several of you nodding your head in sympathetic recognition). It's comforting to be in a society of many, I suppose--but warning lights are flashing red right now: comfort leads to complacency, complacency is the first rest stop on the highway to hell.

I'm sorry, but I must leave you now. I must get to work--the selfish, ego-driven work of writing my own damn words. How to get there? I don't know, really. The creative life comes with no owners manual, no instructions to insert Tab A into Slot B. Giving up the blog, saying "no" to blurb requests, taking a Twitter vacation--those aren't the remedies (I've already tried all of those things). Sleeping less and rising earlier in the morning? Maybe, but I'm already throwing off the covers at 4:30; don't know if I can crack open my eyelids any earlier than that. Making the novel-in-progress the first thing I turn to in the morning? That's a start. Better time management? Of course.

If I'm honest with myself, if I look the mirror man in the eye, I'd have to say that the best first step is moving past the fear: the fear of failure, the fear of letting others down, the fear of wasting time at the keyboard. Instead, what I really need to be afraid of is failing to please myself. That's it. From now on, I'll try to be a Me-Firster.

Just as soon as I finish this blog post...

David Abrams is the author of Fobbit (Grove/Atlantic, 2012), a comedy about the Iraq War that Publishers Weekly called “an instant classic” and named a Top 10 Pick for Literary Fiction in Fall 2012. It was also a New York Times Notable Book of 2012, an Indie Next pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, a Montana Honor Book, and a finalist for the L.A. Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Abrams’ short stories have appeared in Fire and Forget (Da Capo Press, 2013) and Home of the Brave: Somewhere in the Sand (Press 53), anthologies of short fiction about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other stories, essays and reviews have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, Salon, Salamander, Connecticut Review, The Greensboro Review, Consequence, and many other publications. Abrams earned a BA in English from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. He retired from active-duty after serving in the U.S. Army for 20 years, a career that took him to Alaska, Texas, Georgia, the Pentagon, and Iraq. He now lives in Butte, Montana with his wife. Visit his website at: www.davidabramsbooks.com

Author photo by: Lisa Wareham Photography

A Second Book is Born!

A second book confirms that the first wasn’t just a fluke. A second book means you’re not a flash in the pan. A second book means…well, that since you wrote another one, you can do it again, and again, and again. I'm so excited to share the news that Unbridled Books will publish my new novel, Dreams of the Red Phoenix, in October, 2015. I was lucky enough to work with the same editor who edited River of Dust. Greg Michalson is a seasoned, skilled and sure-handed editor. When Greg suggests a paragraph should go, then it should go. When he doesn’t get my meaning, then I’d better believe my meaning’s not clear. In other words, this book was greatly improved and deepened because of Greg’s fine efforts.

As with River of Dust, I wrote the very first draft of Dreams of the Red Phoenix in twenty-eight days. Just twenty-eight days! I’ve been trying to figure out if writing first drafts in precisely the same number of days might have something to do with the stages of the moon, or a woman’s cycle. There must be some mysterious force at work, because in both cases I felt driven and blessed and somewhat on fire.

I started on December 2, 2012. I have never tried to write anything between the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Normally the only writing I do in those months are grocery lists and wish lists for the kids. But, for some reason, I had been plotting the novel in my head for weeks, maybe even months, and I went ahead and started it in early December. I stopped writing during the busiest of the holiday days when we had houseguests, but picked up again between Christmas and New Years and then hit full stride in first weeks of 2013.

But a first draft does not a novel make. It took many months to revise, including the summer months when I set it aside. When I returned to it in the fall of 2013, I zeroed in and we had a final draft by early 2014. Despite the rapid start it still took a full year to come to fruition.

Still, a year is quick for a literary novel. And while I can’t assume the third and fourth and any future books will come so easily, I do now have this precedent of fast starts and slow, careful finishes. With Dreams of the Red Phoenix, I had a story that was burning to be told and then I received some excellent help in telling it. Fingers crossed that the third will be so easy.