I’ve been working at home for nigh on to three months now, and I know I’m blessed to be able to do so. And so today while I take my afternoon break and listen to Queen’s Greatest Hits (which I love because it reminds me of college and also that I have to call my friend John this weekend), I’m going to spin up this blog post and let the world in on what I think of the pandemic and what I’m writing.

There’s a meme that conservatives have been sharing on Twitter which says something like, “Remember that experts built the Titanic, while an amateur built the Ark,” and relates this to the current COVID-19 pandemic which has been kicking the planet’s butt for three months now and probably won’t go away for quite some time. Why should we listen to epidemiologists and virologists and other so-called “experts” when, uh… we have gut feelings or something? This mistrust of expertise and higher thinking has been a part of American politics for centuries, odd for a country founded by a bunch of revolutionary philosophers. But it’s what we’ve got, and now we have a Presidency that’s devoted to the cause of rooting out expertise wherever it can be found.

This irritates me.

No, scratch that. It fills me with a sense of impotent rage that this sense of “my feelings are more qualified than your facts” is so prevalent in modern America. It really is a failure of the American experiment.

*Takes a deep breath*

I can’t really go into much more about that because I took my blood pressure earlier today and it already is too high. So I’m going to finish this blog post up with a list of my current writing projects. So here it is, with various projects listed in order of when I plan to get to them and finish them (though some will be concurrent with others):

• Finish up rough draft of And the Devil Will Drag You Under. I plan to finish this up by the end of June, then I’ll let it sit for a little while before revising and submitting to my writers’ group.
• Revise The Solitude of the Tentacled Space Monster. I gave this to my group a few months ago and got some really great feedback that I have yet to incorporate. I hope to start doing that this weekend, and finish this by the end of June as well. Maybe I’ll start shopping it around. Who knows?
• Start outlining and writing my pirate trilogy. This consists of The X of Doom, The Lord of Nightmares, and The King of Oblivion. This probably won’t start happening until July. But in the meantime I’ve built a pirate-theme playlist on Amazon Music and have been listening to that a lot for inspiration. I’m also looking for good pirate movies to watch (Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean movies are fun, as is Swashbuckler, from 1976) and good pirate novels to read. On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers is a great one. I want to find more.

Those are all novels. I also have short stories to revise:

• “The BIM”
• “A Pine Romance”
• “Sauromancy”
• “Just Like This”

These are all stories that just need revising, though “The BIM” has been undergoing some intense structural revisions and so far has ballooned from 5,000 to 8,000 words, and probably more will be added as I work on it. I don’t have deadlines in mind for any of these. I’m taking the year off from short story submissions, mostly because I feel like I’ve run out of story/market match-ups. I need to get some new ones written and revised before I can start submitting again. I do have three outstanding submissions that I should probably query on since they’ve been at markets for over six months. So… we’ll see what happens.

That’s all I’ve got for now. My break’s just about over, as is the Queen album, so it’s time to say so long. Be well, and be safe. And be smart, for crying out loud. WEAR YOUR MASK!