March 2020 Wrap-Up

Hello! It’s the last day of March, and what a month it’s been! I bet for most of us, it’s the least typical month we’ve had for a very long time. I can’t wait to read everybody else’s wrap-ups this month, because they’re going to be so much different than normal.

Books Read:

I did a little better last month than in February, completing 10 books.

• A Treason of Thorns – Laura E. Weymouth
• Sparrow – Mary Cecilia Jackson
• Light from Distant Stars – Shawn Smucker
• 11/22/63 – Stephen King
• Night of the Dragon – Julie Kagawa
• Stop Missing Your Life – Cory Muscara
• Sky Without Stars – Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell (reread)
• Between Burning Worlds – Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell
• Today Tonight Tomorrow – Rachel Lynn Solomon
• Japan: From Prehistory to Modern Times – John W. Hall

Several of these books were amazing!

Blog Stats:

Blog stats are fairly steady. I haven’t been finding as much time to write reviews, but at least I’ve been doing Top Ten Tuesdays.

I’m at 2191 followers on Twitter. Wow!

Writing:

• I would say that I haven’t written much, but I have, it just hasn’t been fiction. I’ve been keeping a coronavirus journal every day. It’s part of a journal series I started in 2017, although I stopped updating it regularly until this month. Since the 12th I’ve been updating it daily. I write it for an audience that may read it at an unknown time in the future, so I end up explaining things that seem obvious to us sometimes.
• I did write a short story called “Patient Zero” earlier in the month, and I put it on Wattpad. The inspiration from the story is in the next section.

Life:

So who hasn’t had a radically different month than normal here? The coronavirus has changed the way almost everybody on earth has done things.

So the highlight of this month was probably the Penguin Teen Book Tour, where I got to meet Astrid Scholte, Marie Lu, and Melissa de la Cruz (front row of this picture, in order). I took my boy to this event and we had a wonderful day. First we went to a bakery and had brownies, then we went to the Lego Store, then we had dinner at the mall, before coming to The Tattered Cover. You can see me and my boy in this picture in the first row of chairs in the center of the right aisle. The next day I was feeling a little queasy, and it was in the early days of coronavirus, before everything got shut down. I thought, Oh no! What if I made these authors sick?

So then, I started thinking, what if someone attended a book signing of their favorite author, found out the next day they were sick with a deadly virus, accidentally spread it to their favorite author, and she died? How horrible would that be? So of course, I had to write a story about it. I’m happy to report that I don’t have coronavirus and all three of the authors pictured are evidently healthy, so I didn’t accidentally get any of them sick. Since the event was on March 5th, we can be sure no ill effects came from my meeting them.

The library and the gym shut down after that, and like most people, I don’t leave the house much. I do go for a walk every day, listening to an audiobook or an audio class. The Sunday before last I walked over six miles, to a park that is farther away from my house and back. I haven’t gone to the store since Friday the 17th though. We have enough food to last a while, but the grocery stores are still open, so I’ll go shopping again this Friday.

My husband is still working, which is good. Although he can work from home, his boss is insisting he come in and sit in his office by himself all day. He hurt his foot, so the doctor is forcibly making him work from home today and tomorrow.

Almost everything I normally do has moved to Zoom though. Church? YouTube live. Homeschool coop? Zoom. Russian meetup group? Zoom. I even went to an author event on Zoom last Saturday. I had been planning on going to see Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell on March 25th at The Tattered Cover, but of course, that event got cancelled. Fortunately, I found an event they were holding online and it was a lot of fun!

Well, let’s hope April is the worst of this coronavirus pandemic. I know most people (including myself) would love to see an improvement next month, but since I’ve been keeping a journal on this, I’m pretty sure the worst is still to come. Italy has already started to see fewer new cases and fewer new deaths per day, which is good. Some places in the US seem to be taking more days to double the number of cases and deaths, which is also good. Let’s hope that all of us staying at home (and I do hope you’re staying at home unless you have to go out or are exercising by yourself, away from people) are making a difference. I’ve read The Great Influenza by John M. Barry and it’s quite possible that we’re seeing a similar situation, but the US in 1918 had their maximum number of flu cases in October (after exponential growth) and then they started to taper off in the months after that).