It snowed the weekend they closed the pool, which meant I had four days of nothing but kettlebells before I dared go out on the bike. Those four days have been the hardest so far, except maybe the ones that I was actually sick, but at the same time they were comforting. Nothing makes me really enjoy being at home and not having to go anywhere like a thick blanket of snow outside.
That was almost two months ago. The snow melted. The trails emerged. My mind was saved by bike rides in the sun, in the shade, and sometimes—when I miscalculated—in the sleet.
I have been incredibly lucky. No pool means no swimming and no lifeguarding, but that means more biking and more writing and more drawing. I have adapted astonishingly well to being alone in a house with a cat and a dog and all my imaginary friends—as long as I can get out and ride my bike for miles and miles, that is. I feel as if the energy that I usually expend on being sociable with other human beings has been redirected into my art, with the result that I’ve gotten more done in the last six weeks than I have in the last three months. Much of it I can’t show you just yet (though patrons have already seen the Work In Progress snaps), but what it means is that the next book will be coming sooner than later, and more books after that.
I have been writing new fiction again. After spending all of 2019 in editing of one kind or another, I began a new story in January out of a feeling that if I didn’t start writing again parts of my brain would begin to die.
It has been, from the very start, wonderful. And now with no pool to guard I’m left with a solid routine day after day after day, and the result is thousands and thousands of words, a dozen short stories and two novellas and counting.
My days go like this: I wake early, before dawn, make tea and lie on my sofa with my tea in a thermos and a little bowl of chocolate pieces (the all-cacao kind most people use for baking, but I eat straight because I actually like the taste) and a pillow on my lap and my iPad on my pillow and my dog at my feet, and I write for two hours. I write while the sun rises outside, and the trees come into focus against a pale sky, until they are lit with golden highlights and hunger drives me to make breakfast. Sometimes my cat comes and sits on my lap too. It is a little more difficult with the cat, then the pillow, then the iPad, carefully arranged on my lap, but there is no better feeling in the world than a purring cat curled against your chest while you work through a tricky continuity problem.
Before breakfast the dog gets a walk. After breakfast I get a bike ride, or I play with my kettlebells. My Wonderful Mother has been sending me kettlebells gradually over the last three years, and now I have a pretty good collection. We have been taking turns writing workouts that we both do (with modifications), and sometimes we do them together, on the phone with each other.
I enjoy being home alone with no one to visit, but if I couldn’t talk to my closest friends and relatives I would be very sad indeed.
The bike rides have been great. The snowline is gradually retreating, and I get to go higher and longer and higher and longer and I feel even more parts of my brain waking up. They have closed the trailheads and the bathrooms in all the state parks and national forests, but I can ride to the trails from my house. I try to go out relatively early, to avoid the crowds.
Afternoons are in my studio, where I am now typing this. First I worked on Lucena interior illustrations, which felt like they took forever but eventually I did finish them, and moved on to the cover. That was a month ago and today I will put the finishing touches on the art, scan it in, and begin work on the design. I have burned through two Discworld audiobooks, the entire Imperial Radch trilogy, and am currently listening to Anathem, which will outlast the Lucena cover but will provide an excellent backdrop to my next art project: the Professor Odd volume 2 cover.
Then there are evening chores. More dog walks. Sometimes we go to the par course and I do pullups. I bring the little bottle of hand sanitizer I keep on hand for conventions and disinfect my hands afterwards. I do not wear a mask, but we will walk in the middle of the street sometimes to give other people room.
Then dinner. Then bed. I am going to bed while it is still broad daylight, but I don’t mind. I have blackout curtains. And the sooner I get to bed the sooner I can get up, and in the darkness, write.
It is disconcertingly comfortable. Perhaps the biggest challenge is coming to terms with how not-unhappy I am. In the beginning there was the recurring fear that I might get sick, that someone I loved might get sick and then die.
Then I got sick.
It came on right after I’d had a ride where I’d fallen and scraped up my elbow so badly I tore my shirt. It was my favorite shirt. It was very upsetting. I began to feel weak and shaky on the descent, and thought it was the adrenaline leaving my system. I loaded up on NSAIDs and put the elbow on ice when I got home, and felt much better.
That evening I ran a fever. The next morning I felt almost normal—except not. I rested. The fever came back. More NSAIDs. This happened again the next day. The next day I was sick. What food I could take in got an express pass through my digestive system. Fever. Aches. Nausea. WoMo arranged contactless delivery of two gallons of orange juice, three gallons of applesauce, fizzy water drinks, and little pouches of applesauce called GoGo Squeezes clearly designed as a way to get kids to eat fruit, which I don’t know how well it would have worked on me as a kid, but those GoGo Squeezes may have saved my life.
Two days of nausea, fever, GI upset—but no vomiting. WoMo helpfully reminding me that my symptoms closely matched those of her co-worker who, though he never tested positive for COVID-19, had those symptoms while quarantining with his COVID-19 positive fiancée in a tiny one-bathroom apartment with no dishwasher.
I didn’t get tested. I was too ill to leave the house, but not too ill to pull the ripcord and get professional treatment. I did call my doctor, who helpfully suggested I take some antiemetics. The pills gave me cramps but once they kicked in I felt loads better. I slept.
Then I woke up one day and decided I’d had enough. The fact that I had the energy to do this suggests that my immune system had already taken care of the problem and it was just a matter of time, but the result was I spent a wonderful day in bed catching up on Altered Carbon and sucking GoGo Squeezes. Slowly at first, in case they went right through me, and then faster and faster. That afternoon I had enough of an appetite to eat a Lärabar. And then another. And another and another.
Recovery was frustratingly slow, but faster than some others I’ve talked to. I did a lot of eating. I made pancakes (slowly, with lots of breaks for lying down). Three days out from the last time I had a fever I tried gentle pilates and had to nap afterwards. Ten days after the morning I woke up and decided to recover I had a bike ride that finally felt normal.
I’m better now. Still getting stronger, but that’s normal. I know that realistically having been sick doesn’t prevent me from getting sick again, but it’s stopped me worrying unnecessarily: the thing I feared happened. I am okay.
The rest of the world isn’t. But the rest of the world hasn’t been okay for a long, long time. If ever. There is always something. COVID-19 is what we have now. I am watching closely the serological (antibody) tests being developed, and pestering my doctor to get me one. In some test pools 26% of COVID-19 positive patients reported nausea and diarrhea as symptoms. I suspect I could have been one of them.
I am also watching the various reopening methods being employed, and waiting for the siren call for contact-tracers or the second wave if we fail to implement reopening properly.
But mostly I am writing. And drawing. Living, the best way I can.
Breathe in, breathe out. All we have is now. But here and now we are alive.
