WEBSITE UPDATE: ON THE CURRENT SITUATION
I haven’t posted anything recently, mostly because I had a difficult summer and fall. I had two surgeries in a row: an emergency surgery for a herniated disc in my upper back and then four weeks later a knee replacement, and the combination completely laid me low. I know, that sounds like poor planning, but the doctor was anxious to get it (and my ensuing physical therapy) done before the Covid got completely out of hand in our area.
We just made it–Weld County goes red tomorrow, with 45 of our 48 available ICU beds filled–so it was the right decision, but two surgeries that close together really took it out of me, and I’ve been too exhausted to do much more than my exercises and my worrying about the political and pandemical situation.
Speaking of which, I hope all of you are planning safe and socially distant Thanksgivings and Christmases instead of Sturgis-type Super Spreader events. Keep in mind this is not the first time people have had crummy Thanksgivings. Like the Pilgrims, who were nearly starving and had lost tons of their people to disease that first year in America. And in World War II, nobody had a Thanksgiving turkey because they were all being sent to the troops, and there was no Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade for three years because the balloons had all been shredded for their rubber, which was vital to the war effort. To say nothing of the British, who spent their holidays in the tube shelters while they were being bombed by the Germans every night. So being asked to stay home and not gather in giant viral clumps doesn’t seem like much to ask.
We always go to Santa Fe for Thanksgiving. Our daughter Cordelia flies in and we have dinner with screenwriter and novelist Melinda Snodgrass and an assortment of great people, including Sage Walker, George R.R. Martin, and screenwriter Michael Cassutt and his family. And then we go to the French pastry cafe in the La Fonda and walk around downtown Santa Fe and have a birthday tea with Melinda at the Chocolate Maven and go to the movies with Craig Chrissinger and the gang from Bubonicon, and it’s so much fun!
This year we’re staying home and doing the whole thing by zoom.
I’m roasting a turkey breast for the two of us (and the dog and cat) and we’re zooming our daughter and then watching PLANES, TRAINS, AND AUTOMOBILES and THE ADDAMS FAMILY II and YOU’VE GOT MAIL. We’re having a zoom tea with Melinda. She said she’s baking scones, I’ve ordered clotted cream (which I hope arrives on time,) and Cordelia’s bought lemon curd and some fancy tea.
We’re also watching a movie-by-telephone with Cordelia, since we always go to the movies at Thanksgiving. If you don’t know what that is, it means watching the same movie at the same time and calling each other throughout to comment. We’re going to watch CACTUS FLOWER, which we’ve seen, but Cordelia hasn’t. If you haven’t, it’s a great romantic comedy. Walter Matthau, Ingrid Bergman trying to look dowdy and failing miserably, and Goldie Hawn. It was Goldie’s first movie, and she won an Oscar for it. And since we usually hit Olive Garden at some point during our trip for their great soup and salad and breadsticks, we may both go get takeout and then call each other while we’re eating.
Oh, and by the way, Zoom has taken off the forty-minute limit on its Zoom sessions for the holidays, which I think is very nice of them. They’ve asked that people not crash the system by not scheduling their sessions for the top of the hour, so we’ll be meeting with people at 3:30, 4:10, etc.
I hope you are planning a similarly safe Thanksgiving. (If you don’t think the virus is serious, you should watch the video of a tormented Rachel Maddow that’s making the rounds. Her partner Susan got it and nearly died, and as she says, it’s something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.) A guy we were talking to the other day blithely said, “Even if you get it, you won’t die from it now because they have drugs.” This is NOT true. Two thousand people died from it yesterday, and it’s only going to get worse as the hospitals fill up and the staff gets sick or completely worn out. So wear your mask, keep six feet away from people, and STAY HOME. Please. The vaccine will be here soon, so don’t do anything stupid.
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Oh, and thank you for voting! I’m so glad everybody turned out. I can’t tell you how massively relieved I felt for the first time in four years when Biden and Harris won. I feel like we were plunging toward hell, and now we’ve stopped and turned around, and we’re headed the other way. Or as a writer friend of mine put it, “We were falling off a cliff and we managed to grab onto a vine sticking out from the rocks, but it isn’t very strong, and now we’ve got to somehow climb back up the cliff.” But at least we’re not still falling.
Now if Trump will just stop trying to steal the election and go away. I know that’s not very likely. This very morning he’s meeting with Michigan legislators trying to get them to change their votes to Trump, and Rudy Giuliani’s out there spinning nutty conspiracy conspiracies that include everybody from George Soros and Hillary Clinton to Bugs Bunny. I can’t wait for January twentieth!!!
In spite of surgeries, the pandemic, and obsessing about the election, I did manage to get some writing done. I finally finished my UFO novel, THE ROAD TO ROSWELL, it’s now in my agent’s hands! Yay!
It’s about a young woman, Francie, who goes to Roswell to be a college friend Serena’s maid-of-honor. Serena (who has horrible taste in men) is marrying a UFO nut, so they’ve scheduled the wedding to take place during the UFO convention that happens every year in July on the anniversary of the Roswell crash. And when Francie goes to get something from Serena’s car, she’s abducted by an alien and dragged off on a road trip across the Southwest that includes RVs, wind farms, rattlesnakes, chemtrails, casinos, cattle mutilations, a charming con man, a truly annoying conspiracy theorist, a sweet little old lady, a Western movie buff, Las Vegas wedding chapels, and Monument Valley.
I also finished a Christmas story called “Take a Look at the Five and Ten,” which is out right now in ASIMOV’S November/December issue and is coming out in a beautiful edition from Subterranean Press. I worked at the Woolworth’s in downtown one Christmas when I was in college (many, many years ago) and I’ve talked about it ever since, to the point that my family was ready to kill me. So I thought I’d write a story about it instead (with maybe a few tiny embellishments.)
I’m busy now working on my new novel, which is tentatively called THE SPANNER IN THE WORKS and is an Oxford historians time-travel novel. It’s about Oxford and Tintern Abbey and the Inklings and OUR HEARTS WERE YOUNG AND GAY and World War II and eccentric dons and Lewis Carroll and that dreadful drowned statue of Shelley at University College.
We are all fine here, as Han Solo said right before the stormtroopers broke in, and hope you are the same. As Victor Hugo said,
“To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.”
Stay safe and well and have a wonderful Thanksgiving in spite of everything!
Connie Willis