I haven't been here for a while. I don't know if it's because I didn't want to immortalize the year 2020 since it surely has to rank among the worst in living memory. I was about to sit down an blog about the headstone I got for a baby that died in 1928 and who has rested in an unmarked grave since then, but before I could get my thoughts down -- wham! The coronavirus pandemic was upon us and everyone's attention was taken by IT. We have missed an important wedding, three funerals, two planned trips, one of them to Europe, and many many other moments we can never get back. But I know everybody else has had those same experiences so I won't dwell on it. Except to say, I realize how lucky I am, with a house in a quiet small town, and another one where I can go write, and not having to worry about a job loss or any of the other catastrophes others have had to endure. I am not going hungry.
The time has reminded me, oddly, of when I was a child. We didn't go places all the time like people do now. We pretty much kept to our daily routine, and even on the weekends, we often spent a lot more time at home than we did in the car or recreating. In fact, recreation wasn't even a word in my vocabulary when I was a child. I do remember wishing to "go somewhere" and jumped at the chance to accompany either one of my parents on mundane errands if they would allow me to tag along. Often they didn't. We just stayed at home. A lot. But that was back when we had neighborhoods full of kids who played in the streets or in each other's yard, and we didn't have air-conditioned homes, or internet, or any of those things that seem to keep children inside their houses now. We played hard. Sun-up to sun-down. Mother would turn on the porch light when it was time for us to come home. And we usually stayed out a while even after we saw it burning. She might scold us a little bit, but not much. We lived in a safe neighborhood. We didn't even lock our doors way back then.
I do lock mine, now, but my house is my sanctuary, and with all this time on my hands, what better way to fill it than to dig back into writing. Oh, don't think I mentioned it but at the end of 2019 I got a new agent. She went to a lot of trouble to find me! What a switch. I enjoy talking to her, she gets my work, and is enthusiastic. What a delight it is just to have that much after other agents I've had through the years. She's trying to sell a novel, and she has some other ideas, too. Keep your fingers crossed for me. I need a lot of good wishes.
I've done a good bit of reading through the last few months. Haven't had to actually buy many books since my shelves are loaded with books that have been waiting for me to get around to. Hope I can one day read them all, although I may not live long enough for that. I had two books on Horton Foote sitting side-by-side on my shelf. I had forgotten about them. "The Trip to Bountiful" has always been one of my favorites plays and I love the movie with Geraldine Page, too. Reading those two books made me want to write a screenplay. Several years ago I made a stab at it, bought some screenwriting software, and so I updated the software for my newish laptop, and started in on it again. And guess what? I wrote a screenplay. All the way through. From beginning to end. Six times!
It's an adaptation of one of my own novels (the third one), and I was thoroughly engrossed in it from the moment I started. I got lots of help from my agent and just generally had a ball. I changed the ending, deleted characters, streamlined dialogue, and got the thing down from the original 145-page script to a decent 117 pages and I'm (more or less) happy with it. I don't know if anything will come of it, but my agent has it and she will decide if it has merit enough to submit somewhere. The main thing, for me, is it got my writing juices flowing and I'm anxious to get onto the next project. I've got about three of them rattling around in my head, and we shall see which one takes hold.
So I guess for me there has been an upside to this terrible pandemic, although it has more to do with forced isolation than anything. I hope the medical scientists can get this thing licked pretty soon. We've lost far too many people in this country and over the world, and far too many have suffered. There are just a couple more months left of this endless, awful year, and good riddance to it. I urge anyone who might be reading this to wear your mask, maintain social distance, and stay safe and well. Until next time --
Onward...
