Of COVID and Writing by Bonnie Le Hamilton

 

This past weekend I panicked two of my relatives doing one thing, but they panicked for different reasons.

What did I do?

I ended up in the hospital with COVID.

Who panicked?

Well, for starters, my sister-in-law, who lives here in town, panicked over my being in the hospital with COVID. She was afraid I was going to die because she’s already lost friends to the disease.

The other one to panic was Konnie.

Her issue wasn’t that I had COVID but that I was in the hospital with no access to my computer and a post due in a matter of days. As her last post stated, she’s in over her head with no spare time on her hands. She categorically could not sub on my turn this week.

So, now I’m home. I’ve calmed down my sister-in-law, but Konnie is still worried about me posting. Who can blame her? I am having trouble concentrating (more so than usual) and I keep dozing off.

This leaves me with sitting at my computer for a few minutes at a time trying to write something coherent when my brain would rather make the room spin than my thoughts find their way from my gray matter to the keyboard.

You would think she could be happy I lasted this long without getting COVID.

And it wasn’t like I didn’t panic myself when the ER nurse said they were admitting me. I mean who was going to take care of Patches? And who was home on the holiday weekend to even receive my call? I mean at first, no one was answering my messages, and I was even having trouble getting my church address book to open, limiting who I could contact.

I finally got a positive response, but she insisted she had no way to get into my apartment. I reminded her my neighbors had my spare keys. I’d have just called them, but I didn’t have their number!

Everything was fine until my friend let me know Patches had meowed his voice raw before she got there. He was distraught that he couldn’t find me. Now I panicked.

In the nearly three years I’ve had Patches, I spent a whopping one weekend away from home and that was just weeks after I got him. (Don’t worry, I left him with plenty of food and water.) But since then, the longest I had been away from home in a day is around 8 hours, and most days it was between five and a half and six hours. I do only work five-hour shifts. My long days are when I have stuff like appointments or errands to do before or after work. But I always return home in time for dinner until this past Saturday, a day I normally either stay home or run just one quick errand.

The way he is acting now, he has separation anxiety, because now he panics if he wakes up and I’m not where he last saw me. Either that or he’s just worried about me, considering that for the past week he has insisted on curling up next to or on me at every turn.

Yes, he was keeping a really close eye on me; I should have realized just from his behavior something was really wrong with me.

He’s starting to calm down, but now I’m worried about how he’s going to respond when I can actually leave the house again.

On top of all this, I have been trying to tweak my query and blurb for my speculative fiction novel and edit the first book of my science fiction series. (As in actually getting it finished.) I’m adding in scenes to flesh out the story better. Or at least I was trying to. Like I said, I’m having more trouble than usual concentrating.

Does anyone have time to do a critique or two on my query and blurb? If I ever get new ones written.

I’d ask Konnie, but obviously, she doesn’t have time. Me, I have way more time than I was planning to have, too bad I can’t seem to stay awake, let alone concentrate.

And to top it all off, this has been officially the worst birthday I’ve ever had, and that is saying something when heretofore my worst birthday was the one where Dad called and instead of saying hi or asking how I was doing, he announced, “He’s taller than you.”

And that was just the icing on a dreadful day all around because my husband ended up having to work on the fourth and was supposed to get the fifth off instead. It was evening when Dad called, and still no husband.

Anyway, happy writing everyone!