That's My Bix!

Hello from our new normal.

Hello, person on the other side of the screen. I am on this side. You are on that side. We are keeping each other safe this way. Thank you for keeping yourself safe and for keeping everyone around you safe by doing the right thing and staying in your homes.

A long time ago (More than 20 years! Oh my god, please excuse me while I crumble into dust and blow away) I started writing online because I felt alone. And I felt lonely. These are two different things — feeling alone and feeling lonely. You can feel lonely in a crowded room. You can feel alone when you’re with people who swear they understand you and yet, you don’t feel like they do. Writing into the ether helped me feel less alone and less lonely. From the emails and comments I’ve received, it helped you too. I thought about resurrecting this page after the 2016 election, but instead I poured myself into building a book festival for the city I call home. And then I went to graduate school and got my PhD (well, at the end of this month, I’m ABD right now but the D is in the hands of my committee — wow, that sounded so pervy! I gave them my D! YEAH I did!)

(Please forgive me for that last parenthetical. It’s been awhile. I’m awkward talking about this now. Ha! Hey, is that the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile outside? Maybe you should go look just in case.)

So here’s a weird thing: Over the last decade, I’ve been writing a very ambitious novel. Off and on, as one does. My grandmother died. I planned a book festival. Esteban got really sick and then he got better. All of those things were pauses in the writing. And then because I blow things up in my head and have a whopping helping of uncertainty and self-doubt, I chose to finish it for my creative dissertation, because that way I could do one super encompassing thing like reading all of the books that ever were and cramming them into my sad little head over the period of three years, and also, have a room full of smart literature people make me finish the novel despite its imperfections and then tell me that it was indeed a book. So that’s what I’ve been doing since 2017 — writing this book and reading so many many other books and meeting great writers and talking about words all the live long day. It has been quite glorious, to be honest. I passed my comps test in February and defended those tests successfully. And then I sat down to write the ending of the novel — heads down, as they say, full steam ahead.

So here’s the weird thing: My novel is about a pandemic. It’s about an aging early blogiverse online diarist and what happens when the entire world goes on lockdown in a seemingly really fast period of time due to the exponential spread of a definitely-kill-you-probably viral contagion. And the only socializing happens through social media and the internet and telepresence.

Ha ha ha ha sob sob!

As one of my committee members said “How were you so ahead of this curve we’re trying to flatten?”

Burn the witch!

Now I have the rather unenviable tasks of shopping around a pandemic novel while thousands of writers are currently drafting their pandemic novels. My advisor thinks that I’m going to have to beat publishers off with sticks, but I had sent out a few queries prior to the main lockdown in early February and March, and so far, crickets.

But at least I guess I’ll get a PhD out of this thing? So I guess it’s not entirely for naught. But in the way that my MIL June used to accuse me of somehow manifesting the perfect snowfall for Weetacon just three days before we needed to have snow for the sleighride, I’m a bit freaked out by the novel’s similarities to what’s going on now. No one will ever believe I wrote many of these scenes years ago. Trust me, I’m NOT A GOOD ENOUGH AUTHOR to bang out 120K words and have them make sense in this short amount of time. I swear, I could transcribe this Flintstone-style using a rock and chisel and it would still be faster than my manner of drafting in long hand and then in various Word documents.

We’ll see. We’ll see.

But no matter what happens, I do know this — I would not have had the confidence to write this massive piece of fiction if I hadn’t first had this warm welcoming embrace of the good smart people who have been reading this page for years. Thank you, dear reader. With you, I am not alone. And with me, you’re not alone either. Hi friend. I missed you.