I’ve seen a lot more people reflecting on social media about how their year went in 2020 than I usually do. It was a weird year, a hard year in many ways. It was a hard year for me for some additional reasons that had nothing to do with covid-19.
2020 was supposed to be the year for trips. Jonathon and I haven’t really been able to afford vacations other than road trips to visit parents . . . ever. But we decided to go to northern California to visit my sister’s family before they moved away. It would have been our family’s first real family vacation. It would have happened the first week in April. My sister moved to Utah in May, so even though we plan to go to California once it’s safe to do so, her family won’t be there, and that makes me really sad.
Then, at the end of April,Jonathon and I were going to attend ACES together (the conference for the American Copy Editors Society), since it was supposed to be in Salt Lake City this year. I was so excited to meet some of his old friends and some of my friends and to learn more about editing and to have four whole days away from my normal life responsibilities. This would be the longest the two of us had been away from the kids since our oldest was born fourteen years ago (we’ve had a night away, twice). But ACES was cancelled too. And since we probably can’t afford for me to fly to ACES, I don’t anticipate being able to go any time soon, which makes me REALLY sad.
The next thing to be cancelled was a family reunion for my mom’s side of the family. We hold these every three years, and it will happen in 2021, covid-19 allowing.
So March and April were kind of heartbreaking. A lot of people had cancelled vacations and plans then, but I feel particularly salty about ours because the plans that got cancelled were literally some of the first plans our family ever made.
One thing I don’t talk about here much is that I am also a piano teacher. I’ve been teaching for over twelve years now, and I love it. Anyway, piano teaching this year has been hard. Starting in mid-March, I taught only through Zoom for months. That involved buying second copies of all the books all my students were using so that I could see their music as well. It involved trying to explain to some little students who don’t read music yet which part of their music I was referring to and explaining how to get their hands to the right place without actually showing them. Six students quit a few weeks into that, but strangely, I was always able to fill any openings in my studio, though I’ve had a lot of turnover throughout the year. One interesting development is that I have been teaching the son of some online friends from another state since June!
Starting in about April, I started composing, arranging, and transcribing music for my students in a website called flat.io. The nice thing about Flat is that I can share a private link to each score with my students, and I can share my screen while using the MIDI playback to show them how something should sound, or I can share my screen and point to the part of the music I’m talking about with my mouse. Pretty soon every single one of my students was playing at least one of my songs. It was weird but cool.
I’d done some composing and arranging in the past, but in 2020, I created over seventy scores in Flat. Many of these were scores I’d already entered into Finale Songwriter, but I like Flat so much better that I moved them over. One of the reasons I chose Flat in the first place was that I could color-code the note heads in chromatic order (C is red, B orange, A yellow, G green, etc.). I used that as a way to teach note reading to some students who had been struggling, and as a way to quickly reference notes (“Put your finger 2 on the blue E!”).
At the end of 2019, I started drafting my third novel, a science fiction murder mystery loosely inspired by Murder on the Orient Express. I was so nervous to attempt writing a mystery. For years mystery was my genre of choice. I started with The Boxcar Children, moved on to Nancy Drew, and then discovered Mary Higgins Clark and Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I didn’t get far into Sherlock Holmes, unfortunately, before transitioning to a love of science fiction that hasn’t left me yet. But all that mystery reading left me with a skill: I can guess the identity of the murderer in the first quarter of any mystery (TV, movie, or book) the vast majority of the time. I rarely know why it’s them or how they did it, but I have an intuition for it. I figured this might make me uniquely qualified to write a mystery, and I’ve always wanted to do it, but . . . I mean, it’s mystery.
Anyway, somehow I kept writing in 2020, even when everything went crazy, even when I was helping my kids with online school and teaching piano through Zoom and composing and dealing with kids all summer who couldn’t play with friends or really go anywhere. I made small goals: 500 words per day six days a week. And I usually met them. I submitted chapters to my writing group as I completed them, and overwhelmingly, they liked my book. This encouraged me to keep writing.
By the end of September, I’d finished Murder on the Edmonton Rose. I am proud of it. I am currently working on revising it. My goal is to query it widely in 2021 once it’s ready to go.
But let’s back up a little. In June I broke my toe pretty badly, making it difficult to walk for about six weeks. That was terrible timing for summer, since all my plans for keeping four boys busy during their break from school had involved hiking, since nothing else was covid-safe.
Jonathon’s family always does a camping trip together in July, but we decided not to attend this year (it happened without us). Instead, we went camping on our own at a campground on a lake near our house. We rented a kayak and played games and drank a lot of Tang. While at the campground, we lost my six-year-old for over an hour when he ran ahead of us on a trail and took a wrong turn. Remember, I was still hobbling around on a broken toe and couldn’t run to catch up with him. A kind man found him and drove around with my son in his truck asking people if they knew him and eventually found us. I also noticed while camping that my twelve-year-old was looking extremely thin. He’d been losing weight for months, and at first I thought it was a growth spurt–not losing weight so much as stretching out. But by that point it was obvious he didn’t look healthy.
He had other mysterious symptoms: loud, heavy breathing; dry patches on his wrists; random muscle pains; a dull look in his eyes. After we came home from camping, he was constantly cold and lethargic but not fevered. I began to be extremely worried about him. Long story short, within a week he was in the hospital with diabetic ketoacidosis. My boy has type 1 diabetes.
The learning curve for diabetes is steep, and every day has ups and downs. I’ve spent hours and hours researching and learning and going to doctor appointments and pharmacies and on the phone with insurance and others involved in his care. I make hot breakfast every day now, pretty much, when we were a cereal family before. But cereal sends his blood sugar sky high, so it’s not an option anymore.
We chose the online option for our kids when school started up again. 95% of our school district is in person, but especially since we were so new to the diabetes diagnosis and because poorly controlled diabetes can cause complications with covid-19, we didn’t feel safe sending our kids to school in person.
Online school in the fall has been so much more involved and rigorous than it was in the spring. I spend 1-2 hours every day helping my first grader and then a bit more sometimes helping my fourth grader. My ninth grader did PE online, which meant he needed to exercise an hour a day, three days a week, for the entire semester. We did a LOT of hiking and biking, which honestly has been one of the highlights of this year. I also have a large garden, and September and October are the time of year when I’m always busy with harvesting, canning, and freezing everything. Everything takes a lot of time. Most days I’ve been working–cooking, helping with school, doing housework, running errands, gardening, canning, working on diabetes-related stuff, writing, editing, teaching piano, etc.–upwards of 14 hours a day. I’ve felt like I’ve been at my breaking point off and on for months.
Jonathon has been adjuncting an evening editing class this semester too, which has mostly been a great experience for him, but which has meant he’s been crazy busy as well, since he also has a full-time job. I got to guest lecture three class periods (the ones about fiction editing), which was super fun for me but added to my long to-do list.
Just before Thanksgiving, Jonathon started having a LOT of pain in his neck, radiating down his arm and back. He has gone to lots of doctors’ appointments, physical therapy, and a chiropractor, but any improvements have been temporary and not very significant. Thanksgiving and Christmas especially were some of his worst days pain-wise. And I didn’t even mention that he broke his toe this fall.
It’s been a hard year. I have had a few very fun editing projects (I feel the need to plug some of them, including this cool mystery and these delightful coloring and activity books), and we got new windows and a new fridge, both of which were badly needed. I feel closer to my kids because of all the added time we’ve had together, and, y’all, they’re great kids. They’ve rolled with the punches this year and remained kind and cheerful and hopeful. I feel so lucky to have such good kids.
So if you’ve been wondering why I haven’t blogged book reviews since July–well, this is why. I hope 2021 goes a bit better, even if it’s more of the same for the first while. Happy New Year!
