Wherever you are in the world, I hope you’re staying safe and healthy!
We’re a week out of our five-week lockdown here in South Africa, but plenty of restrictions are still in place. MANY businesses are still closed, as are schools. Which brings me to the subject of this blog post …
So here’s the thing. Riley (my six month old, for anyone who’s new around here ?) was supposed to start daycare in April, and I was supposed to start properly writing again. I was supposed to finish ELEMENTAL HEIR and publish it sometime this month.
BUT by the end of March, we were all in lockdown, so that obviously didn’t happen!
Our country is still figuring out exactly when and how schools are going to restart. The current proposal suggests a phased approached, beginning in June, but I don’t know yet what this means for daycares. And even when they DO reopen those, will I feel that it’s safe enough to send Riley, or would I prefer to keep her home, even though it means getting little work done?
So I’ve embraced the fact that I will be full-time parenting and not-much working for the foreseeable future. Amazon is allowing authors to cancel/move preorder dates because of COVID-19 and the extent to which it has affected people’s work/plans/schedules/lives.
I’m moving the preorder date for ELEMENTAL HEIR waaaaaay out into the future (currently it was due to release on May 26th), just because I have no idea how the next few months are going to go.
I hate doing this (AGAIN), and I regularly feel like a giant failure because I look around at other author moms who homeschool multiple children, look after a baby, and write a new book every month, and I think WHY CAN’T I DO THAT??!
But I can’t. So I may as well enjoy baby babbles and lengthy, messy food experiences and making colored spaghetti and edible putty and hiding toys inside jelly and reading out loud and singing and turning kitchen items into musical instruments and discovering blades of grass and flower petals and the texture of every carpet in the house.
And I’ll write little bits here and there, and ONE DAY, I will finish writing a book again! ?