Who could not use more charming stories of love and friendship during these times? Books often seem like the only friends you can hold close right now, so what better than to have a stockpile to keep you going?

The keen eyed among you may notice the CJSW Radio journal from last year’s funding drive (now filled with words). They just wrapped up this year’s edition, but you can donate here all year round. Live radio, peopled by humans from your own neighbourhood, has been quite a luxury these past few months. Sadly, that is not a Vox Magazine journal in the background, but instead a rather nice soft-cover journal with an all-too-ugly corporate logo. It is some rather nice 49th Parallel Middle School Espresso though.

Working from home as been an experience I don’t any of us are ready to unpack just yet, but I have found the pandemic and 2020 creeping into my writing. The Vox journal in particular is full of half-baked ideas involving a pair of medieval knights, a supposed witch, some young priests in training, set against a backdrop of Byzantine Constantinople during one of its plague outbreaks.

Normally, over the course of the spring/summer, I do my best to finish one new manuscript, but this year, concentration has been at a premium, and I found myself flitting from project to project, some days unable to write much of anything at all. This was a pretty common experience among my friends as well. However, as we come up to National Novel Writing Month, I find myself with two competing manuscripts, each in the final stages of first draft completion. So, while I wish everyone participating in NaNoWriMo all the best, and encourage you to be not too disheartened if you find writing more difficult this year than in others, my own writing goal will be to finish these summer manuscripts in order to have a clean slate for winter re-writing.

Slainte!