Still Sick with Ice Fog, Thinking About Cover Art, And When Will the Pandemic End?

Spotted Towhee

Still Sick with Ice Fog

Well, we had another week of depressing freezing temperatures with thick fog that trapped in polluted air, so it was basically like 1800’s London all week. I was still fighting off an illness, which morphed into a more dangerous (still not covid, but a different dangerous) illness, so I was trying to stay out of the hospital by constantly annoying my doctors, drinking fluids like it was going out of business, and basically sleeping 24 hours a day. Also, our five-year-old microwave (that also acts as our kitchen venting) exploded, and we couldn’t find another one anywhere. And every time I groggily woke up, the news would be all “highest death rates from covid ever” and “possible war with Russia on Ukraine border.” I think I’m on the upswing, finally. I am looking forward to a healthier February! With hopefully better headlines.

I did a little thinking about the importance we place on productivity, and how the pandemic has forced people into thinking harder about that. How being chronically ill with an immune deficiency forces you to think hard about your choices, how sometimes you’re just not going to be productive, and you have to sort of accept that. Your value isn’t only from what you produce. It’s sort of a Zen realization, to try to learn to be okay with not doing anything, sometimes.

Thinking About the Importance of Cover Art

One thing I did do this week was think about cover art! BOA sent me an author questionnaire and also some forms about cover art for my upcoming book, which sent me into a deep dive and thinking about what the cover of “Flare, Corona” should look like. First, I found out there’s an anime character from a series called “Fairy Tails” named “Flare Corona.” So that was a discovery. Then I found out it’s sort of hard to find a perfect picture of an eclipse with a corona and solar flares, and even if I do, does that really convey the ideas that the book contains? In other words, does it do what good cover art should do – make you want to read the book? I also thought about using a close up from an MRI of a brain lesion, which is only black and white but sort of cool, a black hole with a white halo, but ultimately nixed the idea as too depressing. Most of my books have an identifiable human female on the cover, so going more abstract would be a departure.

Anyway, comment with your feelings on the subject! I’d love to hear from you!

Female bufflehead, a coot, and mallards – commotion on the water

When Will the Pandemic End?

Have you seen many doctors making predictions about when the pandemic will end lately? Yes, me too. With the incredibly fast and wide spread of Omicron and the rise of vaccines around the world, some scientists are saying we may be approaching “endemic” levels – where the pandemic becomes a long-lasting, more normal infection, like how the flu of 1918 came back several times in the last hundred years in different forms to kill a ton of people, but not as many as the first time around. Some countries, like Sweden, are putting protective measures into place for the first time, as their economy get walloped by the Omicron variant, and others, like the UK, have been dropping their defenses (probably resulting in higher death rates). Given the US’s very high death rates, we probably should still be testing, wearing masks, etc, for a little while longer. But (caveat: I am not a doctor, just a poet with a Bachelor’s degree in Biology who has always been interested in virology) I do have optimism that eventually this virus will burn itself out, and every time humans are exposed again to this particular virus, we are less likely to over-react to it. Now, as an immune-suppressed human who was knocked out for three weeks with NOT covid, you know, I don’t want people to get too casual too soon – we still don’t have access to a lot of anti-virals (not until after March, according to one of my doctors, for the Pfizer pill unfortunately – and the hospitals are still overwhelmed) – but maybe we can feel hopeful that by spring or summer, we can start moving towards a new phase of pandemic. Vaccine makers are working on omicron-specific versions, but more important, smaller vaccine companies are working on more shelf-stable, cheaper, more widely-working vaccines for the world – vaccines that would be less expensive, easy to distribute, wouldn’t require extreme refrigeration, and work on more variations of the virus. This would help the whole world, instead of just wealthier countries, which would help the virus spread less easily and develop fewer dangerous mutations. (Remember that four variations of coronaviruses have been causing colds since we were kids – this would just become a fifth variation, we hope.) So, that’s me with some thoughts on the subject, but we’ll really have to wait and see. I’m hoping by my birthday we will finally looking at a little relief.