I've been thinking lately that I could make sending a weekly newsletter my resolution for 2021. I tried to remember, did I even have a resolution for 2020? Surely it went out the window, oh, around March 13. But then I remembered it was to not share links without reading them, something that quickly went from resolution to habit, and which I'm very happy about.
But why wait until January 1, and maybe I'll change my mind anyway. But right now, Miles is still napping, the treacherous last hour of the nap that may or may not happen, so I'm typing against the clock (a clock I can't see). We'll see what comes of it! I'll hit send when he wakes up.
I've been a freelance writer full-time for about three years now, and on the side for at least a decade, and December's become a time when writers have a pass to re-share our work from the previous year, in lovely twitter threads that we hope a few people might click on, but inevitably at least get faved. (The fave-to-click ratio is always horrifying, on anything, ever. Read things, please! Or at least click the link so your writer friend's twitter stats look more pleasing to their anxious eye.) But other than the last couple of my romance columns, I think I published literally nothing this year? I've been working on my book (now looking like it'll come out in 2022), editing for Future Tense at Slate, plus the whole raising a child in the pandemic thing. So this isn't self-flagellation. It's just weird, to feel less visible on the internet, a place that even before this year was the site of much of my social life. (Surely that has nothing to do with me reviving this letter!)
A neon green dump truck just drove by and I'm so sad Miles wasn't awake to see it.
I guess I did publish one thing, which is the foreword to The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020, this year's edition of the series I series-edit. (Every year a different fancy science writer is the guest editor and picks the final selections for the anthology.)
I wrote the foreword in April, to accompany a book of pieces that had been written in 2019. It was weird! This is how it opens:
I’m writing this from within a very strange time capsule, not at the moment it’s sealed nor the moment it’s opened, but from somewhere weird in between. I’m writing this from New York City, in the middle of April 2020. The coronavirus pandemic feels to be in full swing, but for all I know, this could still be the early ramp-up to something still unimaginable. This year’s guest editor, Michio Kaku, wrote his introduction this past winter, when this virus was news but not yet the omnipresent fact of daily life around the world; you’re reading this in the fall of 2020 or later, you know so much that’s still to come for me. I’m going to read this again, then, too, in the pages of our book instead of as I’m typing it at the little desk now wedged into my bedroom, so this is a time capsule but also a letter to my future self—I hope she, and all of you, are okay. (Who knows what late 2020 is like, but in April we are doing a lot of telling people we write to, “I hope you’re doing okay.”)
April in New York City was in many ways the worst. And the rest of the year was indeed unimaginable. Looking back to April's Jaime, I want to say, "Yes, we are okay. Miles is talking now—he calls dump trucks 'dumpies' and named the stuffed animals he sleeps with 'babies' with no help from you. You live in a house, now, in Connecticut now, and you feel a bit more like you can breathe. Everything is hard and boring and scary, but not as hard or scary as it was in April. More boring, but that's probably good. You ordered Christmas lights and they'll be here next week, and you're going to leave them up until either we set the clocks forward or we get the vaccine—yes, past-Jaime, one is coming—whichever comes first."
I hope you're doing okay.