Zero Murders 2020

In this year 2020, arguably the worst year in modern history, there were zero murders in my household and I am counting this as the year’s biggest win. It’s tough to have your whole family piled up on top of each other for weeks and months on end.

It’s a hard year to look back on, for obvious reasons. But in looking, it was really a stellar year for me personally, though I feel a lot of guilt over it. I shipped good work; I enjoyed a lot of family milestones; I got clarity on a bunch of longstanding health issues; and covid-19 lockdown conditions led me to a number of improvements in my home that will bring me delight for years to come.

And then there was an election, which went right, and gives me hope that 2021 can actually be better for more people than just me.

Work

My work year started off poorly; I’d been working on an immersive experience to take place at SXSW for an unnamed TV show, and of course SXSW was canceled just before construction was set to take place.

I finally finished America Inc., the political novel I’d been working on the last few years, and it was released to low sales but uniformly excellent reviews. My hope is that it might see a bit of a renaissance after the inauguration, when real politics is boring again, knock on wood.

And through the summer and fall, I got to work on My Daemon, an app for His Dark Materials. I’m tremendously proud of the app and all the care and work that went into it. It was also a fantastic team to work with, and finding excellent new collaborators is always a joy.

I did not begin meaningful work on a new book of my own. Between no summer camp, remote and hybrid schooling, and work-from-home for those who can do so, I no longer have big chunks of time home alone to focus in the way I need to to produce meaningful chunks of fiction. Shepherding my younger child through school and keeping the house plausibly clean are the most I can handle some days. Such are the times we live in, and I’m trying to be kind to myself about it.

Home

One of the silver linings of quarantine, for us, was a renewed focus on home and home life. We weeded through closets and donated many a carload of things we had no need for, but that someone else might. We had a junk hauler come to take away half the contents of our garage (so many paint cans, cardboard boxes, ancient CRT monitors.)

We planted grass and trees, after a year with no shrubs and months with no lawn — we had the property regraded last year, as part of a massive drainage improvement project, but the winter came before it could be completed.

A bookshelf collapsed, and I at last replaced my 25-year-old unfinished pine IKEA shelves in my office with something sturdier and more professional-looking for all of those video calls we have nowadays.

But Not

Of course, there are many things we gave up this year that would have happened, had it been an ordinary year. Some of them were minor, but others absolutely heartbreaking. I had to (hopefully temporarily) leave my choir, because the demands of These Difficult Times interfered too much. There was no travel this year, aside from a few very early college visits; no long-planned summer trip to Europe. We saw Hadestown in February, but then Broadway closed, though we’d planned a week in the city to see shows over spring break. No summer camp.

My older daughter graduated high school this year; she’d landed the lead in the school musical, and the show was canceled one week before, when lockdown started. Going viral was a poor substitute for the moment she’d been working toward for literal years. Prom was canceled. Graduation was a parking lot affair, with no music and little pomp.

And yet life marches on, whether we’re ready or not. My older child got her driver’s license, was accepted to college and went away in the fall; my younger child began to come into her own as she began high school; she got braces on her teeth; we all had our ordinary arguments, ordinary pleasures, we watched Jeopardy together, ate take-out and delivery to support local business; we brushed our teeth and went to bed at night and trusted that one day, we would again be able to plan for a future that includes adventures.

Maybe in 2021.