Absorbing January

Look, it’s a new, shiny New Year! Out with the old, in with the new!

I enjoy a good New Years Eve party like anyone might, especially with music and friends. But the anticipation of a clean slate? A fresh sheet of paper? A real positive difference to the state of the world, or to our lives?

Such bunk.

Perhaps it’s residual trauma. Several decades ago, a surprise holiday gift of a permanent layoff from a job I enjoyed. Not my fault: downsizing. No notice, just out the door you go with a severance check and your personal items from your desk. The only time in my life I had to scramble to apply for unemployment to make ends meet, and of course, government offices weren’t open.

Or that time I spent a New Years Eve in Key West with my sister and a friend and a boyfriend, all sharing one hotel room to split the outrageous fee, and I finally came face-to-face with the reality that he was all about himself. I should’ve broken it off then instead of suffering the indignities I did afterwards.

Or that my grandmother died while I was on that Key West trip and the weather was so blizzard-bad on the East Coast that I could not get to her funeral, by car or plane.

Or that my father died on New Years’ Day a decade later. I wasn’t home. I’d tried to take him and Mom to Big Cypress as a holiday gift, but his health gave out en route. I turned around at Punta Gorda and took him to see his doctor, then returned to Big Cypress myself to spend New Years Eve there.

And then there’s that little thing called January 6th. The horror of an insurrection, of an attack on our Capitol, stopped me dead in my tracks. Whatever I was up to at the time, and I truly don’t remember what it was (for Covid-time was surreal-time) I couldn’t go on. Physically I was here. Mentally I shut down for at least a month.

To the best of my recollection, my coping mechanism was to slap on a pair of headphones and be anywhere but in real time:

• I absorbed the canon of the Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, a top NBC radio comedy program that was a staple of my grandparents’ post-WWII lives.
• I absorbed every single slow-motion word, beep, click, and scratch of every one of the manned Apollo missions.
• I listened to music from the 40s and 50s. I highly recommend listening to this ensemble piece led (and with lyrics) by Johnny Mercer, debuted in Berlin, 1947. Relevant then, relevant after Jan 6, relevant now more than ever.

I wanted to be anywhere but here that January.

And as if to punctuate what is wrong with January this January, for horror upon horror keeps sweeping across the American landscape, before even getting out of the car at the host hotel for the SATW St. Augustine gathering I listened as my cousin Sean—a gentle, calm, creative soul—struggled as he delivered the news that none of us should have to as elder siblings: his younger brother, Keith, had died. I feel his pain.

Trying to blot out the relentless creeping evil for which I can only afford a sliver of my mind to acknowledge, for how it actively undermines my physical health, I absorbed myself this January in long-needed utterly boring technical tasks. Makework. Rebuilding websites. Moving pixels around.

For balance against those mind-numbing tasks, I read. A lot. We do that every evening as a norm, but this January was a full-on jump into the deep end.

Twenty books read. Heavy on science fiction and historical fiction. And wow, some serious worldbuilding within. Worlds worth escaping to for escapism, for January always calls for that for me.

It’s occurred to me that at this pace, my year-end wrap-up of favorite reads will be a novel in itself. So in a month like this, it makes sense to share why I enjoyed so many of these so much in the here and now.

I’d meant to in this essay. Instead, I just explained the why of why I’ve read so much in January. I haven’t written any reviews yet, but do check the book review section of this site, as they’ll pop up there.

Meanwhile, in my writing life: I have sent my first novel to an agent a dear friend connected me with. Awaiting a response. I know in this business, it takes time.

I registered to spend a long weekend at the annual Pennwriters Conference, which was so valuable to me last year with its workshops heavy on how-tos for fiction and so much useful input on my writing.

I’ve had the plot of a science fiction short story bubble up in my brain, the first time that’s happened in 40-odd years. I’ve sketched it out.

And a few days ago, I found a writing prompt tucked away that launched me into the start of a new story that’s nothing like anything I’ve written before:

He didn’t look like the type of man to buy a goldfish on a Thursday morning.

Because I have to keep busy. To keep sane. Because January almost always sucks.
But not always. A delightfully unexpected January 2012 led to December 2014, after all.

This January, Minnesota rocks. Thank you, Minnesotans, for your courage.