"My shirt is soaked with my son's tears..."
And other fatherly moments
I Am Humbled.
I really did feel like I could do it, like I could finish this novel in the hidden corners of free time between working, fathering, and husbanding (not to be confused with husbandry-ing). But the shift work, the time-zone hopping, and the un-sleeping child left no corners to hide in. There was no time but futile, minutes-long attempts to wring words from my deflated and minimally functional brain. The words just weren’t there man.
All Hail the Sleeping Baby.
But hallelujah! The child sleeps! We have had four nights of full night sleeps in the last week (the trip to the island and co-sleeping nightmares not withstanding - but that’s another story) and neither of us has arguably EVER felt better! I have been reading, Katie has caught up on Netflix, and more importantly, there have been corners to hide in and write. I mean like hundreds, sometimes surpassing thousands of words. I thought I was bigger than the sleep-dep. I thought I could overcome the horrors of not-sleeping. I am not. I am humbled. I am grateful.
The (Not-So) Synthetic Dusk.
When I coined this newsletter it was because I was writing from my drywalled and painted, carpeted crawlspace (we like to call it the loft area) in Whistler. A Covid-Era project to give us more space. It worked. A windowless hole to crawl into and hide when the need to write hit, a darkness only broken by the dusk of synthetic lights.
Now I write from an office with a view. A mountain aptly named “Sky Pilot” looms above our home, still snow covered now at the end of June. The Chief, a local legend and giant cliff-face appears if I crane my neck. This room is no longer a synthetic anything, the sky is illuminated until well after 10pm and I have yet to install any lighting that can keep me up beyond the actual dusk. Perhaps with the child sleeping I’ll outlast the sun, unlikely but possible.
H5N1.
In case you have any interest in outbreaks, epidemics, pandemics, or even future history, I suggest following the latest news regarding what’s happening with H5N1. Yes it’s bird flu, yes there’s only been 4 human cases in the US so far, but doesn’t this all sound a little familiar? Of note, H5N1 has a 50% kill rate, Sars-Cov-2.0 was below 1%.
I’m not into fear mongering and my knowledge of these diseases is limited to what I’m able to research on the internet, but if I were writing a thriller about a bad actor with an interest in biotechnology, would I consider having the character release an engineered virus into a non-human species and hoping it might mutate? Would that virus look like H5N1? Could it used as a bioweapon? Some wars are fought over decades, and not all are fought with armies…food for thought anyway.
The Busy Times They Are A Changing.
The house is almost completely furnished. The HSBC banking nightmare transition to RBC is complete. The lawn is mowed (mown?). Things are noticeably settling in our lives and it feels fucking good. I said it would be five years for this covid thing to pass, and with a little more than six months to go, I hope very strongly that a) my predictions for a president like Cook (in my novels) do not come to pass and b) that H5N1 washes past us like water down a drain.
But we shall see.