It’s a weird situation we have here: living in a pandemic and thanking our lucky stars. Wait, what luck? For some of us it’s luck that we’re healthy, for others that we’re still getting paid, and for still others that those paychecks come for work done from the safety of home. People like me who check all three boxes let out a grunt of relief: Gratitude that a deadly pandemic has been, for me, no more than a major inconvenience.
My most minor bit of luck, at the very bottom of the hierarchy of good fortune, has been the timing of my book. As a reminder: I turned in the manuscript in January, learned in February that the peer review had been positive, and in March my editor at the University of Michigan Press started working on her edit. That means I’ll be doing revisions semi-soon, which means that publication (I think) is at least several months away, likely slowed by the pandemic.
☝️Yep, I’m a basic bread boy now
I’m OK with it. For one, all this lag time has given me time to relax and, recently, focus on my job, which has been really busy. (Colleges are trying to figure out just how disruptive the pandemic will be. My money is on extremely.) Second, I watched as a bunch of authors with March or April book releases saw their promotional events get canceled amid the coronavirus lockdown. It was disconcerting to see.
Even if we’re still locked down to some degree when my book is released, I’ll have time to plan the promotion. Many authors were taken completely by surprise and forced to re-plan on the fly. (Including friend-of-the-newsletter Sarah Frier, who turned several of her in-person events into Zoom events on a dime. Buy her book!)
I’ll have more to share soon about the revisions and promotional processes, and hopefully some thoughts about how reading and writing can help keep us sane in this era. I know there’s been a bit of time lag since my last edition, but I fully intend on keeping this newsletter regular.
For now, this new feature for our inside lives:
Recommendations corner
You have…
1 minute: Excellent script, I’ve watched this 10 times. (h/t Colleen)
20 minutes: My brother’s fantastic essay on family ghosts in the Oxford American.
24 hours: This sensational book of essays.
A few minutes a few times a week: Subscribe to my colleague’s newsletter on small moments of joy she finds throughout the day.
1 week (or so): So many of you have probably read this novel already, but I finally got to it recently and was blown away.
— Andy
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