Thankfulness (Covid Edition)

Hello! It’s Tuesday again, and time for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl). Sorry I didn’t post last week, I so wanted to post about the pets and kids that I named after book characters, but I was so darned busy. Maybe I’ll use it next freebie week. Anyway, this week is Thanksgiving in the US. Some people have suggested cancelling Thanksgiving, but I don’t think you can cancel it any more than you can cancel your birthday. You can choose to go to work, cross out the word “Thanksgiving” on your calendar, and eat hamburgers instead of turkey on that day, but that doesn’t change the day. Besides, it’s good to be thankful.

So this week we’re posting about things we’re thankful for. This year it might be more difficult. Last year I posted about more bookish things, so this year I’ll post about more 2020 related things. Some of them are still a little bookish.

Financial Miracles. This has actually happened to me twice in approximately the last month. And these aren’t isolated incidents either.

So about a month ago, I needed to pay for my sponsor child. We started sponsoring him last year, when money was (relatively) okay. If I would have paid the bill, we would have been left with about $7 in the bank account. I paid it anyway, because we could survive on $7 until the next unemployment check came in. Two days later, we got a check in the mail: my mom had sent us $1000 because she didn’t want us buying groceries with a credit card.

Last week, it happened again. We usually make a shoebox for Operation Christmas Child. It costs $25 to pack a shoebox online. I’ve been wanting a nice DSLR camera for about 10 years now; I’ve been trying to save up for one with my Zazzle money, but it always seems like my boy needs school books or something. Anyway, I felt that I needed to spend some of my savings on making a box for a kid, and a day later, I got a check for $95 (it’s the money I get teaching for half a semester).

Health. I think this is one thing we often take for granted, but not so much this year. My family has (so far) escaped the coronavirus plague. I like to think that I selfishly wear a mask whenever I leave my house (I consider it a selfish, yet harmless to others act because even though other people benefit, I’m protecting myself), but there are some people that do everything right and still get sick. And even though I bought masks in January, I didn’t start wearing them until March 20th.

I Didn’t Give Marie Lu Coronavirus. This seems like a weird thing to be thankful for, but here’s the story for this. The Penguin Teen Tour came to Denver on March 5. I was already starting to get concerned about the coronavirus. About my only precaution at the time was I wasn’t touching door handles. Anyway, the next day I felt a little nauseous. Even though nausea isn’t a symptom of coronavirus, my writer brain starts thinking “what if I got people there sick yesterday?” Because there was a huge crowd there. Fortunately, the book signing was not a super-spreader event. Two weeks later, there had only been a total of 363 cases and 4 deaths in my state (those were the days, right?).

I’m Completing My Legend Set! Some of you may know that I love the Legend series by Marie Lu. One thing I didn’t have was the short story “Life After Legend.” I had read it (I went out and bought the Warcross paperback edition specifically for that), but I really wanted the original booklet. It came out before I started book blogging and pre-ordering books by my favorite authors. Anyway, last week someone posted about how they had a difficult bookish wish. I posted that I had a difficult bookish wish too. My friend Mary on Twitter asked me what my bookish wish was, and when I said it was “Life After Legend,” she said she had a copy to give to me.

It gets better. I’ve been looking for “Life After Legend” on eBay periodically for a couple years now. I never find it. After I posted on Twitter about my bookish wish, I checked eBay again. No, they didn’t have “Life After Legend,” but they did have a physical copy of “Life Before Legend.” I didn’t even know that was a thing except as a Kindle book. So I picked that up and it’s sitting on my bed right now.

The End to my Reading Slump? If you’ve seen my seasonal TBRs and Monthly Wrap-Ups this year, you know that my reading has been horrible this year. I went from reading 11 books in January to six books last month. Six. I’ve already read seven books this month! My fall TBR is finished with the exception of A Sky Beyond the Storm (which doesn’t come out until next week). Now if I could only start blogging more.

Online Teaching is a Success? I teach Spanish and German to homeschoolers. When they said they were going to move all classes online this year, I was skeptical. I had never taught anything online before. Well, it turns out that it’s so easy to teach online! It allows me to put in all these pretty pictures and stuff. Part of it sucks because class prep takes forever, and sometimes the kids have their cameras off and I feel like I’m talking to myself, but it’s been working out. Right now we’re supposed to return to in-person instruction next year (don’t know if that will actually happen), but I’ve already requested a TV for the class, because it’s so helpful for me to put all the information on the screen.

No Coop This Week! I know I just said that online teaching is going well, but it’s also a lot of work. This week is fall break, I have two weeks after that, and then I can relax. If I was smart, I’d start class prep for next week, so I’m not in a rush Sunday and Monday next week.

37,470. That’s the number of words I’ve written in NaNoWriMo (so far). And I haven’t written today. I have a post scheduled for November 30th about this, but there were two years that I failed NaNoWriMo, and one year I didn’t write at all. So I’m thankful that I’m on track to win again.

It’s Time to Query! Every year, agents always say never to query your NaNoWriMo letter on December 1st. So last year, what did I say? “It’d be funny to start querying my NaNoWriMo novel on December 1st.” And so, I am. I have two queries ready, I plan to send out five.

The reason why they tell people not to query their NaNoWriMo books on December 1st is because they don’t want people hitting 50k on November 30th, winning NaNoWriMo, and sending out their unedited first draft the next day. The NaNoWriMo novel I’m planning on sending out was finished sometime in January of 2019, and I’m on my seventh draft.

Pandemics Don’t Last Forever. I think some people have a hard time understanding this one. I’ve heard people say “I won’t leave my house until there’s a vaccine!” As if they still plan on holing up in their houses in 2050 when nobody’s even contracted the virus in over a decade (they were saying this before scientists even knew if a vaccine was possible or not).

People aren’t still afraid of the 1918 H1N1 virus, are they? With that particular strain of the virus, people could be healthy at breakfast and drop dead by lunchtime. I’ve had multiple people say to me “but H1N1 is still around!” H1N1 is a particular description of what the virus looks like. There’s multiple H1N1 virii, just like there’s more than one coronavirus. The particular strain of H1N1-1918 is no longer out killing people. And the coronavirus that’s ravaging the world right now will simply be a memory in a couple years.

And I’m very thankful about that.

Next week, we’re going to talk about books I want to read again. I’m often rereading books and typically have one book I’m rereading (although right now because of NaNoWriMo I’m not). See you then!