Bernadette Benda

Things were weird, and then they got WEIRDER.

Things are being cancelled, people are buying toilet paper like they are preparing to mummify themselves, and who new that during the apocolypse people would be stocking up on toilet paper and not booze? At the same time life just sort of…goes on???

Anyway, I vote that we are living in a YA dystopian. For those of us growing up reading dystopian novels and then reading books about epidemics and other apocalyptic events, our time has now come.

Things are getting weirder by the hour around here. At least I have plenty writing to get done (just watch, while we’re all in quarantine we’re gonna have severe writer’s block), and am thinking of doing Camp NaNo this year, but I always have a hard time setting “goals” for editing (I would be editing Lily). Small goals, yes. Finish reading through it by the end of the week, etc. But for over a month??? Like I can’t choose “finish”. Rewrite it five times??? I DON’T KNOW. I was thinking of having a goal for the amount of hours spent on it. Maybe I’ll do that.

I guess I will figure this out this week when I reread Lily (I set it aside this past week).

I went to the grocery store with my mom the other night and it was – weird. The weirdest thing was seeing what people were buying and what they weren’t buying. Like all the bread was gone, but there were plenty of oranges (people!! Oranges have vitamin C!!!). All the milk was gone (featuring a saga of my mom and I trying to reach dairy products that were too far back and this nice lady constantly coming to assist us), but no one was buying chocolate (if you’re in quarantine, you’re going to want chocolate, believe me).

And I’m not going to lie but there’s a part of me through this whole thing is like, “Well, if I’m going to write that pandemic novel I’ve been wanting to write, here is all my research being done.”

Because this is what writers do. That’s why my favorite part of Knives Out was when the old guy was writing down the method of dying from the overdose to use in one of his mystery novels, as he was like – dying. Yep, that’s a writer.