Looking Back at 2020 aka The Darkest Timeline
We here at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises are ready for 2020 to be over. So ready, in fact, that we’re starting our year-end review now, a couple of weeks early. Who’s with us?
Remember the Beforetimes? When there were things worth celebrating? We started 2020 on quite a high note. Renovations wrapped up on the Auxiliary Writing Cave, complete with hidden bookshelf. We wrapped up the first draft of Sibling of Music Novel. We were planning a trip to Romania and Hungary. Things were looking so rosy.
We spent February rereading our Music Series, and practicing the mystical art of placing chapter breaks and perfecting pacing.
In March we lamented our missed vacation (spoiler alert: still on hold), explored how many reminders readers need versus how many they appreciate, and debated the difference between villains and monsters. In 2020, Covid is the main monster. There are many, many villains.
By April we’d started actually editing the third Music Novel, the biggest bad boy who ever bad-boyed. First we made it bigger, then we made it smaller. It was a whole thing, and we got quite philosophical about the whole process.
May brought more editing, and a cryptically described disagreement between the two of us. So cryptic that we don’t actually recall what we were at loggerheads over. Which is a good sign for our partnership, both marriage-wise and coauthor-wise.
No summer vacation for us! In June we just took innumerable walks around the neighborhood with the dogs, using the time to dig into our next project. It has the incredibly creative working title “Ghost Series.” You’ll never guess what it’s about.
By July, we were done with both Son of Music Novel, and the minor touchups we wanted to give Sibling of Music Novel. And we watched Hamilton.
The rereading and editing of the Science Novels started in August. Kent’s voice got quite a workout, because when we wasn’t reading the trilogy aloud, we were still talking about the Ghost Series on our daily walks. We wrapped up the month discussing how much of a character’s backstory an author should know.
It seems we didn’t have a lot to say about editing the second Science Novel in September, because all of our posts are about how excited we are about brainstorming the Ghost Series. We did spare a few minutes to talk about the joys and wonders of a good Goose Wrench.
Fittingly, October was also a time to talk about our ghosts. We even had a spooky encounter on one of our nighttime walks. We updated our writing prompt generator, and dealt with a minor case of burnout.
November had Jen finishing her edits on Son of Science Novel and starting in on Grandson. Kent followed not too far behind. We had Quarantine Thanksgiving without our kids, and engaged in a little bit of self-promotion.
Which brings us up to the present day. Kent is getting his geek on, drawing a cutaway view of a major setting in Son of Science Novel (standard floor plans are for chumps!), while he lets Jen get a little further ahead in her edits of Grandson. He’ll soon have to put his shiny toys away and pick up his flensing tools.
Looking back over this past year, we were surprised to see nary an update to our chain story’s Dramatis Personae, so look for that sometime soonish.
2020 was certainly not the year we wanted it to be, but it wasn’t all bad. Even spending all day together every day since mid-February, Kent and Jen still actively enjoy each other’s company. May you be as lucky in your choice of spouse and/or writing partner.