Priorities

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Making the Best of COVID: Re-Evaluating My Habits by Renée Gendron (@ReneeGendron)

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Making the Best of COVID: Re-Evaluating My Habits by Renée Gendron (@ReneeGendron)

My brain broke during the second month of self-isolation. There was a tipping point between a grey and miserable spring, the heightened societal anxiety about COVID, and me trying to complete a first draft of a novel that was a struggle. I went from writing 3,000 semi-decent, unpolished, words in an evening to 500 garbled words.

I’m a big picture thinker. I like systems, processes, and patterns. It’s one of the reasons I write ridiculously long series—they have long arcs, nuance, and complexity.

Fill Your House With You by U.L. Harper (@ulharper)

Fill Your House With You by U.L. Harper (@ulharper)

My wife and I decided we needed to get the hell out of our house.

The bathroom is so small, you need to turn to the side to walk between the bathtub and the sink. Once on the toilet, you can rest your elbows on the sink. It’s the only bathroom in a three-bedroom house.

There’s no privacy in the backyard, which wouldn’t be a big deal except for the horror of the broken-down cars parked in my neighbor’s yard. It’s like living next to a cute little junkyard. And the neighbors across the alley always have their music too damned loud at too late an hour. 6 am to 11:30 pm, it’s the same thumping.