I confess that lately I have not had as much time as I would like to write fiction, or my Frankenstein project. However, that does not mean I have not been writing. As everywhere else in the world, schools have gone online, and I teach college writing for the majority of my income. I therefore had to convert my classes to an online format. Even though I worked on that throughout the summer, and even took a few training classes to accomplish this, I still had a LOT to do.
This past semester, I taught a total of seven classes as three higher education institutions, and I taught a total of three different classes, a developmental writing class, a beginning composition class, and a research writing class. What it really came down to was essentially the equivalent of writing a college composition textbook that could accommodate all three of those levels of writing. Luckily, I have been teaching for a little over ten years now, off and on, and I had a lot of materials to pick from. I wound up choosing a portion of this old textbook, and a different portion from that one, along with my "all star hall of fame" collection of sample essays to use for the students to pattern their writings after.
This did give me some experience with research writing, and may be some experiences I can use when returning to the Frankenstein project. It also granted me some experience with what works and what does not when teaching online.
The semester has now ended, and after doing some housecleaning, and celebrating the holidays, I am trying to return to fiction writing. A lot of markets seem to be slowing down at accepting and deciding on submissions, however, and the entire publishing world is slowing, partially due to the pandemic, and partially due to the economic impact from the pandemic. It looks like the end of this pandemic is finally on the horizon, but it seems it will also leave us with a world that is far different from what it was before the catastrophe began, just like a good horror story.
