As you might have heard, the Eastern United States experienced a brutal cold snap these past few days. Here in New York City, the temperature is only getting above the freezing mark today, for the first time in almost a week. As it happens, my days off from work are Thursday and Friday – the very days that the “bomb cyclone” tore into the Northeast. I woke up Thursday morning to see whiteout conditions outside my window, with the wind shrieking like an entire phalanx of banshees, and thus I promptly decided to hide under my covers for another few hours. So if you were hoping this week’s blog post would depict some epic adventure, I’m afraid I must disappoint you. Since my last post, apart from work, I’ve barely stepped outside.
Fortunately, this is a productive condition to be in when you’re a writer. Despite the usual distractions (being pestered by my cat, having to check online news every five minutes or so to see if we still have a country), I managed to get the opening scenes of my next play drafted. It’s slow going, because this script is particularly complex, but there’s a couple thousand words that weren’t there before.
And from my forays into Facebook, it’s clear I’m not the only one who thought to take advantage of all this enforced isolation. All throughout Thursday, as people either arrived home early or chose not to go in to work at all, they’d announce that they were safe, and reasonably warm – and that they’d begun writing for the day. At least a half dozen of my friends began projects over this long and frozen weekend. (This includes a friend of mine who was just shortlisted for this year’s Relentless Award, so we should all look forward to what she has coming next. Just saying.)
They say, during times of crisis, to expect a baby boom nine months thereafter. Well, writers are solitary creatures, so unless human biology has changed recently I would expect much in the way of literal babies. Metaphorically speaking, however? There’ll be a whole bunch of scripts whose birth we can celebrate in nine months’ time.
Now if only we could get some producers interested…