One of the things that has been perhaps getting in the way of my writing process (besides my allergies) is the current coronavirus surge in Taiwan. Since we have friends and family in Taiwan, we're quite concerned about what's happening, of course, and this sometimes results in paying too much attention to the minute-by-minute updates provided online and through 24-hour Taiwanese news stations that we are able to access.* I appreciate the daily updates on the situation provided by Brian Hioe at New Bloom magazine, but I realized last night that checking that first thing every morning was putting me out of the mood to write.
So this morning I decided not to check the news (or even email) until after I had done some work. And it helped! I did some work on the paper, trying to make my argument clearer among all the details I've piled up (this is a problem I usually have--I tend to get stuck among the weeds too much in my writing). I might work on the paper some more later today, but right now am trying to keep my son's attention on his remote kindergarten class.
*I remember when the 921 earthquake happened in 1999, we were in Syracuse and there wasn't anywhere near the access to updated news that there is now. It's hard to believe, but there was no online streaming news video, the Taipei Times had just started its online version, and we could only watch about half an hour of news from Taiwan a day on cable.
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