The summer has ended before it was obvious that it had even begun. As life slowly becomes more similar to what it was like before the crisis, it has probably been slightly easier to be productive.
Activities
After six months, I had my first live performance, getting the chance to debut the song ‘Truth Be Told’. The footage is out of focus, but the audio is fine.
With multiple projects on the go, a novel that still needs much work, a short story collection coming out next year, and a comedy writing course, I have concluded my series of weekly covers, bringing the total to 100. Highlights of the later ones include ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ and ‘Train in Vain’.
Output
This month I did an interview about writing songs in English and Chinese with Egyptian educator and YouTuber Nour Negm.
And, since I was kicked off the joke-sharing website Sickipedia and can’t find a decent place on the internet to test my jokes, I have set up a Twitter account for original humour writing.
Wider World
Like a lot of others, near the start of the crisis, I read ‘The Plague’ by Albert Camus. Pertinent passages include this one:
“In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they have taken no precautions.”
On the subject of books that are relevant to current affairs, as the American election campaign reaches its business end, I have just started reading Philip Roth’s ‘The Plot against America’.
Kevin McGeary 