(This is cross-posted from my newsletter. If you’re not already subscribed, follow this link to sign up.)

I had a lovely Thanksgiving planned. My daughter, son-in-law, and my 14-month-old grandson were flying over from Honolulu to visit for several days. And then last Monday I came down with a nasty cold and on Tuesday, I tested positive for Covid-19. I advised the kids to change their plans.

I never had Covid before. I’ve been vaccinated and boosted, and I still mask when I’m out in public, but I caught it anyway. So be careful out there!

This was the first time I’ve been sick since December 2019. I’m recovering now, but still taking it easy.

When the waltz of the absurd began between Twitter’s Board of Directors and Elon Musk, I blithely assured myself it would lead to nothing—so you can see how skilled I am at predicting the future. My own Twitter experience hasn’t really changed, except I’m trying to break the habit and so I’m hardly there anymore. I have been spending time scrolling on Mastodon, though not posting much. It’s a quiet time for me. I don’t feel like I have a lot to say right now—the lateness of this post being evidence of that.

As I come to understand Mastodon, I find the way it works quite interesting. The biggest factor in its favor is that no single person or Board of Directors can ever control it, which is awesome. The confusing bit is that you have to select a server—or be admitted to one—that will be your home base.

A cool thing is that any person or organization willing to take the trouble and spend the money can set up their own Mastodon server, aka “instance.” Why would you want to do this? Probably because you’re a curious techie willing to take on extra work! But the advantage is you can invite only who you like and who you can get along with to be on that server. Why is this good? Well, because Mastodon offers multiple timelines. One of these is “local” and the local timeline lets you follow posts and boosts (similar to retweets) only from those who “live” on your server.

But, whatever. I’ve been looking only at the “home” timeline which shows me posts and boosts by those I follow. This is the same way I interacted with Twitter and it worked for me. So it doesn’t really matter what server I’m on. I think, from my few weeks of observation, that small servers are subject to the same hazard as small towns—content moderation might become overly strict as in “we don’t want to talk about that here.” In contrast, big servers might enjoy the anonymity of big cities and only the most egregious behavior will be called out. But that’s just speculation.

I’m on a big server run by the founders of Mastodon which seemed like a safe and available choice at the time I signed up (though I think it’s closed for new signups now).

If you’re on Mastodon or decide to give it a try, find me here:
https://mastodon.online/@LindaNagata

Or in the Mastodon search box:
@LindaNagata@mastodon.online

Oops. I’ve realized I haven’t posted anything here since June. Have I been distracted? Well, yes. A lot going on! I have been keeping up with my newsletter. If you’re not subscribed to that, please do! It’s every four weeks, except for those rare times when I have a time-sensitive announcement.

One of the big events of the summer–announced in my newsletter–was the birth of my first grandchild. He lives in Honolulu with his mom and dad. Ron and I have already flown over several times to see him. 🙂

In other news, I was commissioned to write a short story. That is now finished, and is scheduled for publication later this fall.

I’m now working on a second commissioned short story. Yes, a couple of years ago I said I was done with writing short stories, at least for the immediate future…but time has gone by, and both these opportunities were too good to pass up.

Work on the third book of the Inverted Frontier series is progressing in fits and starts, but more on that later.

I’ll try to be a little more active on this blog!

Yes, this blog has a problem. I noticed it yesterday when I put up the post about the Locus magazine review of Pacific Storm. Evidently something changed on the server, because all of my posts older than yesterday now display nonsensical characters where there once was an em-dash, a curly quote, etc.

This is an encoding issue. I’ve been pointed to a resource that describes a potential fix and someday soon I may take on the project — though I’m not convinced it’s worth the effort given that the older posts get very little traffic.

Anyway, I wanted to let you know I’m aware of it.

I wish all of you who celebrate the holiday a happy Thanksgiving.

Years ago I would cook the full holiday spread on my own. The in-laws would fly over from Honolulu and spend a couple of weeks with us, giving them time with the grandchildren. But kids grow up and our elders become more frail. Eventually, the migration reversed, and Ron and I started to fly over to Honolulu for Thanksgiving, where we would celebrate with the extended family at a restaurant.

This year, for the first time in many years, we’re staying home and no one’s coming to visit. Still, I’m thankful for all our good fortune. Our family is small, but we keep in close touch, and we all continue to take precautions during the pandemic. I’m thankful for that, and for our good fortune to live in a community where a great majority of the people are willing to work together to stay safe.

Please take care. And let’s hope that by Thanksgiving 2021, we’ll be free to move around the country (and the world!) again.

Hi there! Today I’m sixty years old. That feels like a significant number. Big and round, LOL. The important thing though is that I got what I wanted for my birthday: the election of Joe Biden to the presidency of the United States of America, and the election of Kamala Harris as vice-president.🇺🇸 Rational, thoughtful, caring people in government. What a fine change for the country that will be!

I’m concerned for the next two months, but hoping for the best.

I offer my sympathies to the people of Georgia who are going to be ceaselessly inundated with political messaging until the January run-off elections for that state’s US senate seats. If you’re a Georgia resident, please, please, please give us a Democratic senate. Vote for the two Democratic candidates. That’s our most direct path to a better future for our country.

As for being sixty — I’m really fortunate, and it’s quite nice. I’m definitely getting up there, but I’m not done yet. There are still a few more novels I’d like to write. 😊🇺🇸🎉🎂

A few days ago, PBS Newshour showed brief interviews with American voters.

One Trump voter, dressed up pretty with several small children running about, proudly declaimed she was “pro-life” — never pausing to consider a quarter million Americans dead of COVID-19, children separated from their parents at the border, or all those doomed to die as fallout of global warming.

Another Trump voter, an older man, angrily declared Joe Biden would force socialism on the country. No doubt he collects social security and has Medicare.

Another claimed to be Christian, and to be upset with the way Trump speaks, but was voting for him anyway because of his great policies. What policies? Truly, I have no idea. Perhaps separating children from their parents? Demanding personal favors from foreign governments? Utterly incompetent response to the corona virus epidemic? Destroying desert ecosystems in the hope of building a wall for which Trump cronies have won extremely lucrative contracts? Striving to accelerate global warming? Opening a protected old-growth forest to logging? The ceaseless misogyny? Destroying government services to give a tax cut to the extremely wealthy? I could go on and on.

We writers are supposed to be able to adopt different outlooks, to get into the minds of different kinds of characters. But I admit it’s hard for me to understand what would move a person to support an obviously corrupt, criminal, ignorant, destructive, divisive politician who lies all the time.

It’s a good bet that if you enjoy my books, you’re not going to be voting to return this criminal to office. If you’ve already voted, THANK YOU! If you haven’t, please do, and vote blue all the way down the ballot. Joe Biden is not exaggerating when he says this election is a fight for the soul of our nation.

We are better—vastly better—than Trump.

I’m doing a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) in just half an hour! This all came together at the last minute, but if you happen to be in the neighborhood, please stop by! I’ll be answering questions between 3pm and 5pm, HST.
Find the AMA here.

My dog is small and has a knack for getting in trouble, so when she asked to go out at 3:45am this morning, I went with her, as always.

The sky was clear, filled with brilliant stars. The motion of a shooting star instantly drew my gaze up. That’s when I noticed a jet, approaching from the west with a trajectory that would take it directly overhead.

The jet appeared as three lights, arranged in a triangle. The weird and interesting thing about it, the reason it’s worth writing up in a blog post, is that the jet appeared to shift slightly back and forth as it passed across the stationary star field. Well, that’s interesting! I thought. Obviously an optical illusion — one that ceased as the jet passed overhead and continued east — but it made me think of the occasional report of a “UFO”** moving back and forth as if unaffected by momentum.

Two other odd bits about this incident: What was that jet doing flying west to east directly over the island at ~3:45am? That is not a usual route. And why was it flying so low? It was low enough that I could easily see the triangle of lights. Also, the sound of the engines very closely tracked the position of the plane, instead of being widely offset (due to lag in the speed of sound), as happens when a jet is flying at a more usual cruising altitude. My guess is it was a military plane, part of RIMPAC maybe, or maybe the crew just needed some hours in the air.

Anyway, this is the sort of thing that occupies my mind at 4am, and makes it hard to go back to sleep. 🙂

** As we all know, UFO stands for “Unidentified Flying Object.” It does not stand for “alien spaceship.” I cringe every time someone assumes the latter. When I was a teen, my dad was licensed to fly small planes. When I flew with him, it was my job to help look out for other planes and helicopters. When you’re in the air, you want to identify all the flying objects in the vicinity, the better to avoid a mid-air collision. 😉

My most recent newsletter went out last week with no mention of COVID-19. I suspected that at that point my readers were saturated with virus coverage and didn’t want to hear even more about it from me. But here we are, a week later, and life has changed a lot. Most of us have been asked to hunker down at home so as to avoid contracting or spreading infection. For how long? No one knows for sure but it’s unlikely life will return to “normal” anytime soon. It’s far more likely we’ll learn to live with a “new normal.”

It’s uncanny how much our current situation reflects the backstory of Sarah Pinsker’s Nebula-nominated novel A Song For a New Day. That story is a hopeful look at American society breaking out of disease-induced isolation. We, of course, are just learning to live with it.

For myself, the daily routine hasn’t changed much. You’ve probably seen the cartoons about introverts who always stay at home anyway… Both Ron and I have worked at home for years. The main change for us is that we’re not going out as often, and when we do, the hand sanitizer gets frequent use. (We have two little bottles left, acquired prior to the emergence of COVID-19.)

Here on Maui, we’ve had only a couple of confirmed cases of the virus. In Hawaii at large, infections are still low and all so far seem to be associated with recent travelers, or those in close contact with recent travelers. In other words, “no community transmission” — so far.

My respect goes out to all those parents who are suddenly finding themselves home with young children. Wishing you patience, strength, and courage!

And my gratitude goes to all those who don’t have the option of staying home: first responders, medical personnel, all those working in the supply chain, the brave clerks and stockers at Costco, Target, and all our local grocery stores — and anyone else whose service is essential to keeping the country (and the world) functioning through this black-swan event.

It’s staggering to think of all the people now out of work, many of whom likely have little savings and who may be losing their health insurance. Here in Hawaii, so many people are employed in the visitor industry — hotels, car rentals, restaurants, tours, entertainment. All that is now shut down, or soon will be.

We’re still at the beginning of this. For myself, it’s already weirdly surreal to see TV commercials made in the days “Before.” They show large happy gatherings — wedding parties, people in theaters, or at festivals, or out on the town, enjoying life with friends. Scenes of a lost existence, at least for now.

On the positive side, there are companies and governments around the world seeking both a vaccine and antiviral treatments for COVID-19. If we keep our collective heads and don’t panic, we’ll get past this. In the meantime, please take care of yourselves and of each other.