New Release Date: APRIL 27, 2021
My novel has a new release date, as do many books right now, due to the stresses of our current situation, to which we all have to adapt. I think there’s something in here about time, too, and our perceptions of it. Does time seem different to you, too? As they say, the present moment is all we ever have. Time in the land of COVID is a different animal, though, and has taken some adjustment. Part of the reason for the discombobulation is no doubt due to the wearing of pajamas or yoga pants for extended periods or, heck, wearing them continuously. Also the eschewing of regular bathing in favour of radical cleansing and disinfection methods for groceries and packages. In my case I also have an old-school calendar book that I’ve suddenly stopped consulting, giving me that what-day-is-it-even feeling; although, as the weeks have gone by I’ve gotten better at keeping tabs on the date. (It’s as if I removed myself from the calendar’s reach or have no longer found a use for it, or maybe I don’t like being reminded of the world and the sense of time that the calendar represents.)
*This is a note from the future: tonight Saturday Night Live’s cast will create their show from their individual quarantines and Tom Hanks, the host, will declare that Saturday no longer exists. There! I knew it. I told my husband that there is only Today and I-Don’t-Know, and they alternate.
But maybe the larger problem at work here is the emotional dissonance that many of us are experiencing (or we’re experiencing the dissonance of the people we live with or friends that we’re waving to on video or those neighbours in the distance). At any rate, the effect is there, the time warp of this time, the way that it’s more elastic than usual, more Twilight-Zone-ish. Dreams, too, have been unrelentingly strange and vivid, so that sleep is less of a reliable blank and more yet another experience of narrative time.
All this leads to forgetfulness. I forgot to pay some of the bills that aren’t already electronic, which rarely happens. If I have a scheduled call with someone I have to write it in big letters on a whiteboard in the kitchen, where I know I’ll see it, because I’ve been forgetting things—events, places, thoughts, names, schedules, all of it falling into a COVID void only to suddenly bob to the surface later (and for whatever reason scheduling it into my phone doesn’t seem like a better response). Everyone in the computer screen world is wearing their pajamas and clutching a coffee cup or a martini glass, their hair askew, regardless of the hour. A friend and her husband were having cocktails in the morning, because time no longer made sense, or rather it made sense to have a cocktail when they wanted it; she napped at dinner.
All of this is to say that time, as ever, is malleable and artistic, and we are all Alice in Wonderland, and our immediate family is more immediate than ever, and our friends now live inside our screens, and we are all too big and then too small. Not that our perception of time wasn’t this way before, only that the particulars have changed. In the larger, outer world, the postponement and rescheduling of things has been rampant, for good reason. Everyone is madly scrambling to adjust, re-tune, plan for a later time when we can stick our heads up from our burrows and look around, and maybe—someday—attend concerts and go to restaurants, and the beach.
So my novel, also, is in this category of movement (and funnily enough, at the heart of the book is the individual, impressionistic experience of time by one woman). The original date was for the end of this month, but that was arranged long, long before COVID; now publishers, bookstores and the entire delivery system are under an unprecedented strain and so Simon & Schuster Canada has scheduled the release of MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH for April 27, 2021. Given the topsy-turviness of the world, and on a micro level, the fact that my home-life is filled with Gabriel-care at the moment, this is a good decision, and it makes for something to look forward to. So now the event that was on the brink of happening has made a leap in time; this reminds me a little of leaving a party one night as a teenager, very possibly having smoked some pot, and getting closer and closer to the end of a street where the end continually seemed to move out of reach. But I did eventually get there, my destination, and so will we all, and hopefully we’ll be in the present moment as we go. Happy Saturday (Sunday?).