May 21, 2020 – I have been confined to my flat for almost three months now, working remotely. I have been dealing with this surprisingly well. In fact, staying home and not socializing has allowed a lot more time for writing and reading.
I usually write early every morning before going to work. But as I don’t have to prepare and walk to the office, I have more time left for writing. I did one more edit of the first chapter of my latest manuscript Brussels Naked, started re-editing the English translation of ‘She, the island’, wrote the first draft of a novella and am now working on another manuscript. As you can see, it has been a very productive time.
In the evenings, I read for a couple of hours. In the past few months I have reread Cervantes’ Don Quixote, read Borges’ Ficciones, the contemporary Bulgarian authors Elena Alexieva and Alexander Sekulov and am currently reading Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Ladies and Luis Augusto Quimper’s Rutina (in Spanish). I have a long list of books to read, stored in my library and kindle.
So the confinement has had its advantages. It has been a focused period with internal dynamics despite the external lack of events and happenings.