COVID-19 UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

Posted on by vlaw759
The best thing you can do to help is avoid spreading the virus. This building in South Africa has a subtle hint about how you can do that. (AP Photo/Nardus Engelbrecht)

By this time, I would bet that nearly everyone on Earth has been touched one way or another by COVID-19. Global pandemics are an unfortunate experience that unites all of humanity. Similarly, medical providers around the world have been called upon to step up, just as they would in any similar event whether historical, fantastic, or science fictional.

We’re all in this together. Let’s not be that guy.

Nurse Green treating consumption patients in a New York sanitorium in 1843, Doctor White treating AIDS patients in Zimbabwe in 1997, and Healer Black treating bubonic plague patients in Constantinople in 546 all have the same general goals and similar biological challenges.

Medic Silver treating space plague in patients on the Third Moon of Alpha Centauri is likely to find xirself facing the same situation.

Doctors, nurses, aids, technicians, assistants, medics, and medical workers of every other kind have been making this plea, posting photos from all over the world.
(Richmond, Maryland)

For most of us, all but urgent care medical appointments have been postponed or cancelled. Even urgent care has changed drastically. I recently had an appointment for a root canal in a nearly empty clinic. The receptionist told all patients to wait in their cars until called, and only the dentist, his assistant, one office worker, and I were in the building the entire time I was in the chair.  Of course, most of us see these changes from the perspective of the patient. What about the providers? 

Philadelphia

A chiropractor who has a one-man practice told me that so many patients are canceling (or not making appointments in the first place) that he is worried about what’s happening to his personal income, and whether he can continue to pay his one office worker. My dentist is the head of a small practice (fewer than 50 employees) and he said the same thing: trying to keep the practice open and employees paid when they are seeing only urgent care cases. A dental assistant, recognizing that the practice is vulnerable, worries that she won’t be able to pay the rent.

Malaysia

These people are the tiniest of samples and most would agree they aren’t front-line workers in this pandemic. For that perspective, I am fortunate to have a colleague who lives in a veritable nest of doctors, nurses, medical students, and first responders, and here are things they had to say.

Israel

Is this sort of thing what you had in mind when you applied to med school?

Australia

 Absolutely not.  When I went to medical school, I thought I wanted to go into surgery, but I realized that I hated rounding and getting dressed up. As far as the current pandemic, I don’t think anyone envisioned something like this.  We haven’t had anything close to this since 1918 with the Great Influenza Pandemic.  And in probably every humans’ mind, medical care has advanced so much since then.  How could anything like that happen again?

Not at all. I had visions of helping patients overcome their physical or medical disabilities so they could live their lives. Now I am at the frontline of protecting about 100 elderly, disabled patients who were recently hospitalized for other reasons and are now at risk for coming down with COVID-19. We have already diagnosed it in quite a few of our patients. It is likely many of the others also have it but only mild or asymptomatic cases. However, they are still contagious, and we must be extremely careful so we don’t spread it around to other patients, ourselves, and our families.

Italy

I always knew working with high-risk patients meant that I would be saying a lot of good-byes, and I thought I was okay with that. I could at least make them feel a little bit better, maybe smile a little. But now I feel like I’m saying that final good-bye every time I leave a patient’s house. Like, will this person even be here the next time I come over?

Pretty much, yeah. I always knew the communities where I wanted to work would be full of infection and contagion, without a lot of medicine or cleaning. But there was always something I could do, yeah? Now there’s no medicine, no vaccine, no ventilators, nothing but me in the same mask I’ve been wearing for a week and trying so hard to convince families that grandmother must stay away from her grandbabies.

Nope. I think a lot of this is media driven.  And people fear arguing against safety. But being too safe can have its own trade off and risk other forms of safety.

If we did not want that responsibility, we would not have chosen this career path.

Chile

In general, how do you avoid bringing work stress or infections home?

Not bringing infections home is easy.  The scrubs I wear for work stay and get laundered at the hospital.  I have separate shoes for the hospital which stay in my office.  And I use hand sanitizer before I leave the building.  We deal with some pretty nasty resistant bugs at work.  I don’t need to bring that home to my wife and daughters. I try not to let work get to me.  I try to make sure everyone is having fun at work, so it keeps my stress level down.  But even with that, it can build up. 

Jordan

It’s been tough, lately. I cry every night. I try not to, but I see so many people sick and nothing I can do. I never let my family see me.

Showers when I get to work and before I leave work. There’s a clean line between my two lives. I don’t bring any of that culture home with me. No stickers or special license plates on my car, just the parking decal.

The key to avoiding bringing infections home is the same as avoiding spreading it at work, always good hygiene and using protective equipment. There really is no difference. And as long as I work as hard as I can and do the best I can, stress is not an issue. Only fatigue, which comes to anybody who works long, hard hours.

Sudan

Do you prioritize symptoms, patients, contagion, contact, etc. differently now?

It used to be mostly elective or scheduled operations, so we had time to make sure patients are prepped and optimized for surgery ahead of time.  On the bus [ambulance], we don’t get to pick and choose our patients.  They call us when they are in their worst time.  There’s a big difference between a sterile operating room, and the side of the road at 2am.  But in the end, a patient is a patient.  It’s about the ABCs and then go from there.

India

Patients have prioritized themselves differently. Nobody will come to the clinic if they can find something else to do. I had a girl come to my house with a broken arm because her parents did not think she should be risk being exposed.

PPE is at a premium.  At work, I’m reusing my N-95 masks between patients because otherwise we’d run out.  But if I have to intubate a known or suspected COVID patient, we are in full protective gear to include a respirator.  We do have new protocols in place for use of PPE on the ambulances when we suspect a COVID patient.

So far we do not have to prioritize anything other than can they leave their room on a closed ward? Should they be cohorted with someone else who also has the virus? Many of our patients have other contagious diseases or infections; we must be careful.

Actually less people are calling 911. Looking at the county stats the call volume has dropped 10-20% over the past month.  Generally you can look at a person and tell if they are in distress or not.  There used to be a lot of people who called for help when they just wanted a ride. I typically deal with one patient at a time. 

Wales

What behaviors in the general public infuriate you from a health care view (at any time, not just now)?

I used to get really worked up with people smoking.  There is so much data about how bad smoking and drugs are for you, yet young people still start using them.  But I realized I can’t change everyone, and it would just cause me undue stress.  So I just focus on who I can help in front of me.  I also realize people are going to make their own choices, good or bad.  All I can do is give them the information and hope they listen to it.

India

There are so many people who are just forgotten about and so they have no one to help them. They are stuck at home because they are old or no one will talk to them because they are weird or whatever. And then they are sick and no one knows because no one thinks to go and check.

People get a little bit of information and then suddenly they’re the expert and telling everyone else what to do and then people actually do it! Or they follow what the aunties say to do, even if it makes no sense, just because no one wants to upset the aunties. Like, drinking fever tea is not going to cure COVID-19, even if it makes your fever feel a little better.

The only behavior that infuriates me is when I see people carelessly congregating and likely spreading the virus but acting as if it is a joke. It’s infuriating because they are then passing it on to even more possibly highly vulnerable people who have nothing to do with their irresponsible behavior.  Otherwise the public’s behavior does not infuriate me. I feel very bad for family members who are not allowed to visit their family members. Must be terrifying being in such a helpless position. When they get obviously upset or even angry, we know it’s understandable.

When a crowd gathers to watch a hospital ship that has come to help with a quarantine, that kind of defeats the purpose….

Passing the liability on to others.  “Oh my insurance or doctor said call 911.” And the fact that life is not sunshine and rainbows. Just because you’re not feeling well doesn’t mean you’re going to die.

Jakarta

Have you changed your routines at home or work in the past few months?

I always believed that the immune system is something that needs frequent practice to be strong, and I still do believe that.  But with COVID-19, the game has completely changed.  I’m now washing my hands much more frequently, or using hand sanitizer whenever I touch something public in the hospital.  I wipe my desk, computer, phone, and ID badge down with a sanitizing wipe before I leave work.  And I always wash my hands when I walk into my home first thing before I do anything else.

Patients who used to come to me for stomach virus and insulin checks stay far away from the clinic now, especially the pregnant ladies. Now I see only people who are afraid they have coronovirus or that their aunties have coronovirus.

Malaysia

I share a flat with other medics, but I’ve moved back into my parents’ house, where the cellar has a separate washroom and entrance. It’s easier to stay isolated there, even if it’s a longer commute.

In the past two or three weeks our entire day has changed. We do not focus as much on the primary reason the patients are with us, which is to be evaluated and treated for various disabilities. Instead, we are more focused on signs or symptoms suggesting that they may be coming down with the virus. We don’t want to miss them for their sake, and for the increased risk of them spreading it to other patients and staff.

I definitely pray a lot more. I’ll admit it’s a little strange to see His Holiness over video broadcast in an empty room, but it’s very nice to know that I’m not alone to say the Rosary even when I can’t go to Mass here.

Stepped up the disinfecting.  And wearing more healthcare protective equipment.  We don’t got in nursing homes unless they can’t be brought outside. And we tell people to meet us outside.

I spend more time at each house because a lot of my patients aren’t having any other visitors. All the community outreach stops at the front door now.

England

Have you seen anything good as a result of the recent insanity?

I try to focus on the good, but it’s so hard when there is so much bad.  I guess… traffic is fantastic now.  I think everyone is trying to do their part to support local restaurants and businesses.  Most people seem to want to do the right thing.

Italy

With so many people made to stay at home, I think a lot of families are spending more time together. And everyone seems to be thinking up some way they can help, kids giving birthday money to shelters and medical students doing childcare for health workers.

Communities are recognizing that shop clerks, drivers, cleaners, they’re all absolutely necessary. It’s not just the politicians and rich folk who matter. Where would we be without rubbish clean-up and food delivery?

Difficult times like this often bring out the best that is already in people. The best has been in them all the time, but now they are expressing it and experiencing it more. 

People are learning that hospitals are disgusting places and that there are risks in going to them. 

Kenya

Is there anything you wish management, government, media, or whomever would do differently?

All those different entities do so many things wrong, it’s hard to know where to focus.  I’ve learned for the most part that there is little that I can affect on a large scale, such as with government or the media.  So I tend to not pay attention to either much.

Armenia

Some countries have been able to mobilize testing of millions of people very rapidly.  It would help us to determine who has already had the virus and is very low risk for acquiring it and passing it on, and is therefore fairly safe working on the front lines. They can also get back to work in what is currently called nonessential businesses. Without enough testing, we are fighting this battle blindfolded.

Why do travel companies keep offering cheap tickets?!

The media has been distorting the message. We keep hearing how certain drugs have not been approved for this virus, but really nothing has been approved. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least try. About 20% of all medications used have not been approved for the thing doctors are prescribing them for. This is called off label use and we use this approach all the time for many medications. For a governor to ban certain medications because they have not been approved is the same as practicing medicine without a license.

India

The amount of bad information floating around is so dangerous. I understand that people are scared and no one has all the answers, but I wish people would stop telling things that aren’t true. Washing your mouth with bleach, drinking boiling water, filling your room with smoke… No, don’t do these things.

I wish there was more reliable information available in every language. My neighbours like to assume that, because I speak English, I have all of the answers that are being hoarded by British and American doctors.

It’s become a social and status symbol to say that you’ve been tested or have it. No one cares. Just stay home. 

Hawaii

What keeps you up at night?

The one thing that has kept me up at times is when I have a patient that has a complication, whether I contributed to it or not.  I tend to “Monday Morning Quarterback” every little thing I did and blame myself even when it’s not my fault.

Holland

Nothing currently keeps me up at night. As long as I do my best in my family is okay, I sleep well. It’s been a long time since I’ve been unable to sleep.

I worry about the people no one seems to help – the families who can’t get food, the people stuck behind barricades, the old ones left at home with no neighbors to check on them.

Dead kids tend to make it harder to sleep for a while.

Philippines

The question we all really want to ask: How do you keep your hands from drying out and cracking when you wash them every twenty seconds?

Nantucket

Make sure you rinse really well. Little bits of soap film, especially in the knuckles or between your fingers, can cause irritation.

Soap and water is so much better than hand sanitizer. The alcohol in hand sanitizer is usually what dries out skin. Plus, soap and water is more effective.

Lotion, but make sure it’s not scented.

Healthcare is exhausting!

BOOOOORED!

Posted on by vlaw759
Sir Terry Pratchett always knows the best words.

I’ll skip defining boredom. It’s so common that it doesn’t need definition, any more than hunger or sunlight. Nearly everyone feels bored at one time or another, more or less often, sometimes daily. Men, in general, are more often bored than women. And people with little education are more likely to report being bored. As with nearly everything, there are two sides to boredom.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell if they’re bored or if they’re just being dogs.

The Downside of Boredom

Boredom is generally seen as an unpleasant emotional state. Why do people feel bored? Shahram Heshmat, Ph.D. identified eight common reasons for boredom.

1. Monotony in the Mind — When people are not interested in the details of the task at hand, or when a task is highly repetitive, they are likely to feel bored. We lose interest in things that are too predictable, too much of the same thing, too little stimulation. This can often lead to feeling trapped.    

Piracy is just so dull sometimes.

2. Lack of Flow — Flow is total immersion in a task that is challenging but within one’s abilities, a task with clear goals and immediate feedback. Tasks that are too easy are boring. Tasks that seem to be too difficult may lead to anxiety.

3. Need for Novelty — People with a strong need for novelty, excitement, and variety—i.e., sensation seekers—are at risk of boredom. For these people, the world moves too slowly. The need for external stimulation may be why extroverts are particularly prone to boredom, which they try to cure by novelty seeking and risk-taking. 

4. Paying Attention —What bores us never fully engages our attention. After all, it is hard to be interested in something when you cannot concentrate on it. People with chronic attention problems, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, are more likely to suffer boredom.

5. Emotional Awareness — People who lack self-awareness are more prone to boredom, unable to articulate what it is that they desire or want to do. They have trouble describing their feelings. Not knowing what we are searching for means that we lack the capacity to choose appropriate goals.

6. Inner Amusement Skills — People who don’t have the inner resources to deal with boredom constructively rely on external stimulation. In the absence of inner amusement skills, the external world will always fail to provide enough excitement and novelty. 

7. Lack of Autonomy — People often feel boredom when they feel trapped. And feeling trapped—stuck or constrained so that one’s will cannot be executed—is a big part of boredom. Adolescents are often bored, largely because children and teenagers don’t have a lot of control over their schedules and activities.

8. The Role of Culture — Boredom is a modern luxury. As the Enlightenment was giving way to the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th Century, boredom came into being. When people have to spend most hours of the days securing food and shelter, boredom isn’t an option.

The Upside of Boredom

Boredom does have its benefits. It is a “call to action.” Nietzsche suggested that men (sic) of rare sensibility value boredom as an impetus to achievement.  So…

1.  Boredom can be a catalyst for action.

2.  It can provide an opportunity for thought and reflection, a search for life’s meaning. 

3.  It can also be a sign that a task is a waste of time—and thus not worth continuing.

4.  Boredom can spur creativity.

Challenges for writers:

  • Writing boredom in an engaging way
  • Choosing ways for characters to handle boredom that forward the plot
  • Milking boredom for tension and/or emotional acting out

UNSTRUCTURED TIME

Posted on by vlaw759

One of the side effects of COVID-19 is that many people have more unstructured time than usual—much more. By unstructured time, I mean periods of time with no plan in place for what one must/wants to get done

Poking everything with a stick does not count as a plan.

Two points made by openlinecounseling.com resonate for me.

(Note:getting into mischief is not a healthy goal.)
  1. Stretches of unstructured time often bring pressure and anxiety, sometimes existential panic.
    • Worrisome thoughts are more easily set aside when busy. But with unstructured time, it’s easy for self-doubts to come to the fore. 
      • Am I too fat?
      • Have I done a good job as a parent?
      • Will anyone remember me when I’m dead? 
    • When we have lots of time available, it’s easy to procrastinate. One can fritter away the time, flitting from one indulgence to another, from reading a novel to online shopping. Come the end of the day, one then feels guilty for not having been productive—or not productive enough. The feeling that one has “wasted time” is uncomfortable.
Lithuanian Military photographed by adasvasiliauskas
  • Being constantly on the go is often linked to self-worth—in which case not being productive leads to low self-esteem, as in “I’m a failure” or “I’m lazy.”
    • Making the most of every minute of every day isn’t recognized as an impossible, not to say unhealthy, goal.
Don’t let fear drive you to hide away in a box.

When deprived of the activities that usually fill our days, we often drift into unhealthy activities.

  • Being physically inactive
  • Drinking and/or smoking more
  • Snacking and/or eating too much
  • Online gambling
  • Binge shopping
Structure can keep you from climbing the walls… or windows.

Being suddenly confronted with unstructured time can be disorienting. This is often true of the newly retired. Regularly scheduled activities—which could be anything from work to volunteering, golf or poker to orchestra rehearsals—make people aware of the time of day as well as days of the week or month.

For me, COVID-19 cancellations make every day feel like Monday, my formerly “free” day. I have to pause and think what day of the week it is. 

Make sure to change out of your pajamas every day. I recommend formal gowns for coloring time.

Also, the “natural” day for humans isn’t exactly 24 hours: it’s somewhere between 24 and 26 hours. We reset to 24 hours based on outside constraints. My personal day is longer than most, and it’s easy to stay up and wake progressively later and later—say 3:00 to noon. For those on lock-down due to COVID-19, with no scheduled activities, the time of day might feel “off.”

The short solution to all these negatives is simple: make plans.  Keep the list of plans brief — say three — and doable. The plans could be relaxing activities such cutting flowers, taking a walk, etc. The idea is that making plans decreases the likelihood that you’ll pass days in haphazard activities or listlessness.

Enjoy an elegant tea party with inanimate friends!

Astronauts, being experts in the field of isolation, have offered some advice to those of us down here on the planet.

  • Keep a consistent sleeping schedule
  • Go outside and get some sun, so long as you do it by yourself
  • Separate work and leisure time, if you still work from home, so that one does not overtake the other
  • Stay in touch with people online or over the phone
These astronauts seem to have missed the rule about staying 6 feet apart.
(Don’t worry; the baby isn’t sitting on the dog while reading to him… not that he’d notice if she was.)

As more people are staying at home, many organizations are creating virtual activities to keep your mind active. You can take a virtual tour of a museum or national park, audit classes in a variety of subjects, join exercise or meditation groups, watch ballets or operas or Broadway shows, even have a cocktail or movie party with your friends! If all else fails, there are ways to help your community from the comfort of your living room.

  • OpenCulture has gathered many of these links to allow people to browse their options.
  • To fix the growing shortage of protective gear among healthcare workers, many people have started making face masks for local hospitals and fire stations.
  • Coursera is currently working with many universities to allow students to earn college credit
  • Many independent, foreign, classic, and documentary films are available to watch online for free
  • All kinds of educational materials for k-12 students are free online
  • The Guggenheim has made 300 ebooks about art available for free

Takeaway for writers: consider the role of structure in the lives of your characters.

The Worst of Times, The Best of Times

Posted on by vlaw759

One of my favorite guest bloggers has agreed to provide her always unique perspective on current events. With all that’s been written on the current pandemic, we sometimes need to take a step back and look from a (very) different angle. Kathleen Corcoran is a local harpist, teacher, writer, editor, favorite auntie, and tenuous believer in the goodness of humanity.

Whenever society collapses (or maybe wobbles a bit), we seem to see the extremes in people come out. The very best of heroes stand up, and the very worst villains take advantage. As the late, great Sir Terry Pratchett wrote in Good Omens, “Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind.” Of course, disaster also sometimes brings out the very weirdest elements…

Note: The examples provided below are by no means a comprehensive list of incidents. They represent my own personal opinions and are not endorsed or promoted by any other entity.

Volunteers at the Sunnyvale Community Services food distribution site
(Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

The Best Side of Humanity

During the Plague of Justinian, the official Court Historian Procopius kept notes on how the plague affected the Roman Empire. In addition to some rather bizarre medical theories, he saw the way the plague brought out the very best of humanity. “[T]hen all, so to speak, being thoroughly terrified by the things which were happening, and supposing that they would die immediately, did, as was natural, learn respectability for a season by sheer necessity.” From History of the Wars, II.xxii–xxxiii translated by H.B. Dewing.

  • One constant in every disaster is the appearance of some form of healthcare worker, whether professional or volunteer, providing care for patients despite personal danger, overwhelming circumstances, inadequate supplies, exhaustion, and every other possible obstacle.
    • As far back as the Plague of Justinian, the court historian Procopious wrote about the exhausting and selfless labors of those who cared for plague patients, though it seems the main job of a nursing aid at the time was stopping their patients from committing suicide before they died from the plague: “When they were struggling to rush headlong out of their houses, they would force them back by shoving and pulling against them.”
    • Elsie Maud Inglis started a women’s medical corps during WWI and established two hospitals on front lines. When the German army advanced, she was taken prisoner with her patients rather than be evacuated. During a later prisoner exchange, Elsie Inglis refused to be released unless her captors also released her patients, saving 13,000 injured Serbian POWs.
    • During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic (sometimes called Spanish Flu), the ease of infection and limited hospital space resulted in incredibly high mortality rates among everyone who worked near the sick. Stories emerged after of nurses working straight through their shifts only to die at the end, of medical students taken out of classes to run entire hospital wards, of doctors continuing to direct care rotas despite being confined to bed themselves.
    • Corporal Desmond Doss repeatedly ran into enemy fire to recover wounded soldiers as a medic in WWII. Despite refusing to carry any weapon as a conscientious objector, he saved nearly 100 wounded soldiers under fire and was awarded the Medal of Honor.
    • After running 26.2 miles, many Boston marathoners who crossed the finish line after the 2013 bombing continued running several more miles to Massachusetts General Hospital to donate blood.
    • Despite having been hit earlier by Hurricane Katrina, Cuba was one of the first countries to offer aid to the US victims of the hurricane, offering to send 1,586 doctors and 26 tons of medicine.
    • Kellan Squire, an ER nurse who ran for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia (in part to fix the healthcare system) has this to say about healthcare workers in the current pandemic: “We’re going to get infected, we’re going to die and get ICUed at a rate a few times above other subgroups, we’re going to charge in without the resources or support we need to do our jobs. It’s just what we do. It’s not like we’re going to stop… especially now.”
  • Despite facing serious threats to themselves or their families, there are always people who are willing to face that danger in order to aid or shelter others.
    • Ninety percent of the Jewish population of Denmark survived the Holocaust because nearly the entire Danish population worked together to hide or evacuate their friends and neighbors when the Nazis invaded.
    • Every part of Harriet Tubman’s life was pretty heroic.
    • In 1943, hundreds of non-Jewish women married to Jewish men who had been deported gathered every day at the Rosenstrass e 2-4 Welfare Office to demand the release of their relatives, risking harassement, arrest, and execution while completely unarmed themselves. The “Rosenstrasse Protest” was successful; all of the arrested men were released, and the protesters faced no repercussions.
    • In Kenya in 2015, al-Shabab terrorists started a pattern of entering an area, separating Muslims and non-Muslims at gunpoint, and then massacring all of the non-Muslims. A bus leaving Nairobi in December was boarded by terrorists who demanded that the passengers separate by religion, but Kenyan Muslims on board refused to move, sheltering their fellow riders in their ranks. The al-Shabab terrorists eventually left without firing a shot.
    • The families of Sarajevo business partners Yosef Kavilio and Mustafa Hardaga wound up saving each other, decades apart. In the 1940s, Mustafa Hardaga and his wife Zejneba hid the Jewish Yosef Kavilio and his family in their cellar. Decades later, in 1992, Kavilio’s descendants in Israel saw on television the danger Zejneba Hardaga faced from Bosnian troops. The petitioned the Israeli government to locate Zejneba and her daughter, who were safely evacuated to Israel.
  • Sometimes doing the right thing means deliberately disobeying laws or going against direct orders from a superior.
    • Dominican Friar Najeeb Michael, who was in charge of digitizing thousands of ancient volumes of Iraqi history, refused to leave his abbey in Mosul when ISIL invaded. Instead of evacuating immediately as his superiors orders, he kept boxing up and moving cases of books to prevent them from being destroyed. Even when he finally started to leave the city, he kept stopping his car to children and disabled passengers on his way to safety.
    • Hugh Thompson was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam who landed his helicopter between American soldiers and the fleeing residents of My Lai, threatening to open fire on the soldiers if they did not stop killing civilians and destroying homes. He then flew dozens of survivors to receive medical care. Despite direct orders to cover up the My Lai Massacre, Major Thompson cooperated fully with the investigation into the incident. He was later ostracized by fellow military members, receiving anonymous death threats and mutilated animal bodies left on his front porch.
    • Tibor Rubin repeatedly broke out of North Korean POW camps to smuggle food back in to fellow prisoners. He also provided medical aid to other POWs, using skills he picked up while surviving Mauthausen concentration camp during the Holocaust
    • In 1944, Nazi ships tried to round up all of the Jews in the Ionian Islands of Greece. When the SS demanded that Mayor Loukas Karrer of Zakynthos provide a list of all Jews on the island, Bishop Chrysostomos handed them a list with two names on it: Mayor Loukass Karrer and Bishop Chrysostomos. Meanwhile, the 275 Jews on the Zakynthos were hidden by residents of nearly inaccessible mountainous villages; every person on the island collaborated in saving their Jewish neighbors.
    • The Edelweiss Pirates was a loosely connected network of ex-Hitler Youth, mostly between the ages of 14 and 18, who did everything they could disrupt the Nazi war effort in Germany, including blowing up railways and helping Jews escape execution.
    • Sergeant Dakota Meyer was ordered to ignore a distress call at Ganjigal and to fall back instead. He drove into the battle zone five times, transporting wounded soldiers in his Humvee and providing cover fire for other military personnel to escape.
    • Dr. Albert Battel was a lieutenant in the German army who stopped the SS from entering Przemysl ghetto in 1942. While the SS was stalled trying to get through the blocked bridge, Lieutenant Battel and his unit moved families out of the ghetto and hid them at his own Army headquarters, preventing the SS from deporting them to the Belzec Extermination Camp.
  • With the stock market practicing pogo moves, kids needing extra childcare, people missing shifts, and every possible industry seeing some kind of disruption, it’s still amazing to see businesses putting the good of the community over profit.
    • Zahid Iqbal has donated and delivered thousands of “coronavirus kits” from his convenience store in Edinburgh, Scotland. He and his employees have made the kits from toilet paper, antibacterial handwash, tissues, and anti-inflammatories and then brought them to retirement homes and the homes of at-risk neighbors.
    • Healthcare workers in America are facing a serious shortage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), putting them at additional risk of infection while they work. Several medical tv shows are donating PPE used on sets (still sterile boxes of gloves, face masks, surgical gowns, hairnets, etc.) to EMTs, fire stations, and hospitals.
    • Lazy Magnolia Brewing Company in Mississippi has converted its distillery to make spray disinfectant.
  • There are some very creative methods of giving back to the community and helping society that take a specific blend of available talent and courage to perform.creative methods of giving
    • Chef José Andrés closed all of his restaurants in DC to comply with restrictions on social gatherings. With empty kitchens and refrigerators full of food, he decided to go back to work making packaged meals to distribute to people in quarantine, healthcare workers, and anyone else in the area who needs help feeding their families.
    • Other restaurants that have to close for social distancing are donating massive amounts of food (as well as cooking and packaging supplies) to local food banks, shelters, Meals on Wheels, and community kitchens.
    • Chiari Hospital in northern Italy needed ventilator valves to help COVID-19 patients breathe. Engineers from Isinnova collaborated with the 3-D printing company FabLab to produce replicas of the valve quickly, allowing the ventilators to stay in use.3-D printing ventilator valves.
    • Musicologist Ahmad Sarmast graduated from school and then returned to his native Afghanistan to record oral musical traditions he feared would be lost in chaos and uncertainty. Along the way, he started teaching girls to play orchestral instruments in defiance of religious restrictions. He has already survived one bombing assassination attempt and continues to record, notate, and teach despite now being nearly deaf and riddled with shrapnel.
Dr. Ahmad Sarmast with some of his students

The Worst Side of Humanity

Unfortunately, there will always be people waiting to take advantage of any situation. Some betray their neighbors to save themselves. Some see any opportunity for profit or personal gain. Some seem to hurt people for no other reason than the pleasure they feel when hurting people. Again, Sir Terry Pratchett said it best: “Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” (from I Shall Wear Midnight)

  • The phrase “adding insult to injury” comes to mind when reading these next examples. People who are kicked when they are down, sometimes in the most petty of ways.
    • After the students protesting in Tiananmen Square were gunned down in 1989, the Chinese government reportedly charged families of victims a “bullet fee” for the cost of the bullets used to execute their dead family members.
    • During Irish Potato Famine, Sultan Abdul Medjid Khan of the Ottoman Empire tried to donate £10,000 and ships full of food to send to Ireland. British ambassadors told him it was forbidden for anyone to donate more than Queen Victoria, who had only donated £1,000.
    • People running from Hurricane Katrina were turned back at gunpoint when they tried to cross the bridge into neighboring town of Gretna.
    • White Star Line billed the families of Titanic victims for freight shipping cost of having bodies returned, used a weird contract clause to fire every employee the moment the ship started to sink, and billed the families of the band members for the cost of uniforms that weren’t returned (because they were too busy playing to keep people calm as the ship sank to worry about taking off their clothes and stowing them safely on a lifeboat for return to the company).
    • The Mongol army was busy beseiging the city of Kaffa (present-day Feodosiya) on the Crimean Peninsula when they were forced to retreat because their ranks were so depleted by the Black Death. Stories from the time claim that the Mongols catapaulted the bodies of soldiers who died from the plague over the city walls into Kaffa on their way out.
    • At the end of WWII, Soviet soldiers held in German POW forced labor camps were returned to Russia. Trains carrying these soldiers home were diverted to Russian forced labor camps, gulags, where most of the soldiers were sentenced to 10-20 years for the “crimes” of assisting the enemy and having possibly been exposed to Capitalist Western POWs.
  • A scapegoat can always be found for any disaster or atrocity. Xenophobia and bigotry are easier than understanding the facts.
    • Armenians were blamed for the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in WWI, providing a convenient justification for the Armenian Genocide.
    • Jews, Romani, witches, and sailors were all blamed for Black Death at one point or another. Terrified plague mobs expelled, burned alive, deported, stoned, and performed every other imaginable atrocity on whichever group was most convenient at the time.
    • Mentally and physically handicapped Robert Hubert was not in London during the Great Fire of 1666; his ship didn’t even arrive until two days after the fire was extinguished. Nevertheless, he was tried and hanged for firebombing London and starting the Great Fire.
    • Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson went on TV and announced that the 9-11 terrorist attacks were the fault of “liberal civil liberties groups, feminists, pagans, homosexuals, and abortion rights supporters.”
    • The current novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic has been blamed on China (especially Wuhan province), Chinese people, people of Chinese descent, people of partial Chinese descent, and people who might look a bit Asian if you tilt your head at just the right angle. Government officials (including those in very high office) have blamed the Chinese government, and it trickles all the way down to children being bullied for “spreading the virus.”
  • It seems there will always be someone willing to take advantage of others’ fear, selling the Brooklyn Bridge and a guarantee to Heaven all in one convenient package.
    • “Spiritual leaders” whose primary goal is to raise funds have started asking for donations in return for prayers, going so far as to ask for donations to build a hospital for patients with coronavirus (conveniently leaving out the bit about the hospital being a spiritual place rather than an actual building where medical care is provided.)
    • The prices of everything from face masks to canned food have skyrocketed around the world.
    • Price-gouging of food and fuel became so severe during WWII that enabling price controls was one of the primary reasons the government enforced a rationing system.
    • “Doctors” during the Black Plague in Europe charged extreme prices for very expensive treatments, such as eating a paste of ground emeralds or bathing in the urine of uninfected mothers.
  • People hoard anything they think might become scarce, even if they don’t immediately need it, even if others need it more.
    • While people starved by the millions in 1845-1847, the worst years of Ireland’s Great Hunger, millions of bushels of grain were shipped to England, along with livestock, dairy, and beer. Landlords only allowed the peasants to eat potatoes, which had all been destroyed by blight.
    • In Australia, people with stockpiles of food have received death threats.
    • People panic buying medical supplies, especially in the US, have caused a shortage in hospitals, clinics, fire stations, nursing homes, etc. Doctors and nurses are re-using face masks, making surgical gowns at home, and not doubling gloves in an attempt to make their increasingly limited supplies last.
Soviet POWs got the short straw everywhere.

Um… What?

Fear makes people do all sorts of strange things, like buying loads of toilet paper in preparation for an illness that doesn’t cause any increase in toilet use.

  • City officials seeking to cure the “Dancing Plague” in Strasbourg in 1518 asked medical officials how to help people who were literally dancing themselves to death, flailing and jerking around for days on end until they dropped dead from exhaustion. The doctors decided that these people had a sickness that needed to be shaken off… by forcing them to keep dancing!
  • A strip club in Las Vegas is advertising that the lap dances on offer are guaranteed to be free from coronavirus.
  • People have begun sharing very odd photos and videos of the ways they are passing time while in quarantine or isolation. Pets wearing ties or being unhelpful coworkers are a popular photo subject, as are twitter competitions for things like jumping on the bed or holding one’s breath.
  • The Justinian Plague often began with very high fevers, causing hallucinations. These visions were often interpreted as signs from God of punishment to come or evidence of demonic possession. Exorcism was a common prescription, usually carried out by a tonsured monk. There were also people who believed that the monks were demons and the cause of the plague and fled from the sight of any man who was getting a bit bald on top.
  • According to some reports, the Dutch are hoarding cannabis in preparation for whatever COVID-19 brings, while the French are building stockpiles of red wine.
  • Something the Justinian Plague and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic had in common – people often wore name tags, armbands, toe tags, or some other external form of ID because the illness could kill so quickly that it was often the only way of ensuring your body would be identified if you dropped dead on the street.
  • With the aquariums in Chicago closed to visitors, the penguins have taken over!
Who put these guys in charge?

Be the Best!

You can be one of the good guys. Here are some ways you can show the best of humanity during this pandemic (and at any other time!)

  • Donate blood! The Red Cross really needs blood donations from healthy people to meet the needs of virus patients on top of all their regular needs.
  • Buy vouchers or gift certificates online for local restaurants, bars, shops, etc. Redeem them when things are back to normal. Think of it like a microscopic micro-loan.
  • If you are crafty, make reusable face masks for medical professionals. Here are some instructions.
  • Donate to organizations working to help the most vulnerable people in our societies.
  • Call, text, email, video chat with your friends, family members, work acquaintances, that guy down the street you wave to while walking your dog. Social distancing, while necessary for physical health, is not great for mental health. Make an extra effort to reach out to isolated people and stay connected.
  • https://www.flattenthecurve.com/
The Best: Lines of people waiting for hours to donate blood after the Orlando mass shooting

WRITING PANDEMICS

Posted on by vlaw759
Beware the Carnosaur Virus!
from the movie Carnosaur

We are currently enduring a coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19).  But perhaps I can tell you some things about pandemics in general that you don’t know! 

Writers note: you will find below several bits of information you absolutely must have if you are going to write a story involving a pandemic—or even an epidemic.

ALZ-113 (Simian Flu) from Planet of the Apes

First you need to know the different levels of the disease’s severity within a community.

  • Sporadic: a disease that occurs infrequently and irregularly (rabies, polio)
  • Endemic: the constant presence and/or usual prevalence of a disease or infectious agent in a population within a geographic area (chicken pox in American schoolchildren, malaria in certain areas of Africa)
    • Hyperendemic: persistent, high levels of an endemic disease occurrence, above the expected “normal” levels
Disinfection of workers at an Ebola clinic, 2016
  • Epidemic: an increase, often sudden, in the number of cases of a disease above what is normally expected in that population in that area (Ebola in 2014, Zika in 2018)
    • Outbreak: carries the same definition of epidemic, but is often used for a more limited geographic area
  • Holoendemic: essentially every individual in a population is infected, though not all show symptoms (modern occurrences are not common, but one example is hepatitis B in some areas of the Marquesas Islands)
  • Cluster: aggregation of cases grouped in place and time that are suspected to be greater than the number expected, even though the expected number may not be known
  • Pandemic: is an epidemic so big it crosses international boundaries and affects large numbers of people.
Bubonic Plague
Squirrel Army!

Pandemics can occur in crops, livestock, fish, trees, or other living things, but I’ll be sticking with people here.  You may want a plot line that has people battling a pandemic in another species. What happens to the food supply if all the wheat or corn or soybeans die off? How would people protect themselves from an entire population of aggressively rabid squirrels?

A wide-spread disease or condition that kills many people is a pandemic only if it is infectious. E.g., cancer and diabetes are not pandemics.

Until recently, I thought—in a vague sort of way—that pandemics were a thing of the past, mostly centuries ago. Wrong.  Currently, besides COVID-19, HIV/AIDS is an active pandemic world-wide. For example, several African countries have infection rates as high as 25%, or even 29% among pregnant South African women.

Distribution of AIDS cases worldwide

Any given pandemic is seldom one-and-done. Maybe none of them are.

Black Death, Venetian miniature. Middle Ages, Italy, 14th century. (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)
Seattle PD wearing newly distributed face masks to prevent the spread of respiratory disease
  • Plague: contagious bacterial diseases that cause fever and delirium, usually along with the formation of buboes, sometimes infecting the lungs. In past centuries, plagues killed 20%, 40%, even 50% of a country’s population. The first U.S. plague outbreak was the San Francisco plague of 1900-1904. 
    • Writers note: isolated cases of plague still turn up in the western U.S.
  • Influenza (a.k.a. Flu): the first flu pandemic recorded was in 1580, and since then influenza pandemics have occurred every 10 to 30 years
  • Cholera: seems (to me) to be nearly perennial, with pandemics recorded 1871-1824, 1826-1837, 1846-1860, 1863-1875 (in 1866 it killed some 50,000 Americans), 1881-1896, 1899-1923, 1961-1975. 
  • Typhus (a.k.a., camp fever, gaol fever, and ship fever): caused by bacterial Rickettsia prowazekii and characterized by a purple rash, headaches, fever, and usually delirium. It spreads rapidly in cramped quarters, often carried by fleas, lice, and ticks. It’s common in times of war and famine.
  • Smallpox: caused by the variola virus, it raged from the 18th century through the 1950s. Vaccination campaigns beginning in the 19th century led the World Health Organization to declare smallpox eradicated in 1979. 
    • Writers note: it is the only human infectious disease to have been completely eradicated. But for your purposes, maybe not!
  • Measles: historically, before the vaccine was introduced in 1963, 90% of people had the measles by age 15. Measles is an endemic disease, so groups of people can develop resistance. But it is often deadly for those who get measles, and it has killed over 200 million people over the last 150 years. Worldwide, in 2000, measles killed 777,000 out of 40 million cases.
  • Tuberculosis (a.k.a, TB): a very present danger, as new infections occur at a rate of one per second. A quarter of the world’s current population has been infected, and although most of those are latent, 5-10% will progress to active disease. Left untreated, TB kills more than half of its victims.
  • Leprosy (Hansen’s disease): caused by a bacillus, it is a chronic disease. It has an incubation period up to five years, but it can now be cured. It’s been estimated that in the early 13th century, there were 19,000 leper hospitals (leprosariums) across Europe.
  • Malaria: widespread in tropical and subtropical regions around the world. 
    • Writers note: consider the implications of climate change. Once common, malaria deaths became all but non-existent due to drug treatment. However, growing drug resistance is a major concern. Malaria is resistant to all classes of antimalarial drugs except artemisinins.
Yellow fever was vaguely understood to be carried by sailors on long voyages
  • Yellow fever: a viral infection carried by mosquitoes. In 1793, it killed approximately 10% of the population of Philadelphia.
  • Ebola virus: one of several viral hemorrhagic fevers (along with Lassa fever, Rift Valley fever, Marburg virus, and Bolivian hemorrhagic fever) that seem to be pandemics in waiting because they are highly contagious and deadly. On the other hand, transmission requires close contact and moves fast from onset to symptoms, so effective quarantines are possible.
    • And on the third hand, writers note: it could always mutate and adapt.
  • Coronaviruses: a large family of viruses that cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV, and the current Coronavirus-19, which is a new strain of SARS-CoV-2. Common effects of all of these are fever, cough, shortness of breath, and breathing difficulties. 

Historians have identified five (sometimes six) “major pandemics” that have affected enough of the population to cause a significant change in the social order. They are often referred to as plagues, despite not being caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis.

  • The Plague of Justinian (541-543) continued to cause famine and death after the primary infection had been contained because the sudden lack of a labor force meant that crops weren’t planted and harvested.
    • The horrific conditions during and after the plague are believed to have created an ideal atmosphere for the rapid spread of Christianity.
    • Though he survived his infection, Emperor Justinian had to shelve plans to consolidate power and expand the Roman Empire.
Plague victim demonstrating a bubos
  • The Black Death of 1347 to 1351 is believed to have killed as much as half the world’s population.
    • Historians have estimated that resulting labor shortage allowed for the end of the feudal system and the beginning of the Renaissance in Europe.
    • The population of Greenland was so diminished that the Vikings didn’t have the manpower to continue their raids in North America.
  • The Colombian Exchange is a general term used to cover all of the species of plants, animals, people, and diseases moved from one continent to another during the European invasion of North and South America.
The worst-hit areas of the Third Plague
Hong Kong
  • The Third Bubonic Plague began in 1855 and reached every part of the world before it died down in the 1960s.
    • Researchers confirmed that the disease was spread by bacteria in flea bites, allowing for major breakthroughs in quarantine methods.
    • Some of those early quarantines involved such draconian measures in colonized areas that they contributed to rebellions in Panthay, Taiping, and several regions of India.
Public information campaigns helped to reduce transmission
  • The 1918 Influenza outbreak, commonly known as the Spanish Flu, infected 500 million people around the world and killed more people than World War I. In 25 weeks, it killed more people than AIDS did in its first 25 years.
    • The close quarters of soldiers involved in World War I contributed to the rapid spread, but the contagion raised public awareness of how disease is transmitted and how to prevent it.
    • Note: The “Spanish” flu was present around the world, but it gained its name because the Spanish government did not censor information on the pandemic. Because most other countries worked to suppress information so as not to disrupt the war, people got the impression that the disease was coming from Spain, the source of their information.
Keith Haring, AIDS activist and artist
  • Though it was first reported in 1981, HIV/AIDS is believed to have originated in a mutated genetic strand of the virus from a monkey in the 1920s.
    • Sex education in schools and sexual practices among some portions of the population (notably among sex workers) changed drastically to focus on safety.
    • Because it was first prevalent among the gay community, many religious leaders claimed the virus was a divine sign that homosexuals were evil.
Leprosy hospitals still exist in India

“Alien” diseases are more deadly than local ones. Writers note: what are the implications of colonizing Mars?

Medieval dead cart
  • In 1529, a measles outbreak in Cuba killed 2/3 of the natives who had previously survived smallpox.
  • Malaria was a major threat to colonists and Native Americans when introduced to the Americas along with the slave trade.
  • In Colonial times, West Africa was called “the white man’s grave” because of malaria and yellow fever.
  • European explorers often had devastating effects on indigenous people—and vice versa. For example, some believe that the death of up to 95% of the Native American population of the new world was caused by old world diseases such as smallpox, measles, and influenza.
  • On the other hand, syphilis was carried from the new world to Europe after Columbus’ voyages.
Attempts to combat typhus after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen

Many notable epidemics and pandemics involve transmission from animals to humans, zoonoses.

  • Influenza/wild aquatic birds
  • SARS-CoV/civet cats
  • MERS-CoV/deomedary camels
  • COVID-19/bats’
  • Avian influenza (bird flu)/birds in Vietnam (a pandemic in waiting)
During the Third Plague, researchers definitively proved that flea bites spread Bubonic plague

Writing about pandemics—or any disease, actually, you need to decide on:

  • Name, fictional or real
  • Disease type/ who’s most susceptible (childhood/ common/ rare) 
  • Cause (bacteria, virus, parasite, fungus, imbalance of bodily humors, witchcraft, divine intervention, etc.) 
  • Transmission (airborne, body fluids, food or water, touch, telepathy, miasma, etc.)
  • Virulence (how likely a person is to catch the disease after coming into contact with it) 
  • Length of the incubation period: a person could be showing symptoms and become infectious almost instantly or it could take years 
  • Symptoms of this disease
  • Whether it’s treatable and/or curable
  • How people react when they encounter someone with this disease
    • For a first-hand idea of what people thought during the Black Death, check out this Eyewitness to History!
Houses with sick inhabitants were marked for quarantine in London

BOTTOM LINE FOR WRITERS: pandemic are tried and true for creative fiction, whether historical or current, sci-fi or known world, mystery/action adventure or romance. Go for it!

Let’s end this on a more cheerful note:
Happy Saint Patricks Day!

CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

Posted on by vlaw759

Let me be clear, right up front: I hate that we—all around the world—have to endure this pandemic.  But as with everything big and small, it’s fuel for writers.  Nothing ups the stakes like a global pandemic.

There is a long history of authors writing about society-wide epidemics, both real and fictional. One of the earliest examples is the plague in the Epic of Gilgamesh. A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe, is a first-hand account of the Bubonic Plague that devastated London in 1665. More examples of literary illnesses are below some important information from the Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization.

Although you’ve no doubt heard much of what follows, I will nonetheless provide the cautions from the CDC website. According to the CDC, the virus is thought to spread mainly from person-to-person, and everyone should TAKE STEPS TO PROTECT HIM/HERSELF.

Clean Your Hands Often

  • Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds (twice through the Happy Birthday song) especially after you have been in a public place, or after blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing. (Remember thumbs, backs of hands, and between fingers.)
  • If soap and water are not readily available, use a hand sanitizer that contains at least 60% alcohol. Cover all surfaces of your hands and rub them together until they feel dry. 
    • Writers note: at this time, there is a run on hand sanitizer. Suppose your character looks online for a DIY recipe (2/3 cup 99% rubbing alcohol [isopropyl alcohol] or ethanol; 1/3 cup aloe vera gel; 8-10 drops essential oil, optional) and has a panic attack trying to find the ingredients.
    • Writers note: some people are allergic to hand sanitizer and can only use the soap and water method. What would they do if hand washing facilities were not available?
  • Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth with unwashed hands. 
    • Writers note: on average, people touch their faces 20 times an hour (women typically touch their faces more than men; people with glasses touch their faces more). Consider a non-obsessive/compulsive person trying to follow even these three guidelines. Would thinking about it make them touch their face even more? Or consider a character who chooses not to do these things, or not to do them conscientiously.
Mustache stickers not included
  • If you are NOT sick, you do not need to wear a facemask unless you are caring for someone who is sick (and they are not able to wear a facemask). Facemasks may be in short supply and they should be saved for caregivers. 
    • The two most common types of facemask are those shaped like a rectangular piece of folded paper and those shaped like a cup. The cup-shaped masks are more effective, and they should be reserved for people in the most risk of infection.
    • Writers note: what if someone who needs facemasks can’t get them?
Italians keeping the mandated 1 meter distance

Avoid Close Contact

  • Avoid close contact with people who are sick. 
    • Writers note: what if the sick person is a spouse or child? Is the child old enough to understand why there are no hugs? Does your character avoid or not? And how does the sick person feel about that?
  • Put distance between yourself and other people if COVID-19 is spreading in your community. This is especially important for people who are at higher risk of getting very sick. The recommended distance is at least 6 feet. 
    • Writers note: what if your character is a health-care provider, first responder, police officer, bus driver, or … ? 
    • Also note: people at higher risk are those with pre-existing conditions (like heart disease, etc.) and anyone 60 or over. What if your character is high risk? 
    • Plot point: what if an otherwise healthy characters becomes an unwitting carrier for the virus, spreading it to someone who would otherwise have been safe?

Take Steps to Protect Others

Stay Home If You’re Sick

  • Stay home if you are sick, except to get medical care. Learn what to do if you are sick.
  • Call ahead: If you have a medical appointment, call the healthcare provider and tell them that you have or may have COVID-19. This will help the healthcare provider’s office take steps to keep other people from getting infected or exposed.
  • Isolate yourself: people who are mildly ill with COVID-19 are able to isolate at home during their illness. You should restrict activities outside your home.
  • Stay at home until instructed to leave: Patients with confirmed COVID-19 should remain under home isolation precautions until the risk of secondary transmission to others is thought to be low.
  • Talk to your healthcare provider:  The decision to discontinue home isolation precautions should be made on a case-by-case basis, in consultation with healthcare providers and state and local health departments.
  • Avoid public areas:  Do not go to work, school, or public areas.
  • Avoid public transportation:  Avoid using public transportation, ride-sharing, or taxis. 
    • Writers note: tension points for employed people (and/or partners and children) are obvious. And what about childcare? And school children who rely on breakfast/lunch programs?
  • But for writers, staying home could be handy writing time!
XKCD

Stay Away From Others 

Onions are a flu vaccine?
  • Lock yourself in: as much as possible, you should stay in a specific room and away from other people in your home. Also, you should use a separate bathroom, if available.
  • Limit contact with pets & animals: You should restrict contact with pets and other animals while you are sick with COVID-19, just like you would around other people. Although there have not been reports of pets or other animals becoming sick with COVID-19, it is still recommended that people sick with COVID-19 limit contact with animals until more information is known about the virus.
  • When possible, have another member of your household care for your animals while you are sick. If you are sick with COVID-19, avoid contact with your pet, including petting, snuggling, being kissed or licked, and sharing food. If you must care for your pet or be around animals while you are sick, wash your hands before and after you interact with pets and wear a facemask. 
    • Writers note: how will your character get food, medicine, toilet paper, … ?

Cover Coughs and Sneezes

  • Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when you cough or sneeze or use the inside of your elbow.
  • Throw used tissues in the trash.
  • Immediately wash your hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds.
    • If soap and water are not readily available, clean your hands with a hand sanitizer that contains at least 60% alcohol. 
  • Writers note: consider a character who is bullied or shunned because of seasonal allergies.
  • Writer’s note: in many countries, blowing one’s nose in public is considered as rude as farting loudly in church. How does a character in such a country stem the drip safely?
  • If you are sick:  You should wear a facemask when you are around other people (e.g., sharing a room or vehicle) and before you enter a healthcare provider’s office.
    • If you are not able to wear a facemask (for example, because it causes trouble breathing), then you should do your best to cover your coughs and sneezes, and people who are caring for you should wear a facemask if they enter your room.  Learn what to do if you are sick. 
    • Writers note: not just any facemask. It must be one that hugs the bridge of the nose and the area around the mouth. So what if a sick person uses the wrong type of facemask?
  • Monitor your symptoms
  • Seek medical attention: seek prompt medical attention if your illness is worsening (e.g., difficulty breathing).
  • Alert health department: ask your healthcare provider to call the local or state health department. Persons who are placed under active monitoring or facilitated self-monitoring should follow instructions provided by their local health department or occupational health professionals, as appropriate.
Pro athletes have said that playing in empty stadiums is eerie and not much fun.

Clean and Disinfect

  • Clean AND disinfect frequently touched surfaces daily. This includes tables, doorknobs, light switches, countertops, handles, desks, phones, keyboards, toilets, faucets, and sinks. 
    • Writers note: would your character do this or not? Or interfere with someone else doing it?
  • If surfaces are dirty, clean them:  Use detergent or soap and water prior to disinfection.
Cleaning and disinfecting products are already becoming hard to find

Pandemics Past and Present (Fiction and Non-Fiction)

As promised, here are some of the other authors who have written about illness sweeping through society and the ripples that spread out.

  • World War Z by Max Brooks
    • Unlike most zombie narratives, this book follows the entire course of a zombie plague, from Patient Zero to the eventual reconstruction of society. The “historical narratives” are provided by characters from every background and every part of the world. For an extra amazing experience, check out the audio-book, with actors from many countries providing a range of voices and accents.
  • Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
    • Set during the Bubonic Plague in 1666, this is a historical fiction account of a rural English village that quarantined itself to prevent the spread of plague to surrounding areas. The characters and most of the their interactions are fictional, but the story of the quarantined village is true.
  • The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell
    • Following the history of Zambia from the end of the colonial era, the author covers in haunting detail the toll that HIV/AIDS has had on the country. She writes from unfortunately first-hand experience of losing an entire generation of Zambians.
  • A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
    • Defoe published this account of London in 1665-1666 as a warning to later readers. He included lists of how many people died in each parish, how entire households were forcibly quarantined, the morning dead carts being pulled through the streets (and what was likely to happen if you fell asleep on the sidewalk!), and lots of individual stories of the people around him in London.
  • The Two Princesses of Bamarre by Gail Carson Levine
    • Young adult fantasy novels and horrific plagues are not common bedfellows (bookfellows?), but Levine has included a twist on the typical hero’s journey, a fabulous protagonist, and an interesting side-quests. Still, behind all the heroism and romance is the inescapable dread and death that affects every member of society.
  • Survivors by Terry Nation
    • This was a television series in the 1970s, made into a novel by Terry Grant, and then made into another television series based on the novel in the 2000s. Except for the very beginning, Survivors deals with the aftermath of a pandemic that wiped out most of the world population; characters have to adapt to a society with no law or order.
  • Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter
    • This short novel is set around the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 and focuses on a young woman falling in love with a soldier, as both influenza and World War I threaten to destroy their entire world.
Patients coming off a recently docked cruise ship and going directly into quarantine

Bottom line for writers: any calamity can be good for writers—both fiction and non-fiction writers. Consider the daily news: quarantined cruise ships, all passengers aboard; quarantines for nursing homes and senior living facilities; schools and colleges closing. And the spin-off of people preparing to be quarantined, causing panic buying of hand sanitizer, disinfectants, toilet paper, frozen foods, disposable diapers, etc., etc., etc.

This is a prescription I can definitely follow!

SLEEPING ALONE AND TOGETHER

Posted on by vlaw759

People who get the recommended eight hours of sleep in twenty-four are spending a third of their lives in bed. Granted, things other than sleep happen in bed, but it’s absolutely undeniable that people—and therefore realistic characters—go to bed, sleep more or less well, and get up often. Whether the sleeper spread-eagles across the bed or looks like a soldier at attention, a preferred sleep position can be indicative of character, personality, and even health issues.  

Writers take note: it pays to pay attention to your protagonist’s sleep habits.

Sleeping Positions and What They Say About Personality

  • The Fetal Position is a favorite: 41% of all people habitually adopt this position at night. It involves curling your knees towards your chest, as if sleeping in the womb. 
    • Secret Softy is the basic personality type associated with this position.  This sleeping position means tough on the outside and soft on the inside. The person may be shy to begin with, though they usually open up and relax quite quickly.
    •  Left-side sleepers tend to be creative and  well-educated.
    •  Right-side sleepers are more likely to smoke and depend on caffeine.
  • The Thinker—much like the fetal position—will sleep curled up but with a hand gently resting on the chin, as if pondering something.
    • The personality associated with this position is an  Emotional Evaluator. Those who habitually sleep in this position are more emotional than other sleepers, with both positive and negative emotions running high.
  • The Log: 15% of people enjoy sleeping in the log position, the second most popular position. To snooze in this position, one sleeps on one side with both arms and legs straight.  (It must be comfortable even if it doesn’t look it.)
    • Logs are Naturally Carefree people.  But conventional wisdom says that those who tend to sleep like this also tend to be social butterflies, friendly, carefree, and popular.
    • Writers Note: A trusting nature means also likely to fall into the trap of being gullible. 
  • The Yearner is also a common sleeping position that involves sleeping on one side with straight legs but arms stretched out, as if trying to reach something.
    • Such people are thought to be Complex Characters. People who sleep like this are a bit of a mixed bag, being both open-minded and cynical, inviting but suspicious of new friends and acquaintances.
    • “Yearners” tend to make good, reliable friends. Slow and deliberate decision makers, they are often unsure of their own decisions, though they have a firm resolve once they’ve come to a conclusion. 
  • Soldier Stance, as the name implies, looks like a soldier sleeping at attention, lying on their back with arms straight by their sides.
    • Controlled Characters tend to sleep in this position. They will usually be strong, quiet, focused, and reserved.
    • They may also expect themselves and other people to adhere to strict moral codes and high standards.
  • The Freefall (also called The Skydiver) sleep position makes the sleeper look a relaxed skydiver freefalling through the sky, often with arms wrapped around a pillow while sleeping on their stomach. 
    • Sleeping in freefall indicates someone who is bold, sociable, and fun, though they may not have the thick skin necessary to deal with criticism or uncomfortable situations.
    • They may be anxious, and seek control of situations.
  • Spread-Eagled Starfish (sometimes called Mattress Hog), the starfish sleeper spreads arms and legs in a carefree manner over the entire bed surface while lying face-up, is the least common position.
    • A starfish is likely to be a flexible friend, willing to listen to anyone who needs to talk or help anyone who needs a hand.  Although unconventional, they probably don’t really like to be the center of attention.
  • The Stargazer position isn’t the most popular, possibly because it can mean the sleeper gets too cool overnight. The position is a vulnerable one, with stargazers lying on their backs, arms wrapped around their head.
    • They are likely to be the Best BFF’s, giving priority to their friends, doing everything they can for those they hold dear.
    • Usually, these sleepers will have a happy, easy-going disposition.
  • Pillow Huggers are self-described. They hug pillows close to their bodies, and usually have arms and legs wrapped around it in some way. 
    • Pillow huggers like to get cosy and be cuddled, cherishing the relationships they have with the important people in their lives above all else.

Other Factors Related to Various Positions

Positional Side Effects

  • The Log
    • Some claim this position, aligning neck and back, makes it one of the best for back and neck pain; others point out the potential for arm numbness, as well as neck and shoulder pain for some people.
    • May also put pressure on hip joints, sometimes eased by a pillow between the knees.
  • The Soldier 
    • Unless the sleeper uses too many pillows or sleeps on an uneven surface, this position aligns the neck and spine if not too many pillows. This position can distribute weight evenly across shoulders. Its relationships to acid reflux is unclear. Back sleepers are more prone to snoring, and those with sleep apnea can aggravate the condition by sleeping like this.
    • On the other hand, the effects of gravity means it can help prevent the development of wrinkles on beck and face. Dianna Ross once said she trained herself to sleep on her back for that very reason. 
    • Another reason to train oneself to sleep in this position is to elevate or avoid aggravating injuries, such as broken arms, knee or ankle surgeries, abdominal sutures, shoulder strain, or any other painful event that may have happened to a character.
  • The Starfish
    • Also a flat back position, the starfish has the same side effects as the soldier. Only 8% of sleepers prefer back sleeping.
    • Back sleeping tends to lead to more refreshing sleep, with the least readjusting during the night. May be a good choice for people with arthritis.
    • On the other hand, it may aggravate back and neck pain. Back sleeping (keeping face off the pillow) may reduce acne breakouts.
  • Freefall/ Skydiver 
    • Research suggests that this position is one of the worst for health because it puts strain on the neck, back, and spine. It increases the risk of neck and back pain as well as airway blockage. A sleeper can ease stress on neck, upper back, and airways by sleeping face down with a pillow under forehead.
    • On the plus side, it also has the the potential to ease snoring and sleep apnea.
    • Only 7% of people sleep on their stomach.
  • Side Sleepers
    • Side sleeping reduces snoring and relieves sleep apnea. It can reduce back and neck pain and carpal tunnel syndrome. Side sleeping helps the brain’s lymphatic system clear waste during sleep.
    • Side sleepers are more likely to develop face and neck wrinkles (compared to back sleepers). Consistently sleeping on one side can lead to noticeably asymmetrical wrinkling.
    • Sleeping on one’s side may lead to the down-side limbs “going to sleep.”
    • Which side matters:
      • Left side sleeping is helpful for acid reflux, and it may aid digestion.
      • Right side sleeping may lower nervous system activity, reducing heart rate and blood pressure.
    • Fetal Position
      • Sleepers in the fetal position have the fewest sleep interruptions.
      • It’s also the best position for back pain. 
    • The Thinker shares side effects with the fetal position.

Age

  • With age, more people gravitate to a side-sleeping position. This may be related to protecting heart function during sleep.
  • As they get older, people move less drastically during the night, move less frequently, and spend more time in a position before moving on to another. Children shift sleep position more than twice as often during the night compared to those 65 and over.
  • Sleep position matters more with age. Older people are less flexible and more prone to stiffness and pain.

Gender

  • Twice as many women as men tend to sleep in the fetal position.
  • Pregnant women are urged to sleep on the left side, for reasons mentioned above. Back sleeping can create back pain, breathing problems, and heartburn, lower blood pressure and reduce circulation. The fetal position keeps pressure off the liver. 

Dreams

  • Right-side sleepers may have fewer nightmares. Disturbing dreams might be lessened by sleeping on the other side.
  • Back sleepers are also more likely to have nightmares and to recall less of their dreams.
  • Stomach sleepers have more vivid, intense, and sexual dreams. They’re also more likely to have dreams of being immobilized or restrained.

SLEEPING TOGETHER

  • Spooning is a fairly well known term. It’s where one partner snuggles up behind the other. It’s practiced by about 18% of couples and indicates a dynamic in which one partner takes a protective role with the other.
  • The Loose Spoon is exactly what it sounds like, the spoon but with less physical contact. It is typical of couples who start off spooning but relax as the relationship matures. It still says “I’ve got your back,” but is less sexual than spooning.
  • The Chase is like the spoon, except as the spoonee moves to the edge of the bed, the spooner follows. It might mean that the spoonee wants to be pursuedpursued OR that s/he wants more space. Clearly, these two motivations have quite different implications about the state of the relationship.
  • The Tangle is extremely intimate, the partners facing each other, arms and legs entwined. It is most common at the start of a romantic relationship, or in a situation of intense emotion. Couples that maintain the tangle throughout their relationship may be overly enmeshed, too dependent on each other.
  • The Unraveling Knot starts as a tangle that lasts about ten minutes, then the two people move apart. It’s a sign of a stronger relationship than the tangle, allowing for both intimacy and independence—the best of both worlds.  Only 8% of couples exhibit this two-step style.
  • Liberty Lovers sleep back to back, not touching, indicating the people in the relationship are connected and secure, sharing both closeness and independence. It’s relatively popular, the preferred sleeping style for 27% of couples.
  • Back Kissers are like liberty lovers except their backs or bottoms touch. It’s more common among newer couples, those who have been together for less than a year.
  • The Nuzzle involves one partner resting his/her head on the other’s chest, legs often intertwined. It’s often seen in early relationships, sometimes rekindled ones. This is considered a nurturing position that creates a sense of protection and trust.
  • The Leg Hug is like playing footsie in bed—one partner’s leg over the other’s. It represents a craving for an emotional or sexual connection. They can’t get enough of each other, and their lives are so intertwined that they function as a pair—taking care of each other, finishing each other’s sentences, etc.
  • The Space Hog is when one partner takes the starfish position, indicating selfishness, especially when/if the sprawler pushes the other partner so s/he is hanging off the bed (or falls off). This often indicates a lack of honest conversation. It can demonstrate which partner is dominating the relationship. The person sleeping closest to the headboard tends to feel more dominant and confident, while the one who is farther from the headboard tend to be submissive and have lower self-esteem.

Bottom line for writers: Consider the sleep habits of your characters to make their private lives richer, add tension, and possibly demonstrate intimacy (or lack thereof).

Exercising Your Creativity – Challenge Accepted!

Posted on by vlaw759
Mariko Takahashi really exercises her creativity!

Today’s blog entry was written by Kathleen Corcoran, a local harpist, teacher, writer, editor, favorite auntie, and very reluctant washer of dishes.

This is an update/response to a post originally written on June 9, 2017. I’ve decided to take up Vivian’s challenge and run with it as far as my over-active imagination can take me! (Spoiler warning: I can run pretty far.)

The program is simple. Take an ordinary event and consider all the ways you could add tension, conflict, humor, surprise, etc.  For example, house-sitting.

This is definitely my brother’s house. Mine is right across the street!

My brother and sister-in-law live across the street from me. It’s a bit like having an extra WiFi connection, couch, kitchen, and bathroom, complete with pet-sitters and random free food. On this particular occasion, I was looking after my extended house while my brother’s family was out of town.

Mid-morning, I piled all my dirty dishes into a box and went across the street to take advantage of the dishwasher. And feed the fish. And water the plants.

  • What if
    • The box fell apart or dropped, smashing dirty dishes all over the street?
    • I forgot my key and had to jimmy open the window to climb in?
    • A neighbor called the police about the shifty-looking woman in slippers wandering around the yard with a suspiciously clattering box?

My niece is six-going-on-seven and makes her presence known even when she isn’t home. Little rainbow shoes and fluffy coats were left by the door. Exquisitely rendered crayon portraits covered the refrigerator. Scattered markers and Legos and hair ribbons and books and dinosaurs and a million other bits of her massive personality dominated every room in the house.

  • What if
    • I replaced all her artwork on the refrigerator with finger paintings by another niece, just to see if anyone would notice?
    • Paint, glue, juice boxes, etc. had spilled, making a big mess or possibly indicating that someone else had been in the house?
    • I stepped on a lego, screamed in pain, dropped the box of dishes on my other foot, stumbled back, tripped over a plastic sword-wielding dinosaur, knocked over a bookcase, crashed into the fish tank, and fell to the floor in an unconscious heap while fishy water and inevitable glitter dripped on my head?

When I go out of town, my brother takes care of my dog and turtle. When he’s out of town with his family, I feed his fish. I think I’m definitely getting the better end of the deal. All I have to do is shake a few pellets into the tank.

  • What if
    • The fish were floating upside down and I had to decide whether to dispose of the bodies and hope no one noticed or to save the bodies for a shoebox funeral when my niece returned
    • I knocked something in the tank and had to dive into the cold, salty water to save it, feeling fish and slimy water plants drift through my fingers?
    • A leak had developed in the tank overnight, leaving puddles on the floor and flopping fishy bodies on the gravel at the bottom of the tank?
If you find a pack of wolves in the living room, I suggest leaving them there and running away.

While the kitchen robot washed my dishes (I hate washing the dishes), I wandered around the house to check that everything looked as it should.

  • What if
    • Broken windows or missing/ disarranged valuables showed that someone had broken in?
    • An animal of some kind had gotten in through an overlooked air vent and clawed furniture, released bodily fluids, shed fur, knocked everything over, and then left? What if it was still there?
    • Embarrassing items of a personal nature had been left out?
    • A strange and not altogether pleasant smell was coming from somewhere?
    • The mail I brought in included an envelope marked “Past-Due” or “Cancer Test Results” or something else worrying?
    • I replaced all of the energy drinks in the kitchen with decaf drinks in similar cans?

So many possibilities! No matter how comfortable I am with my brother’s family, being in someone else’s home always feels just a bit voyeuristic. There are some things I can reliably assume I won’t find in my brother’s house, but a stranger’s house might contain anything a whole world of insanity!

  • Someone else in the house unexpectedly, maybe sleeping on the couch or looking through the refrigerator…?
  • The remnants of something illegal halfheartedly hidden in a trashcan…?
  • Poisonous plants to water very carefully without touching the leaves….?
  • A coffee table made from the taxidermied bodies of deceased pets…?
  • Burst pipes, smoking outlets, fires, or any other kind of disaster in progress…?
  • Sexually explicit photos framed and hung on the bathroom wall…?
  • A chandelier smashed on the floor with no clear reason why…?

Your assignment: Choose any mundane activity from today’s wealth—anything from doing laundry to going to the gym to hosting six for dinner—and take a few minutes to consider what if?

What if there is a horse in the dining room?

NAVIGATING THE RAINBOW

Posted on by vlaw759

The following is an excerpt from the March 2, 2020 issue of The New Yorker, in a letter to the editor, headed “Fifty Shades of Gay.”

As a temperamentally conservative white Christian man, Buttigieg is as palatable as gay people get—a fact that makes this moment in queer history anticlimactic for the nonwhite, non-cisgender, non-male individuals who don’t relate to the queerness that America is most comfortable with.  … our political system, which is so concerned with the emotional equilibrium of the white cis-het majority…”

In order to understand this letter, I had to go online. It turns out that non-cisgender means someone whose gender identity doesn’t match the sex recorded on his/her birth certificate.  Cis-het means someone whose gender identity matches the birth certificate and who is heterosexual.

Note to writers: if you are writing contemporary fiction, know the current jargon. For your edification (perhaps), here is a dictionary of some terms that might come in handy. Bear in mind that the following terms may have different meanings or connotations in different societies, and a term that is used with pride in one community may be an insult in another.

Abrosexual Pride Flag

abrosexual – adj. : being fluid in sexuality. This means a sexuality that changes very often and fluctuates among several sexual orientations.

Agender Pride Flag

agender – adj. : a person with no (or very little) connection to the traditional system of gender, no personal alignment with the concepts of either man or woman, and/or someone who sees themselves as existing without gender. Sometimes called gender neutrois, gender neutral, or genderless.

androgyny /“an-jrah-jun-ee”/ (androgynous) – 1 noun. : a gender expression that has elements of both masculinity and femininity;  2 adj. : occasionally used in place of “intersex” to describe a person with both female and male anatomy, generally in the form “androgyne.”

Androsexual Pride Flag

androsexual / androphilic – adj. : being primarily sexually, romantically and/or emotionally attracted to men, males, and/or masculinity.

Aromantic Pride Flag

aromantic /”ay-ro-man-tic”/ – adj. : experiencing little or no romantic attraction to others and/or has a lack of interest in romantic relationships/behavior. Aromanticism exists on a continuum from people who experience no romantic attraction or have any desire for romantic activities, to those who experience low levels, or romantic attraction only under specific conditions. Many of these different places on the continuum have their own identity labels (see demiromantic). Sometimes abbreviated to “aro” (pronounced like “arrow”). For insight on writing aromantic characters, I recommend this guide by Bran Lindy Ayres.

Asexual Pride Flag

asexual – adj. : experiencing little or no sexual attraction to others and/or a lack of interest in sexual relationships/behavior.  Asexuality exists on a continuum from people who experience no sexual attraction or have any desire for sex, to those who experience low levels, or sexual attraction only under specific conditions. Many of these different places on the continuum have their own identity labels (see demisexual). Sometimes abbreviated to “ace.” For insight on writing asexual characters, I recommend this guide by Bran Lindy Ayres.

Bicurious Pride Flag

bicurious – adj. : characterized by an openness to or curiosity about having sexual relations with a person whose sex differs from that of one’s usual sexual partners : curious about exploring or experimenting with bisexuality

Bigender Pride Flag

bigender – adj. : a person who fluctuates between traditionally “woman” and “man” gender-based behavior and identities, identifying with both genders (or sometimes identifying with either man or woman, as well as a third, different gender).

binder – noun : an undergarment used to alter or reduce the appearance of one’s breasts (worn similarly to how one wears a sports bra).  Binding – adj. : the (sometimes daily) process of wearing a binder. Binding is often used to change the way other’s read/perceive one’s anatomical sex characteristics, and/or as a form of gender expression. 

biological sex – noun : a medical term used to refer to the chromosomal, hormonal, and anatomical characteristics that are used to classify an individual as female or male or intersex. Often referred to as simply “sex,” “physical sex,” “anatomical sex,” or specifically as “sex assigned at birth.”

biphobia – noun : a range of negative attitudes (e.g., fear, anger, intolerance, invisibility, resentment, erasure, or discomfort) that one may have or express toward bisexual individuals. Biphobia can come from and be seen within the LGBTQ community as well as straight society.  Biphobic – adj. : a word used to describe actions, behaviors, or individuals who demonstrate elements of this range of negative attitudes toward bisexual people.

Bisexual Pride Flag

bisexual – 1 noun & adj. : a person who experiences attraction to some men and women. 2 adj. : a person who experiences attraction to some people of their gender and another gender. Bisexual attraction does not have to be equally split, or indicate a level of interest that is the same across the genders an individual may be attracted to. Often used interchangeably with “pansexual”.

butch – noun & adj. : a person who identifies themselves as masculine, whether it be physically, mentally, or emotionally. ‘Butch’ is sometimes used as a derogatory term for lesbians, but can also be claimed as an affirmative identity label.

cisgender /“siss-jendur”/ – adj. : a gender description for when someone’s sex assigned at birth and gender identity are the same (e.g., someone who was assigned male at birth, and identifies as a man). A simple way to think about it is if a person is not transgender, they are cisgender. The word cisgender can also be shortened to “cis.”

cisnormativity – noun : the assumption, in individuals and in institutions, that everyone is cisgender, and that cisgender identities are superior to trans* identities and people. Leads to invisibility of non-cisgender identities.

Transgender people murdered in 2018

cissexism – noun : behavior that grants preferential treatment to cisgender people, reinforces the idea that being cisgender is somehow better or more “right” than being transgender, and/or makes other genders invisible.

constellation – noun : a way to describe the arrangement or structure of a polyamorous relationship.

One variation of the Demiromantic Pride Flag

demiromantic – adj. : little or no capacity to experience romantic attraction until a strong sexual connection is formed with someone, often within a sexual relationship.

Demisexual Pride Flag

demisexual – adj. : little or no capacity to experience sexual attraction until a strong romantic connection is formed with someone, often within a romantic relationship.

Racism in the gay community is particularly prevalent and visible on online dating apps.

down low – adj. : typically referring to men who identify as straight but who secretly have sex with men. Down low (or DL) originated in, and is most commonly used by, communities of color.

NYC Dyke March

dyke – noun : referring to a masculine presenting lesbian. While often used derogatorily, it is also reclaimed affirmatively by some lesbians and gay women as a positive self identity term.

Erin Davies drove her “Fagbug” around to film reactions to anti-LGBTQ vandalism for five years.

fag(got) – noun : derogatory term referring to a gay person, or someone perceived as queer. While often used derogatorily, it is also used/reclaimed by some gay people (often gay men) as a positive in-group term.

feminine-of-center; masculine-of-center – adj. : a phrase that indicates a range in terms of gender identity and expression for people who present, understand themselves, and/or relate to others in a generally more feminine/masculine way, but don’t necessarily identify as women or men.  Feminine-of-center individuals may also identify as “femme,” “submissive,” “transfeminine,” etc.; masculine-of-center individuals may also often identify as “butch,” “stud,” “aggressive,” “boi,” “transmasculine,” etc.

feminine-presenting; masculine-presenting – adj. : a way to describe someone who expresses gender in a more feminine/masculine way. Often confused with feminine-of-center/masculine-of-center, which generally include a focus on identity as well as expression.

femme – noun & adj. : someone who identifies themselves as feminine, whether it be physically, mentally or emotionally. Often used to refer to a feminine-presenting queer woman or people.

fluid(ity) – adj. : generally with another term attached, like gender-fluid or fluid-sexuality, fluid(ity) describes an identity that may change or shift over time between or within the mix of the options available (e.g., man and woman, bi and straight).

FtM / F2M; MtF / M2F – abbr. : female-to-male transgender or transsexual person; male-to-female transgender or transsexual person.

Third Gender Pride Flag

gender binary – noun : the idea that there are only two genders and that every person is one of those two.

gender expression – noun : the external display of one’s gender, through a combination of clothing, grooming, demeanor, social behavior, and other factors, generally made sense of on scales of masculinity and femininity. Also referred to as “gender presentation.”

Genderfluid Pride Flag

gender fluid – adj. : a gender identity best described as a dynamic mix of boy and girl. A person who is gender fluid may always feel like a mix of the two traditional genders, but may feel more man some days, and more woman other days. Ashley Lauren Rogers provides a range of references for writing characters with a different gender identity.

gender identity – noun : the internal perception of an one’s gender, and how they label themselves, based on how much they align or don’t align with what they understand their options for gender to be. Often conflated with biological sex, or sex assigned at birth.

gender neutrois – adj. : see agender.

gender non-conforming – 1 adj. : a gender expression descriptor that indicates a non-traditional gender presentation (masculine woman or feminine man).  2 adj. : a gender identity label that indicates a person who identifies outside of the gender binary. Often abbreviated as “GNC.”

gender normative / gender straight – adj. : someone whose gender presentation, whether by nature or by choice, aligns with society’s gender-based expectations.

Genderqueer Pride Flag

genderqueer – 1 adj. : a gender identity label often used by people who do not identify with the binary of man/woman.  2 adj. : an umbrella term for many gender non-conforming or non-binary identities (e.g., agender, bigender, genderfluid).

gender variant – adj. : someone who either by nature or by choice does not conform to gender-based expectations of society (e.g. transgender, transsexual, intersex, genderqueer, cross-dresser, etc).

Gray Ace Pride Flag

gray asexual – noun : a person who is somewhere between being asexual and sexual. They might only experience sexual attraction on very rare occasions, feel sexual attraction but not desire sexual relationships, or experience a feeling somewhere in between platonic and sexual.

Gynesexual Pride Flag

gynesexual / gynephilic /“guy-nuh-seks-shu-uhl”/ – adj. : being primarily sexually, romantically and/or emotionally attracted to woman, females, and/or femininity.

Rebis, a Medieval alchemical hermaphroditic principle

hermaphrodite – noun : an outdated medical term previously used to refer to someone who was born with some combination of typically-male and typically-female sex characteristics. It’s considered stigmatizing and inaccurate.  See intersex.  (The word comes from the Greek myth of Hermaphroditos, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite.)

heteronormativity – noun : the assumption, in individuals and/or in institutions, that everyone is heterosexual and that heterosexuality is superior to all other sexualities. Heteronormativity also leads us to assume that only masculine men and feminine women are straight. Leads to invisibility and stigmatizing of other sexualities: when learning a woman is married, asking her what her husband’s name is. 

heterosexism – noun : behavior that grants preferential treatment to heterosexual people, reinforces the idea that heterosexuality is somehow better or more “right” than queerness, and/or makes other sexualities invisible.

heterosexual/straight – adj. : experiencing attraction solely (or primarily) to some members of a different gender. 

Original flag design by Gilbert Baker in 1978

homosexual – adj. & noun : a person primarily emotionally, physically, and/or sexually attracted to members of the same sex/gender. This [medical] term is considered stigmatizing (particularly as a noun) due to its history as a category of mental illness, and is discouraged for common use (use gay or lesbian instead).

Intersex Pride Flag

intersex – adj. : term for a combination of chromosomes, gonads, hormones, internal sex organs, and genitals that differs from the two expected patterns of male or female. Formerly known as hermaphrodite (or hermaphroditic), but these terms are now outdated and derogatory.

Lesbian (Labrys) Pride Flag

lesbian – noun & adj. : women who are primarily attracted romantically, erotically, and/or emotionally to other women.

LGBTQ; GSM; DSG – abbr. : shorthand or umbrella terms for all folks who have a non-normative (or queer) gender or sexuality, there are many different initialisms people prefer. LGBTQ is Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and Queer and/or Questioning (sometimes people add A + AT the end in an effort to be more inclusive); GSM is Gender and Sexual Minorities; DSG is Diverse Sexualities and Genders. Other options include the initialism GLBT or LGBT and the acronym QUILTBAG (Queer [or Questioning] Undecided Intersex Lesbian Trans* Bisexual Asexual [or Allied] and Gay [or Genderqueer]).

Lipstick Lesbian Pride Flag

lipstick lesbian – noun : usually refers to a lesbian with a feminine gender expression. Can be used in a positive or a derogatory way. Is sometimes also used to refer to a lesbian who is assumed to be (or passes for) straight.

metrosexual – adj. : a man with a strong aesthetic sense who spends more time, energy, or money on his appearance and grooming than is considered gender normative.

MSM / WSW – abbr. : men who have sex with men or women who have sex with women, to distinguish sexual behaviors from sexual identities: because a man is straight, it doesn’t mean he’s not having sex with men. Often used in the field of HIV/Aids education, prevention, and treatment.

Mx. / “mix” or “schwa” / – noun : an honorific (e.g. Mr., Ms., Mrs., etc.) that is gender neutral.  It is often the option of choice for folks who do not identify within the gender binary: Mx. Smith is a great teacher.

Neutrois Pride Flag

neutrois – noun : an umbrella term for neutral genders (includes agender). Sometimes, it refers to genderlessness, sometimes a neutral combination of male and female.

Novosexual Pride Flag

novosexual – noun : someone who does not know what their sexuality is. This is different from questioning, however, as they know they are a different sexuality (from heterosexual/straight), but that sexuality keeps changing and they can’t pinpoint which one it is.

Pansexual Pride Flag

pansexual – adj. : a person who experiences sexual, romantic, physical, and/or spiritual attraction for members of all gender identities/expressions. Often shortened to “pan.”

passing – 1 adj. & verb : trans* people being accepted as, or able to “pass for,” a member of their self-identified gender identity (regardless of sex assigned at birth) without being identified as trans*.  2 adj. : an LGB/queer individual who is believed to be or perceived as straight.

PGPs – abbr. : preferred gender pronouns. Often used during introductions, becoming more common as a standard practice. Many suggest removing the “preferred,” because it indicates flexibility and/or the power for the speaker to decide which pronouns to use for someone else.

Polyamory Pride Flag

polyamory  (polyamorous) – noun : refers to the practice of, desire for, or orientation toward having ethical, honest, and consensual non-monogamous relationships (i.e., relationships that may include multiple partners). Often shortened to “poly.”

Polysexual Pride Flag

polysexual – noun : the attraction to multiple genders. Bisexuality and pansexuality are forms of polysexuality.  Polysexuality generally rejects the idea of a gender binary rather than a spectrum of genders. Polysexuals do not necessarily engage in or support polyamory.

queer – 1 adj. : an umbrella term to describe individuals who don’t identify as straight and/or cisgender.  2 noun : a slur used to refer to someone who isn’t straight and/or cisgender.  Due to its historical use as a derogatory term, and how it is still used as a slur in many communities, it is not embraced or used by all LGBTQ people. The term “queer” can often be used interchangeably with LGBTQ (e.g., “queer people” instead of “LGBTQ people”).

questioning – verb, adj. : an individual who or time when someone is unsure about or exploring their own sexual orientation or gender identity.

Progress Pride Flag: includes PoC, Trans, Ace, Nonbinary, and HIV/ AIDS awareness

QPOC / QTPOC – abbr. : initialisms that stand for queer people of color and queer and/or trans people of color.

Bawabu, the symbol used for same-gender loving movement in the 1990s

same gender loving (SGL) – adj. : sometimes used by some members of the African-American or Black community to express a non-straight sexual orientation without relying on terms and symbols of European descent.

sexual orientation – noun : the type of sexual, romantic, and emotional/spiritual attraction one has the capacity to feel for some others, generally labeled based on the gender relationship between the person and the people they are attracted to. Often confused with sexual preference.

Linda Ikeji, before and after transitioning

sex reassignment surgery (SRS) – noun : used by some medical professionals to refer to a group of surgical options that alter a person’s biological sex. “Gender confirmation surgery” is considered by many to be a more affirming term. In most cases, one or multiple surgeries are required to achieve legal recognition of gender variance. Some refer to different surgical procedures as “top” surgery and “bottom” surgery to discuss what type of surgery they are having without having to be more explicit.

Skoliosexual Pride Flag

skoliosexual – adj. : being primarily sexually, romantically and/or emotionally attracted to some genderqueer, transgender, transsexual, and/or non-binary people.

spornosexual – adj. : a man concerned with personal appearance, but who places more emphasis on having a fit, toned, virile body than on grooming or fashion. Spornosexuals are said to be on the quest for the ultimate body so they can show if off on social media, preferably shirtless, not to be confused with a metrosexual.

stealth – adj. : a trans person who is not “out” as trans*, and is perceived/known by others as cisgender.

straight ally – noun : a heterosexual and cisgender person who supports equal civil rights, gender equality, LGBT social movements, and challenges homophobia, biphobia and transphobia. Also known as a heterosexual ally.

stud – noun : most commonly used to indicate a Black/African-American and/or Latina masculine lesbian/queer woman. Also known as ‘butch’ or ‘aggressive’.

third gender – noun : for a person who does not identify with either man or woman, but identifies with another gender. This gender category is used by societies that recognize three or more genders, both contemporary and historic, and is also a conceptual term meaning different things to different people who use it, as a way to move beyond the gender binary. Many cultures have a separate word for members of this third gender.

top surgery – noun : this term refers to surgery for the construction of a male-type chest or breast augmentation for a female-type chest.

Transgender Pride Flag

transgender – 1 adj. : a gender description for someone who has transitioned (or is transitioning) from living as one gender to another.  2 adj. : an umbrella term for anyone whose sex assigned at birth and gender identity do not correspond in the expected way (e.g., someone who was assigned male at birth, but does not identify as a man).

Black Transmen Inc
Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice

transman; transwoman – 1 noun : an identity label sometimes adopted by female-to-male transgender people or transsexuals to signify that they are men while still affirming their history as assigned female sex at birth (sometimes referred to as transguy) 2 noun : identity label sometimes adopted by male-to-female transsexuals or transgender people to signify that they are women while still affirming their history as assigned male sex at birth.

Transgender people murdered in 2019

transphobia – noun : the fear of, discrimination against, or hatred of trans* people, the trans* community, or gender ambiguity. Transphobia can be seen within the queer community, as well as in general society.

transphobic – adj. : a word used to describe an individual who harbors some elements of this range of negative attitudes, thoughts, intents, towards trans* people.

Chevalier D’Eon, recently confirmed to be a painting of a transvestite

transvestite – noun : a person who dresses as the binary opposite gender expression (“cross-dresses”) for any one of many reasons, including relaxation, fun, and sexual gratification (often called a “cross-dresser,” and should not be confused with transsexual).

two-spirit – noun : is an umbrella term traditionally within Native American communities to recognize individuals who possess qualities or fulfill roles of both genders.

ze / zir / “zee”, “zerr” or “zeer”/ – alternate pronouns that are gender neutral and preferred by some trans* people. They replace “he” and “she” and “his” and “hers” respectively. Alternatively, some people who are not comfortable/do not embrace he/she use the plural pronoun “they/their” as a gender neutral singular pronoun.

Suicide and mental illness rates among LGBTQIA people, especially young people, are more than twice as high as those among the general population.
Association for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Issues in Counseling

GOOD READING ANYTIME

Posted on by vlaw759

I’ll cut to the chase: when my husband and I talked about Black writers the other day, in the car, the following list rolled off the tips of our tongues. If you search the internet for African American writers, you will find all sorts of lists, from those who made the New York Times Bestsellers list to literally hundreds on Wikipedia arranged into categories. But here is our personal, not-so-big-as-to-be-overwhelming list of our favorite Black authors, and something we especially liked from each. (FYI: we didn’t think of them in alpha order! 😉 )

  • Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart
    • Born in Nigeria in 1930, Chinua Achebe made a splash with the publication of his first novel, Things Fall Apart, in 1958. Renowned as one of the seminal works of African literature, it has since sold more than 20 million copies and been translated into more than 50 languages.  Achebe followed with novels such as No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), and served as a faculty member at renowned universities in the U.S. and Nigeria.  He died on March 21, 2013, at age 82, in Boston, Massachusetts.
    • Biography.com Editors
  • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Americanah
    • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is the author of three novels, Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Americanah (2013), of a short story collection, The Thing around Your Neck (2009). She has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (2007) and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2008).
    • The Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Website, written by Daria Tunca
  • Ama Ata Aidoo Changes: A Love Story
    • Born Christina Ama Ata Aidoo in 1942, was born in Abeadzi Kyiakor, Gold Coast, now Ghana. Combining traditional African storytelling with Western genres, she writes of the contemporary roles of African women and the negative impact of Western influences on African culture. Her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, was published in 1965. Her short stories, collected in No Sweetness Here and The Girl Who Can, and her novel, Our Sister Killjoy, expand on these themes, many of which mirror Aidoo’s own experiences. Her other works include the play Anowa, the poems of Someone Talking to Sometime; Birds; and Angry Letter in January; and a collection of children’s stories. The novel Changes: A Love Story (1991) explores a contemporary African marriage.
    • The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia
  • Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
    • Born in 1928 in St Louis, Maya Angelou joined the Harlem Writer’s Guild in the late 1950’s. With the guidance of her friend, the novelist James Baldwin, she began work on the book that would become I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Published in 1970, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings received international acclaim made the bestseller list. The book was also banned in many schools during that time as Maya Angelou’s honesty about having been sexually abused opened a subject matter that had long been taboo in the culture. Later, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings would become a course adoption at college campuses around the world. Maya Angelou has wrote 36 books, including more than 30 bestselling titles, before her death in 2014.
    • The Legacy of Dr. Maya Angelou
  • Ayi Kwei Armah The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
    • Ayi Kwei Armah is a Ghanaian novelist whose work deals with corruption and materialism in contemporary Africa. He worked as a scriptwriter, translator, and English teacher in the United States, among other places. In his first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Armah showed his deep concern for greed and political corruption in a newly independent African nation. All of Armah’s works are concerned with the widening moral and spiritual chasm that existed between appearance and reality, spirit and substance, and past and present in his native Ghana. He is also an essayist, as well as having written poetry, short stories, and books for children.
    • Encyclopedia Britannica: Ayi Kwei Armah written by Amy Tikkanen
  • Odafe Atogun Taduno’s Song
    • Odafe Atogun was born in Nigeria, in the town of Lokoja, where the rivers Niger and Benue meet. He studied Journalism at the Times Journalism Institute, Lagos and is now a full-time writer. His debut novel, Taduno’s Song, was selected for the BBC Radio 2 Book Club, and he has been compared favorably to Franz Kafka and George Orwell in critical reviews. Following his two-book deal with Canongate, Penguin Random House and Arche Verlag, Atogun’s second novel, Wake Me When I’m Gone, was published in 2017. His work has been translated into several languages.
    • Odafe Atogun press
  • Sefi Atta Everything Good Will Come
    • Sefi Atta was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1964 and currently divides her time between the United States, England, and Nigeria. She qualified as a Chartered Accountant in England, a Certified Public Accountant in the United States, and holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Atta was a juror for the 2010 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and has received several literary awards for her works, including the 2006 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa and the 2009 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. In 2015, a critical study of her novels and short stories, Writing Contemporary Nigeria: How Sefi Atta Illuminates African Culture and Tradition, was published by Cambria Press. Also a playwright, her radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC and her stage plays have been performed and published internationally.
    • Sefi Atta Official Website
  • Mariama Bâ So Long A Letter
    • Mariama Bâ was one of the pioneers of Senegalese literature. Born in Dakar in 1929, she was raised by her maternal grandmother, who was of Muslim confession and strongly attached to traditional culture. Through the insistence of her father, an open-minded politician, the young Mariama attended French school, obtained her school-leaving certificate, and won admission to the École Normale for girls in Rufisque, from where she graduated as a schoolteacher in 1947. She threw herself into the women’s movement to fight for greater recognition of women’s issues. Throughout her life, she tried to reconcile her grounding in her culture, her Muslim faith, and her openness to other cultural horizons. Towards the end of her life, her literary genius achieved full expression in So Long a Letter, a novel that directly confronted polygamy and the caste-system in Senegal – a predominantly Muslim country, firmly attached to its traditions, yet traversed by profound transformations, and confronted by the challenge of new models of society.
    • UNESCO: Women In African History – Mariama Bâ
  • James Baldwin Go Tell It On The Mountain
    • Born in Harlem in 1924, James Baldwin was the oldest of nine children.  His writing started as a way to escape his stern stepfather.  He graduated from high school in 1942 and moved to New Jersey to begin working as a railroad hand. In 1944, he moved to Greenwich Village where he met Richard Wright and began his first novel, In My Father’s House.  In 1953, he finished his important novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, which stands as a partially autobiographical account of his youth.  The following year he wrote the play, The Amen Corner and won the Guggenheim Fellowship. During the 1960’s, Baldwin became politically active in support of civil rights. Baldwin wrote novels, poetry, essays and a screenplay in the later years of his life. He died of stomach cancer at his home in St. Paul de Vence, France.
    • African American Literature Book Club – James Baldwin
  • Octavia Butler Kindred
    • Octavia Estelle Butler, often referred to as the “grand dame of science fiction,” was born in Pasadena, California on June 22, 1947. During 1969 and 1970, she studied at the Screenwriter’s Guild Open Door Program and the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop, where she took a class with science fiction master Harlan Ellison (who later became her mentor), and which led to Butler selling her first science fiction stories. Butler’s first story, “Crossover,” was published in the 1971 Clarion anthology. With the publication of Kindred in 1979, Butler was able to support herself writing full time. She won the Hugo Award in 1984 for her short story, “Speech Sounds,” and in 1985, Butler’s novelette “Bloodchild” won a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award, the Locus Award, and an award for best novelette from Science Fiction Chronicle. Other books by Octavia E. Butler include the Xenogenesis trilogy: Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988) and Imago (1989), and a short story collection, Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995). Parable of the Sower (1993), the first of her Earthseed series, was a finalist for the Nebula Award as well as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The book’s sequel, Parable of the Talents (1998), won a Nebula Award.
    • Octavia Butler: The official site of the Pen Lifetime Achievement and MacArthur award winning writer
  • Charles Chesnutt  The Conjure Woman
    • Charles Waddell Chesnutt was born in Ohio in 1858, the son of free blacks who had emigrated from Fayetteville, N.C. When he was eight years old, Chesnutt’s parents returned to Fayetteville, where Charles worked part-time in the family grocery store and attended a school founded by the Freedmen’s Bureau. In 1872, he began teaching in Charlotte, N.C. but returned to Fayetteville in 1877. Chesnutt married a year later, and by 1880 had become principal of the Fayetteville State Normal School for Negroes. Meanwhile he continued to pursue private studies of the English classics, foreign languages, music, and stenography. In 1883, he moved his family to Cleveland, where he passed the state bar examination and established his own court reporting firm. Financially prosperous and prominent in civic affairs, he resided in Cleveland for the remainder of his life. “The Goophered Grapevine,” an unusual dialect story that displayed intimate knowledge of black folk culture in the South, was Chesnutt’s first nationally recognized work of fiction. Its publication in the August 1887 issue of the Atlantic Monthly marked the first time that a short story by a black had appeared in that prestigious magazine. After subsequent tales in this vein were accepted by other magazines, Chesnutt submitted to Houghton, Mifflin a collection of these stories, which was published in 1899 as The Conjure Woman.
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates The Water Dancer
    • Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates is an American author and journalist. Coates gained a wide readership during his time as national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he wrote about cultural, social, and political issues, particularly regarding African Americans and white supremacy. He was born in Baltimore in 1975, a member of a large, close-knit, politically active family. In addition to his nonfiction work, Coates has been a teacher, has written for Black Panther and Captain America comics, and published his first novel, The Water Dancer, in 2019.
    • The Official Website of Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Frederick Douglass Any of his autobiographies
    • Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. At about the age of twelve or thirteen, Douglass purchased a copy of The Columbian Orator, a popular schoolbook of the time, which helped him to gain an understanding and appreciation of the power of the spoken and the written word, as two of the most effective means by which to bring about permanent, positive change. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York. Whenever he could he attended abolitionist meetings, and, in October, 1841, after attending an anti-slavery convention on Nantucket Island, Douglass became a lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and a colleague of William Lloyd Garrison. This work led him into public speaking and writing. He published his own newspaper, The North Star, participated in the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, in 1848, and wrote three autobiographies. 
    • The Frederick Douglass Society
  • W.E.B. DuBois The Souls of Black Folk
    • Scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois was an American civil rights activist, leader, Pan-Africanist, sociologist, educator, historian, writer, editor, poet, and scholar. He was born and raised in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895.  DuBois was one of the most important black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. He shared in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He had two children with his wife, Nina Gomer. In 1963, he became a naturalized citizen of Ghana at the age of 95 – the year of his death.
    • NAACP History – W.E.B. DuBois
  • Alexandre Dumas The Three Musketeers
    • Born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie (1802–1870), also known as Alexandre Dumas père, was a French writer. His grandmother was Marie-Cessette Dumas, a black slave in what is now Haiti. His works have been translated into many languages, and he is one of the most widely read French authors. Many of his historical novels of high adventure were originally published as serials, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. 
    • Alexandre Dumas, Two Centuries of Living Literature
  • Ralph Ellison Invisible Man
    • Born in 1914 in Oklahoma City, the grandson of slaves, Ralph Waldo Ellison and his younger brother were raised by their mother, whose husband died when Ralph was 3 years old. His mother supported her young family by working as a nursemaid, a janitor and a domestic. Having earned a degree at Tuskegee University, Ellison was an American novelist, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act, a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory.
  • Yaa Gyasi Homegoing
    • Yaa Gyasi (born 1989) is a Ghanaian-American novelist. Her debut novel, Homegoing, published in 2016, won her, at the age of 26, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for best first book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first book of fiction, the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” honors for 2016 and the American Book Award. She was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature in 2020. Homegoing is her debut historical fiction novel, published in 2016. Each chapter in the novel follows a different descendant of an Asante woman named Maame, starting with her two daughters, who are half sisters, separated by circumstance: Effia marries the British governor in charge of Cape Coast Castle, while her half-sister Esi is held captive in the dungeons below. Subsequent chapters follow their children and following generations.
  • Bessie Head When the Rain Clouds Gather
    • Bessie Amelia Emery Head, known as Bessie Head, was a South African writer who, though born in South Africa, is usually considered Botswana’s most influential writer. Bessie Amelia Head never knew her real parents — an unstable white woman and an unknown black man. She was born and raised in apartheid South Africa. After spending several years in the field of education, she decided to work as a journalist for the Golden City Post. She experimented with poetry and fiction, and published her first story in The New African.  Despite the occasional financial aid from friends, the author lived in absolute poverty, forcing her to live in a refugee camp with her son. Her luck changed when a New York editorial offered her to write a novel, When Rain Clouds Gather (1969), in which she tells about the era she lived as a refugee. This book was met with positive reviews from critics, which encouraged her to continue her literary career with Maru (1971). She wrote novels, short fiction and autobiographical works that are infused with spiritual questioning and reflection.
  • Langston Hughes Any of his poetry and/or essay collections
    • James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri.  While working as a busboy in a hotel in Washington, D.C., in late 1925, Hughes put three of his own poems beside the plate of Vachel Lindsay in the dining room. The next day, newspapers around the country reported that Lindsay, among the most popular white poets of the day, had “discovered” an African American busboy poet, which earned Hughes broader notice. Hughes received a scholarship to, and began attending, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in early 1926. That same year, he received the Witter Bynner Undergraduate Poetry Award, and he published “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” in The Nation , a manifesto in which he called for a confident, uniquely black literature. After graduating, he traveled widely in the Soviet Union, Haiti, Japan, and elsewhere and served as a newspaper correspondent (1937) during the Spanish Civil War. Hughes documented African American literature and culture in works such as A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (1956) and the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro (1949) and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958; with Bontemps).  Hughes was one of the most important writers and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance.
    • Academy of American Poets – Langston Hughes
  • Zora Neal Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God
    • Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1700s American South and published research on hoodoo.  During Zora Neale Hurston’s career, she was more concerned with writing about the lives of African Americans in an authentic way that uplifted their existence, rather than focusing on their traumas. Her most celebrated work, 1937’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, is an example of this philosophy. It follows Janie Mae Crawford, a middle-aged woman in Florida, who details lessons she learned about love and finding herself after three marriages. Hurston used black Southern dialect in the characters’ dialogue to proudly represent their voices and manner.
  • Edward P. Jones Lost in the City
    • Edward P. Jones was born in 1950 and raised in Washington, D.C. A winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award and recipient of the Lannan Foundation Grant, Jones was educated at Holy Cross College and the University of Virginia. His first book, Lost in the City was originally published by William Morrow in 1992 and shortlisted for the National Book Award. Mr. Jones was named a National Book Award finalist for a second time with the publication of his debut novel The Known World which subsequently won the prestigious 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
  • Dinaw Mengestu How to Read the Air
    • Dinaw Mengetsu is a Washington, DC-based American writer born in Ethiopia in 1978. In addition to three novels, he has written for Rolling Stone on the war in Darfur, and for Jane Magazine on the conflict in northern Uganda. His writing has also appeared in Harper’s, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. He is the Program Director of Written Arts at Bard College.  Since his first book was published in 2007, Mengetsu has received numerous literary awards, and was selected as a MacArthur Fellow in 2012. He is the author of three novels, most recently All Our Names. His debut novel, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, won the Guardian First Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2007. His novel How to Read the Air, published in 2010, was the winner of the 2011 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.
    • PEN America – Dinaw Mengetsu
  • Toni Morrison Beloved
    • Chloe Anthony Wofford, (1931-2019) was an American writer noted for her examination of black experience (particularly black female experience) within the black community. When Morrison was two years old, the owner of her family’s apartment building set their home on fire while they were inside because they were unable to afford the rent.  After earning her MA at Cornell University, Morrison taught at Howard University and then became the first black female editor of fiction at Random House Publishing. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 for her novel Beloved.
    • National Women’s History Museum – Toni Morrison
  • Trevor Noah Born a Crime
    • Born in South Africa in 1984, Trevor Noah’s father Robert is of Swiss German ancestry, and his mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, is of Xhosa ancestry. Because interracial relations were illegal under Apartheid law, Noah’s mother was jailed and fined by the South African government. Patricia and her mother, Nomalizo Frances Noah, raised Trevor in the black township of Soweto. Trevor Noah has hosted numerous television shows including South Africa’s music, television and film awards, and two seasons of his own late night talk show, Tonight with Trevor Noah. In November 2016, Trevor Noah released his first book Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, which was an instant New York Times bestseller.
    • Official Site of Trevor Noah
  • Ben Okri The Famished Road
    • Ben Okri is a poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, aphorist, playwright, and writer of film-scripts. He was born in Nigeria in 1958 and came to England as a child. He went to school in London and returned to Nigeria with his parents on the eve of the Nigerian Civil War. The war made a defining impact on his life. After finishing secondary school, he wanted to study physics and become a scientist but was deemed too young then for university. He began writing at a very early age, poetry and published articles and essays about the living conditions of the poor in the slums of Lagos. In 1978, Ben Okri returned to London to study comparative Literature at Essex University. Two years later he published his first novel; and in 1982 came his second novel, The Landscapes Within. After a brief period of homelessness, in 1986 he published Incidents at the Shrine, a collection of stories that won him prizes and enhanced his reputation. The Famished Road won the Booker Prize when it was published in 1991.
    • Ben Okri Official Site
  • Alexander Pushkin Eugène Onegin
    • Born in Moscow in 1799, Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was heavily influenced by his great-grandfather, Abraham Petrovitch Gannibal, who was kidnapped from Cameroon as a child and sold as a slave to the court of Tsar Peter the Great. As a frequent exile himself, Pushkin compared his experience as an outsider to that of a poet’s role as an observer. His unfinished novel The Moor of Peter the Great was meant to be a biography of his great-grandfather, but Eugène Onegin directly refers to Pushkin’s mixed racial background.
    • How Alexander Pushkin was Inspired by His African Heritage
  • Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka Death and the King’s Horsemen
    • Nigerian playwright and political activist Wole Soyinka was the first African recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He was born in 1934 in Abeokuta, near Ibadan, into a Yoruba family and studied at University College in Ibadan, Nigeria, and the University of Leeds, England. Soyinka, who writes in English, is the author of five memoirs, two novels, and 19 plays shaped by a diverse range of influences, including avant-garde traditions, politics, and African myth. Soyinka’s poetry similarly draws on Yoruba myths, his life as an exile and in prison, and politics. An outspoken opponent of oppression and tyranny worldwide and a critic of the political situation in Nigeria, Soyinka has lived in exile on several occasions. During the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s, he was held as a prisoner in solitary confinement after being charged with conspiring with the Biafrans; while in exile, Soyinka was at one point sentenced to death (the sentence was later lifted). Soyinka has taught at a number of universities worldwide, among them Ife University, Cambridge University, Yale University, and Emory University.
    • Biography of Wole Soyinka
  • Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o A Grain of Wheat
    • Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, was born in Kenya, in 1938 into a large peasant family. In the 1950s, his family was caught up in the Mau Mau Uprising, an experience that influenced much of his later writing. His novel A Grain of Wheat was the first modern novel to be written in Gikuyu; all of Ngũgĩ ‘s work thereafter was written in Gikuyu and Swahili. The play Ngaahika Ndeenda, co-written with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, was shut down by the Kenyan regime six weeks after its opening, and Ngũgĩ was imprisoned for over a year. While in exile following his release, he worked as a teacher, a writer, and an advocate for justice in Kenya and for native linguistic equality.
    • Website of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
  • Amos Tutuola The Palm-Wine Drinkard
    • Amos Tutuola was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria, in 1920. The son of a cocoa farmer, he attended several schools before training as a blacksmith. He later worked as a civil servant. His first novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, was published in 1952 and brought him international recognition. From 1956 until retirement, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Company while continuing to write. Many of his novels drew elements from Yoruba folktales as well as oral storytelling traditions. His last book, The Village Witch Doctor and Other Stories, was published in 1990. He died in Ibadan in 1997.
    • Authors Calendar – Amos Tutuola
  • Abraham Verghese Cutting for Stone
    • Abraham Verghese was born in Ethiopia to parents from Kerala, India, who worked as teachers. He is the Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford University Medical School and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine. He is also the author of three best-selling books, two memoirs and a novel. The novel, Cutting for Stone (2009), follows twin brothers in Ethiopia during its military revolution and in New York, where one of them flees. In 2014, Verghese received the 19th Annual Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities.
    • Website of Abraham Verghese
  • Alice Walker The Color Purple
    • The author of short stories and novels, essays and poetry and activist for racial civil rights, women’s equality, and peace among other causes, Alice Walker brought black women’s lives into primary focus as a rich and important subject for US American literature. Her landmark novel The Color Purple (1982), which drew upon her sharecropper family’s Southern roots, made Walker famous and brought her the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction awarded to an African American woman, as well as the National Book Award. Walker’s introduction of the concept of “womanism” (1983) was an influential corrective to the focus on white women understood by many under the term “feminism;” it helped broaden the women’s movement to include women of color and appreciate their traditional cultural and creative roles. Walker has also been instrumental in rediscovering and promoting other Black women writers, past and present, most notably Zora Neale Hurston (1901-1960), whose work she edited and interpreted. Alice Walker has written seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children’s books, and volumes of essays and poetry.
    • Alice Walker’s Garden – About the Author  
  • Isabel Wilkerson The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
    • Born in Washington D.C. in 1961,  Isabel Wilkerson became the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism in 1994, while Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times. She devoted 15 years to the research and writing of The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,200 people, unearthed archival works, and gathered the voices of the famous and the unknown to tell the epic story of the Great Migration, one of the largest migrations in American history. During the Great Migration, millions of African Americans departed the Southern states to Northern and Western cities to escape Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and the failing sharecropping system. The book highlights the stories of three individuals and their journeys, from Florida to New York City, Mississippi to Chicago, and Louisiana to Los Angeles. Wilkerson’s in-depth documentation won her a National Book Critics Circle Award for the nonfiction work.
  • Richard Wright Native Son
    • Richard Nathaniel Wright (9/4/1908 – 11/28/1960) was born in Adams County, Mississippi into a life of poverty, and racial discrimination.  He was quoted as saying, “I was born too far back in the woods to hear the train whistle…” When he was fifteen, Wright knew he wanted to be a writer.  Known as a poet first, through his writing, his goal was to bring two worlds together, one Black and one White, and make them one.  His marriage to Ellen Poplar, a white woman, like his writing was controversial.  His most successful work, Native Son, a Chicago story about a Mississippi boy, Bigger Thomas, in New York had an autobiographical tone.  The author of 16 books, some of which include, Black Boy, The Outsider, and American Hunger, Richard Wright died mysteriously of a heart attack at the age of 52 in Paris, France.
    • African American Literature Book Club – Richard Wright

Bottom line for readers: Choose any of these authors you haven’t yet read and go for it!