2020 in review

This is the time of the year when I typically get a bit more personal, and with a year like 2020 now in the rearview mirror, it’s hard not to get personal. So, what to make of it? As ideas for this little retrospective review started forming in my head, I thought that I would end up writing only negative things. We easily prioritise negative things because the kind of marks they leave inside us often make us forget about the good stuff, or make the good stuff seem small and inconsequential in comparison. But 2020 — while I’ll certainly remember it as a shitty, depressing year — also had its share of good things in store for me.

But let’s start with the negatives.

Well, Covid-19 of course

I was planning a trip to Italy to visit my mother in late February-early March 2020. I had started the year hoping I could also visit some close friends I hadn’t seen in a while. The virus and the consequent lockdowns obviously changed everything. And I don’t just superficially mean Gosh, Covid thwarted my plans, how inconvenient. I mean that the virus threw a heavy blanket of dread and worry over everything. 2020 was the year that for the first time in my life I really got scared to get terminally ill and pass away. I was worried (I still am) that for a simple, stupid oversight, I could get infected — or my wife, or my mother, or the people I care about the most. That’s why I self-isolated in my apartment even before the official lockdown here in Spain made that mandatory. That’s why I started wearing gloves and a mask since day one.

The weeks of ‘hard’ lockdown, when we were allowed to leave our home only to go grocery shopping, are indelible memories for me. The general atmosphere was surreal. No noises coming from outside. Empty streets. The dreadful uncertainty. But I must say I quickly started feeling safe in my home, and there was also a mild excitement bubbling underneath, because I (foolishly) thought that the forced isolation could also be an opportunity to advance my personal projects. Now I can finally sit down and finish my novel, and even write an entire new book of short stories for my Minigrooves series! — I said to myself.

So I don’t know if it was for these ‘creative plans’ or because I spent the quarantine with my wife and not alone, but I never suffered from cabin fever, or felt otherwise trapped. I felt scared, the virus scared and scares me, but I also approached the forced isolation with a pragmatic, let’s‑make-the-most-out-of-this, mindset. I’ll talk about how this eventually panned out in the Personal projects section below.

While no close friends or family members have died from Covid-19, I’ve still lost four acquaintances and one distant relative to the virus.

I can’t stand people who have never really taken the virus seriously or who still refuse basic precautions like wearing a mask in public. Not wearing a mask is wrong, full stop. It’s not a matter of opinions.

Personal projects

As I was writing above, I really thought I could take advantage of the quarantine to make considerable progress in all my creative endeavours. The plan was ‘simple’:

Finish the first novel in my science-fiction Low Fidelity series.

Expand, and maybe finalise, my series of short stories centred around the figure of Ian Charles Winterman, a consultant detective with a gift, a sort of heightened perceptiveness that allows him to have special insights and intuitions, and help the police force specifically in cases of abductions and missing persons.

Continue with Off the Grid, another series set in the same post-apocalyptic world of Low Fidelity — I wrote five episodes between 2016 and 2017, and the sixth episode was in the works when the first wave of serious creative block hit me back in 2018.

Start working on the third volume of Minigrooves, my series of short stories without a specific theme.

Do you know how much new stuff I ended up writing? A page of ‘tactical notes’ for Low Fidelity, and a whole paragraph of a short story. Nothing else, nothing more. This particular creative block hit me hard and unexpectedly. It felt like wanting to go for a run and feeling out of breath and sorely out of shape after 100 metres. Nothing clicked. Nothing worked. I don’t know if it was the constant attention I paid to the news, to always stay informed about the pandemic; I don’t know if it was the sudden increase of workload that left me without enough creative juices to proceed; I don’t know if the quarantine’s general atmosphere made me uninspired surreptitiously. But the end result was that I’ve never felt so useless as a writer or a creative. If I’ve written a bit more on this more tech-oriented space is also maybe because I wanted to prove to myself that I was still capable of writing something.

So, with regard to my creative projects, 2020 has felt like a huge, terrible waste of time and a missed opportunity.

Now, the positive stuff.

People

Firstly, I feel that, while the pandemic and the related quarantine have prevented people from connecting in person, they also enabled people to connect online in a sort of we’re in this together fashion. With my closest friends from Italy, people I have been seeing so very rarely since I relocated to Spain almost 16 years ago, we organised a weekly videochat meeting, a sort of hanging out at a virtual pub, and thanks to this we paradoxically ended up seeing one another much more frequently than in the past 10 years or so.

Secondly, people I only know via the Internet, and sometimes even people I’ve simply exchanged a few words over Twitter, or strangers who simply like what I write on my blog, have all surprised me repeatedly with their generosity.

Thanks to a concerted effort from two marvellous fellows, one from the US, one from the UK, I was able to acquire a 2015 13-inch retina MacBook Pro to use as a test machine for the Big Sur betas. The machine wasn’t exactly donated to me, but it was made available at a ridiculously low price.

Another example: one day I was talking on Twitter about how amazed I was at the photos I took with a Fujifilm FinePix F30, a 6.3‑megapixel compact camera from 2006; when I kept sharing my snaps, I was contacted out of the blue from people who were following me on Twitter, and/or readers of my blog, telling me they had other compact cameras they didn’t use and asked me if I wanted them. They were clearly affected by my enthusiasm and perhaps thought that — just like I put vintage computers and devices to good use — I could do the same with older digital cameras.

This triggered a snowball effect. I was excited by the ‘new’ cameras I received, shared my photo tests and results, and this in turn drove other people to offer me more cameras. Again, not everything was given me at zero cost, but often it was a matter of just paying shipping fees. In a short amount of time, I got an Olympus E‑P2, a Nikon 1 J2, an Olympus E‑PL3, and a Samsung NX1000, all very capable mirrorless cameras (I was especially blown away by the little Nikon J2), all cameras that cost a small fortune when new, and that I had the chance to own for very, very little money. All this thanks mostly to the kindness of strangers.

Photography

All those generous offers left me with a few new toys to try out. As soon as the ‘hard’ lockdown was lifted here and people were allowed to go out, I resumed an old habit from the time I used to shoot exclusively on film: taking photowalks across the city and just shoot — mostly architecture shots and street photos. Eventually, with so many cameras to shoot with, 2020 turned out to be a very prolific year for my photography. I probably haven’t taken this many photos since 2011 or thereabouts. Last year has been terrible, inspiration-wise, but at least it was not a complete disaster on every creative front.

Final stray observations

For many people I know, 2020 and the pandemic have been rather disruptive, work-wise. Many who never worked from home found this new arrangement to be a bit of a shock, and had trouble adjusting. I was lucky, in a way, because as a freelance who has worked from home for the past 20+ years, the ‘quarantine life’ wasn’t very different from my usual routine — overworking included. I remember feeling somewhat vindicated when an acquaintance, who was also a client back in 2004–2005, wrote me and, in passing, said something like: I used to belittle your work, I know; I admit I didn’t take someone sitting all day at his computer very seriously; I didn’t understand how fucking exhausting that can be. Now my company requires I do the same, and I’m losing it, I’m telling you. So yes, this is kind of an apology. Fifteen years later, I know, but take it anyway.

Speaking of work, my daily job got pretty intense in 2020. There was a surge of translation/localisation assignments that kept me extremely and stupidly busy for months with little to no respite. I’m not complaining, mind you, Having a somewhat steady job in this day and age is a blessing, and I’m fully aware of that. Still, there were extremely stressful times that left me drained and almost burnt out.

Despite all the silver lining I’ve found, 2020 still remains a mostly-negative year for me. The general ‘feel’ of it has been weird, wrong, dreadful, disheartening. Despite my little exposure to social media — I’m basically just on Twitter and a couple other low-traffic networks — there have been several periods where I just couldn’t stand staying up-to-date with what happened around me and in the world. I’ve tried to filter out as much toxicity as possible, but sometimes it got so overwhelming that I had to quit checking Twitter for a while. And when you seek refuge in your daily job to avoid what should be a social, casual, leisurely platform, then you realise just how fucked up things are nowadays.

I also hate 2020 for the untimely passing of Adam Banks. We weren’t personal friends, I only knew him via Twitter and through some sporadic private correspondence, but he was certainly more than just an acquaintance. When I was experiencing some hard times work-wise back in 2014, he was one of the few who did something to try and help me out, and I’ll never forget it. Rest in peace, Adam.

I have no specific plans or resolutions for 2021. These are uncertain times, and one can only plan so far. I’m trying, again, to be more organised and to further limit my focus to what really matters most. Creatively, I’ve sort of given myself an ultimatum — either I advance or finish my main writing projects, or I’ll scrap them and begin afresh with something entirely new. As for my tech writing and this blog, everything will proceed as per usual — updating when I can, writing only when I feel I have something to say.

And finally, a big heartfelt thank you to everyone. You all made 2020 a much more tolerable year.