As happened to many people, our plans changed in 2020. It has influenced my writing in that I didn’t gather material as I had expected to, but I had plenty of material to work on. We were luckier than many in that our finances didn’t take a hit. Although I didn’t write about traveling as I had planned, I was able to focus on writing.
After having our house on the market (off and on) for almost two years, we listed with a new agent and had a few people looking at it before it was officially listed. Once it went live, we had two offers within days in March of 2020. Then the stay-at-home order was given for Illinois. While real estate was deemed essential business, we weren’t comfortable having people inside our house to look, let alone a moving company, or any of the rest of it. Plus, our plan had been to explore the world, but the world was locking down. So we temporarily pulled our listing. A month later, we unlisted ‘for a while.’ Our plan to be nomads doesn’t seem like a great one.
We enjoyed our large house and yard and all the forest preserves that are a few miles from our house. We’ve also found projects
to do, like stacking our wood in back so the neighbors’ dogs don’t bark when we walk onto our deck. And planting trees. Lots of trees. Also lots of writing. Although I had book four of my French series outlined, I decided to use our recent trip to Spain and Morocco and wrote about the time immediately after book three. 2020 was a good year to travel vicariously since we weren’t traveling the world as we had planned.