It’s not my holiday today, of course, though I’ve sent good wishes to my US friends winging across the Atlantic for years. I can get behind most holidays where good food is the order of the day—though I admit I look askance at something called ‘green bean casserole’. Just… no. Thanks all the same. Pass me more turkey, though.

Despite this not being a UK holiday, I’m quite taken with the principle of standing still once a year, reflecting, and then giving thanks for all the blessings in my life. I admit I usually do that as the old year dies and the new one is born, but the coincidence of producing today’s post on Thanksgiving is too good to pass up.

If 2016, the year that saw Brexit and Trump, was the year that made satire obsolete, then 2020 is the year that almost killed satire stone dead.

It can be hard to think about giving thanks after bushfires in Australia and wildfires in the US, after stock market crashes, and downed airliners, cyclones and hurricanes, Beirut explosions, George Floyd and Brionna Taylor… and Covid. Good crikey, if ever we needed a demonstration to show how fragile human civilisation is, a microscopically teeny-tiny virus is giving us one big time.

I’m primarily a spec fiction writer, either hard(ish) sci fi or steampunk. Read that list of disasters above (and it’s a tiny slice of the ordure 2020 has heaped on us) and that is the stuff of every dystopian fiction I’ve ever read.

It’s a rare writer that isn’t influenced by what’s going on around them. It can, sadly, close down any impulse to write at all, as we just try to live through it all with family, home and mental peace intact. Or it can inspire.

Sometimes that inspiration takes you down some dark-ish paths. I’ve written my apocalyptic devastation of humanity story in the Taking Shield series, otherwise I might be tempted to dip my toe in those waters again. Dystopian, dark fiction is at least a means of forcing some sort of order over the events you’re writing about. Reducing them to words on a page, words that *you* choose, puts things into your personal perspective and gives a measure of control. Probably illusory, but in today’s climate, I’ll take what I can get.

Or it provokes them to write something that stands as the complete opposite to the carnage around them. As if that denies events any power over you. And that is most definitely illusory, but at the moment, it’s the way I’m coping: a light Regency story on the one hand, a half-written magic-realism glass blower’s story on the other.

So yes. Giving thanks. Here’s my personal list.

We’re still here. Still fighting. Still human. As I had a character say in Shield, humans have an extraordinary capacity for survival. We’ll get through this.

We’re clawing our way back from the political brink, perhaps turning the tide on popularist demagogues.

We’re being made to face our own biases and privileges – if we’re thinking empathetic human beings, that is –and that may, just *may*, mean we finally tackle structural and cultural -isms (racism, sexism, cis-ism, ableism, all the other -isms).

On a very personal level, my family is safe and well. That’s the big one. Selfish of me, but there it is.

So yeah, a shitty year, but not entirely devoid of hope.

Give thanks today, my US friends, and keep on fighting. As the Romans never actually said,

About Anna

Anna was a communications specialist for many years, working in various UK government departments. These days, though, she is writing full time. She lives with her husband in a quiet village tucked deep in the Nottinghamshire countryside. She’s supported there by the Deputy Editor, aka Molly the cockerpoo, who is assisted by the lovely Mavis, a Yorkie-Bichon cross with a bark several sizes larger than she is but no opinion whatsoever on the placement of semi-colons.

Website and Blog | Facebook | The Butler’s Pantry (Facebook Group) | Pinterest | Twitter | Sign up for Anna’s occasional newsletter