I’m registering my daughter for school this week, and if I had any delusion that life has not been turned on end by the pandemic, my options for her schooling would certainly disavow me of that notion. I have three options: homeschool her, register for a new online charter school created by our school district, or register her for comprehensive distance learning at her regular school. You’ll notice that none of these options involve her going back to school for in-person learning.
Where I live, we can’t even consider that right now. We’re in a hotspot due to a massive outbreak at a seafood-processing plant that has caused other outbreaks throughout the county as well as uncontrolled community spread. Until those numbers are not only not going up, but instead actively going down, we can’t get our kids back together in school.
That means no fall sports either.
And as hard as that’s going to be on my child and my family, I’m fully on board with that decision. I also recognize that I’m luckier than many of my neighbors. I have a flexible schedule, my husband has a flexible schedule, we have full access to technology and additional resources, and my child is academically motivated and far ahead of her grade level already. She has little risk of being left behind.
My biggest concern for her is her mental health. That’s why we’ll be choosing the comprehensive distance learning option. It’s the only one that involves her interacting with her teacher and classmates face-to-face (at least virtually).
I’ll have new choices to make every grading period (nine weeks) as the numbers change and the options change and I have to make more hard decisions. What if they decide it’s safe to bring the kids back to school, but I disagree? There are no easy choices here.
But then, nothing about this pandemic is easy. I certainly didn’t think school would be any different. Parenting is never easy, but parenting during a global event of this magnitude where there is literally no place that’s truly safe—whoa nelly.
I have a whole new appreciation now for what the fictional crew of the Ivoire must feel being hurled 5,000 years into a future that bears no resemblance to the one they left. (Sounds like traveling from January to June of 2020, doesn’t it?)
If you’re a fan of Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s bestselling Diving series, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t yet experienced that series, there’s no time like the present.
We’ve just launched a new Kickstarter called The Return of Boss. Boss is the chief protagonist of the Diving series, and she’s back—finally!—in a new novel called Thieves, which will publish in early 2021.
But that’s not all. Another new novel called Squishy’s Teams will publish this fall. It explores some of the events that we read about in Boneyards, but with a whole new perspective.
Both of these new novels have big secrets in them that will surprise even the most ardent fan. And if you back the Kickstarter, you can get early access to both books!
There’s so much more to say about all that, but Kris does it best in her Kickstarter story. Click here to read that and to check out the Kickstarter and all it’s amazing rewards!
And if you haven’t read anything in the series yet, we’ll give you a head start. Click here to get the multiple-award-winning novella that started it all, Diving into the Wreck, for free. The story in this novella also appears in a slightly different form as part of the novel Diving into the Wreck, which is the first novel in the series.
So go on…get lost in the future. There’s never been a better time.
Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer, working mother, and brain tumor survivor.
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