The pandemic was rough on my writing, which is too bad, because I had plenty of time at home. However, I found myself pulled to spend energy on other hands-on things: gardening, baking, etc. All that Pioneer Village stuff we all were doing at the start of lockdown. As the pandemic wore on, and we shifted to online instruction, any time that I could have been writing was blasted away by the complete time-suck of preparing online asynchronous lectures.

My writing has picked up quite nicely this spring though. A moment that felt like turning a corner for me was getting vaccinated—feeling like there's light at the end of the tunnel. We have come through a period that has been so very difficult that writing suddenly seems rather easy by comparison, and I am making great progress on my book manuscript.

So, tl;dr: the pandemic didn't help.

at all. Getting through the pandemic helped.