Pandemics, Politics, and Face Plant

This photo is 100% representative of the past two years of writing for me. The picture is from July 2021. I'd just face-planted on a downtown Austin sidewalk. Fat lip. Broken nose. 

So yeah. Pandemic. Politics. Face-plants. I've been a mental and emotional train wreck since January 2020. I've finished nothing. I've barely managed to put one word in behind another on a book that should have been finished in late 2019. 

Why?

1. Lock down and unrelenting introvert exhaustion. Don't get me wrong. I love my family. Most of the time. But I need serious alone time. THERE'S BEEN NONE FOR TWO YEARS AND I'M ABOUT TO CRACK. Four adults and too many cats in one house has been crushing to this introvert. 

2. Living with someone who's immune-compromised. If you look up 'COVID-19 comorbidities' you'll find my father's photo. That's a lot of worry and a lot of pressure. It meant living in several months of fear that one of us would bring illness home and kill my father. As a result, no one went anywhere. For a really, really long time. Even past being vaccinated. To this day, no one goes anywhere unless double masked. It also means that while I used to be able to leave the house to get some alone time out in the world, you can see how THAT stopped.

3. I picked up a day job. Initially, when I picked up the technical writing gig, there was plenty of time and brain space for fiction. Then the projects at work kicked into high gear and ate my brain. 

Now, there are parts of life in these times that I cannot impact. I can't do anything about a pandemic. Nor can I do as much about politics as I'd like. But I can change how work happens and the day job is scaling back in January. I can't change the fact that life has fundamentally shifted. The parental units both need extra help and I'm having to adjust to the fact that alone time is going to be thin on the ground for the foreseeable future. 

Adapt or die. I thought it was a movie slogan. I'd never expected a bit of Jurassic Park to apply to me.
 

Writing in the Time of Covid-19

9/11 Memorial Site NYC

I’ve read one novel centered around the 9/11 tragedy. I’ve watched one movie about it as well. Both stories had other plot threads, but the Twin Towers attack filled the background, enough to be the painful reminder I suppose it was meant to be. I remember that day so clearly, sitting with my little girl, watching in disbelief as the disaster unfolded on a television screen. It was traumatic, and when I visited Ground Zero in 2019, all those emotions I felt so many years ago bubbled to my surface, raw and fresh.

I’d expected to be affected, but as tears welled behind my sunglasses, I felt sick and lightheaded. Hollowed out. So many young people roamed around the memorial laughing and smiling because they didn’t live through that day. The significance seemed lost on them. While part of me felt saddened that they may never grasp the horrors of 9/11 and how that day changed much of how we all went about life, another part of me felt relief that they didn’t own such a grim memory. The changes we watched happen have always been their norm. Standing there, I realized I was watching the effects of time on our world’s awareness and reality.

Covid is a different beast, an ongoing tragedy not pinned to one specific day in our past, and for most, this is certainly a time we will never forget. But, there are children who are too young to understand how much the world they could have known has transformed. One day, people will look at a memorial to those we’ve lost in this pandemic, and it won’t hold the same significance that it does for the rest of us. This, again, is the nature of time as our present becomes history.

So how do we make certain that people of the future know what we went through? How do we make sure they understand the impact on our lives, so that they might do or know better? Old newspaper articles and internet chronicles will float around, of course, and the events will be documented in history books. Other non-fiction texts will become references for research papers and book reports.

But what about fiction?

Fiction has always mimicked real life, and it has always endured and educated. Storytelling is the language of our ancestors, after all. It’s the vehicle for passing down legends, myths, folklore—and real-life lessons and experiences. Even though I can’t say I want to read Covid-19 fiction any time soon, I can say that telling writers they shouldn’t write about this awful point in time would be a mistake. However, my advice to anyone tackling that mountain is: Be wise and tread lightly.

As an editor, I would be quicker to lend an eye to an emotional story about how the pandemic has altered our connection to the world rather than a story focused on the virus and the horrors brought about in its wake. I’m still living through all of this, still thinking about old friends who lost their lives, still worried about my loved ones contracting a virus that could take them from me. Reading is my escape. It isn’t an escape if I pick up a book that carries me back to the fears I’m trying to avoid. But a book that resonates because it provides a lesson about humanity? That, I might be able to do, and so might others.

This is why I enjoy dystopian novels. Granted, I prefer witches and magicians, romance and happy endings, but dystopian is one of the genres outside of those realms that I love to venture into. Dystopian fiction teaches us about ourselves and reveals deeper truths about the (often faulty) constructs of our society, as well as becoming literary think-pieces on the future. Experiencing the last year has been a lot like walking inside a dystopian dream, from quarantines and lockdowns to corrupt government failures to an ever-changing landscape of life. I remember thinking that I never imagined living through times like these, and yet I have and I am. That gives me, as a storyteller, a unique perspective, as it does every writer alive right now. Whether we choose to infuse this experience into our fiction is up to us.

My hope is that writers handle any Covid-19 story inspiration with a delicate touch and much respect for their readers. I also hope that—even in this time of difficulty and change—writers are able to nurture their creativity and write about something, because the world needs stories. It needs feel-good tales and scary science fiction, colorful Regency romance and gritty vampire fantasy.

If a writer so desires, any of these stories can resonate with the times we’re living through. Over the last year, we’ve endured personal, emotional, and physical struggles, witnessed more bizarre events than I can count, and watched while our government let people die. We’ve also witnessed acts of heroism, kindness, perseverance, ingenuity, and triumph. All of the above can manifest through our fiction in ways that don’t perfectly mirror our current reality, allowing us to reach readers on planes they feel safe to explore.

This is literary alchemy, the writer’s gift of transmuting life into fiction. We are one-day ancestors, leaving behind stories for those who come after us.

We just have to write.

Put It In

What do you know about cholera? Or what came to be called the Spanish flu? How about yellow fever? Or Bubonic Plague (outside of your world history class)? Let's go with what these all have in common. 

What they all have in common is that they show up in the fiction of and representing their times. If you know much about yellow fever, it's likely you gleaned at least some of that knowledge from Civil War narratives and/or stories centered around New Orleans during the outbreaks. Cholera is a bit player in Victor Hugo's work. If you saw Les Miserable, the latter portion of the story takes place during a cholera outbreak. Valjean and Cozette are taking charity to cholera victims when the barricades go up. Spanish flu haunts WWI stories to a lesser degree than the trenches and miserable conditions, but it killed more people worldwide than the war did. If you're of a certain age, maybe you saw some of the orphan train movies that followed the aftermath of that pandemic. Bubonic Plague features in Chaucer's tales and most of us know that Shakespeare got a couple of plays out a plague quarantine. We have windows into those pasts because stories told around these sicknesses endure. 

Does anyone imagine that those literary mentions of popular (at the time) culture date the stories in which they occur? They do, after a fashion, but it's not a bad thing. The pandemics and outbreaks documented in popular literature anchors the stories in a historical and cultural context. It's a fancy way of saying these stories that included the hard realities of everyday life offered modern readers a glimpse of what we had no way of knowing we'd end up facing - yet another pandemic. Looking back, we can see the repeating patterns of illness sweeping the world. Maybe we should have taken the warning. Maybe we thought we were too modern, too clever, too scientific to think that 'bad air' caused malaria, but we're clearly not so smart as all that because here we are. Living what our ancestors set down for us to read about in their fiction. Only now, we're living it. Same as they did.

So write about the time of Covid. I haven't. At least not on purpose - even though a weaponized pandemic is a part of my SFR series that was started several years ago. It wasn't this pandemic. If I were writing contemporary fiction, though, I would include the reality. It's a rich and textured landscape filled with loneliness and the longing for human interaction that's loaded with unseen danger. This is a place and a time where a single regrettable decision puts your heart in more than one kind of danger. Sure. We're all looking forward to looking back on our stories written at this time and laughing over how irrelevant and dated they seem. But our children's children might not laugh. They might read our stories and frown at one another over the lives we had to alter so suddenly and completely, or over the vast numbers of needless dead. 

Our reality has so much grim horror to it, so much pain; but it also has moments of shattering humanity and heartbreaking beauty in it. I can say this, and maybe you nod in comprehension, but it will take a fiction writer with a painterly hand to brush those images into a story so that it haunts the souls of readers who will look back at this pandemic and wonder what it must have been like. If you're writing, put your reality on the page. It means more than a writer trying to appear daring.

Is the pandemic infecting your writing?

 

Notre Dame Cathedral reconstruction August 2019

Do you pull real life into your writing? More specifically, is our current pandemic showing up in your books? Like the Notre Dame Cathedral above, our world is rebuilding, but do we want to see it in our books?

My fellow SFF Seveners have answered rather well this week, but it’s still a tough question to face as a writer. Which makes me wonder if it’s different from a reader standpoint?  

I’ve said it before and my stance hasn’t changed, I read for fun and to escape. Stress running high? Read. Exhausted from work or house projects? Read. Heartache that you’d rather not think about any more? Read. 

Reading clearly works for me and if I look back at the books I’ve read so far this year it’s pretty heavy in the fantasy category. I want to escape into fantastical worlds where the magic or creatures are what you fear. In fantasy I’m not looking for a book filled with characters in masks, unless we’re talking DUNE. 

I also read some contemporary romances. They were lovely stories where the characters got close, figuratively and literally. When I picked those up I wanted to escape into a heartwarming love story and hopefully have some good laughs along the way. I wasn’t looking for a real-time meet cute half hidden behind masks. 

Escaping into the past is fun and I read a couple historical fiction novels too. But no, they didn’t take place during any epidemics or pandemics. Same with the middle grade books I finished reading aloud to my kids. Those were tales as old as time…no, not fairy tales, just the struggles everyone goes through of fitting in and finding yourself. 

That leaves sci-fi. My other love. I can totally get into a good space opera, but my faves are near-future. And mankind vs. a deadly disease isn’t anything new in this department. So yes, I have and I will continue to pick up science fiction based on frightening viruses and alien controlled lifeforms. In fact, bring on more! If you’ve read one recently drop the title in a comment. 

Now that I look back at my reader thoughts I can put my writer hat back on. And whew because THE MARS STRAIN, that was pitched as a cross between THE MARTIAN and OUTBREAK, featuring an infection disease scientist and astronaut who, in a race against time, work to stop the devastating impact of a deadly Martian virus, will be releasing this spring! 

I guess that means I’ll continue to write my fantasy books with the same themes, found family and discovering what you’re truly capable of. And that also means my next sci-fi WIPs, works in progress, won’t change either. They’re near future and it’s easy to imagine our triumphant dominance over coronaviruses and continue to pit my characters against greed, boiling their choices down to a discovery of self and revelation of what, or who, they really value.

Any creatives out there who’ve taken a step back to consider the consumer side? What did you come up with? 

Dead Is Dead - Or Is It?

*kitty is not actually dead

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is: Beware the Ides of March: Fav/Most Intriguing Method of (Fictitious) Murder.

Do I get to pick pandemic??

Seriously, it’s kind of creepy that Calendar Maven K.A. Krantz picked this topic while we’re all practicing social distancing to #flattenthecurve on COVID-19—and she picked it months ago, before she could possibly know this would happen.

Or did she?

I mean, a global pandemic sounds like a great Evil Mastermind Plot…

Anyway, all of this is to day that I don’t really think about types of murder. Just not my thing. I occasionally have to kill off characters, but I tend to do it in efficient, not very interesting ways. I guess I figure dead is dead and I don’t have a lot of morbid curiosity about how to get people that way.

Probably this is why I don’t write murder mysteries.

Is this something you all pay attention to as readers? Are there more interesting deaths than others? Do you have a favorite fictional death?