Last year, when the world was changing at a frantic pace, I was in the middle of writing CHECKING OUT CRIME. My day job is in the public sector, so for weeks upon weeks I was working from dawn to dusk and beyond, making sure we were doing all we could to keep the public safe and to keep our employees and their families safe. Doing my absolute best to keep up with the firehose of information. Working extremely hard to make sure we were complying with the constantly changing rules, regulations, and protocols. And, oh yeah, doing all the job normal duties.
As you might imagine, my writing had to take a back seat. I wanted to write—longed to do so—but the mental capacity just wasn’t there. Then one evening, in late spring, I left the office and wasn’t completely exhausted. Huh. Maybe it was time to start writing again. After all, there was this thing called a deadline and it was rapidly approaching.
Once I was home and fed, I fired up my laptop and read over what I’d written a lifetime ago, back in the pre-COVID days. But…so many things in the manuscript seemed odd. My characters weren’t socially distancing. They weren’t wearing masks. They weren’t arguing about politics or science. They didn’t seem to be washing their hands nearly enough and they were assembling in large multi-household groups whenever they pleased.
So…now what should I do? Should I or shouldn’t I wrap COVID-19 into the manuscript? I could rewrite, incorporating all the protocols into every action. Or I could rewrite and refer to the pandemic as a thing of the past.
I pushed back from the computer and went for a walk, thinking hard. And when I returned, I knew what I was going to do, which centered on the fact that I write fiction. The world in my books is a world of my own creation, and that world has not endured, and is not enduring, a global pandemic. It’s a world I love to visit, and I hope you will, too.