Sorry I’ve been MIA for a while, but I’ve been busy editing my novel about a fictional pandemic and economic collapse to include the real thing.
BIG SKY FALLING, the novel I finished last year, follows a group of people who survive the double whammy of a pandemic from China and an economy that collapses because its day of reckoning comes.
Barely two months after signing with literary agent Eleanor Wood to represent my novel, stories start appearing about some new strain of coronavirus in Wuhan. We all know what happens next. However, I realized several months into the COVID-19 pandemic that this unprecedented historical event would fundamentally change the world that my characters found themselves in.
With Eleanor’s blessing, I tweaked my manuscript to reference COVID-19 as an event that had happened earlier in the timeline. Here’s an example from a scene in which two of the main characters are in the last leg of their panicked drive from the Midwest to Montana:
Eric and Susan passed without incident through a handful of minuscule towns that barely merited the label before approaching the suburb of East Helena, and the plumes of thick black smoke rising from it.
“We have to drive through that?!” Susan gasped.
“No. Route 12 only skirts the town. Highway 282 is right up ahead to take us away from the Helena area altogether, which is fine by me, because the natives are getting restless.” Eric pointed to a crowd mobbing a supermarket on a frontage road. “Those store shelves got emptied by panic buying a long time ago. You’d think these people would’ve learned their lesson after the shelves went bare during the coronavirus pandemic. Those idiots probably thought this would be a repeat, and they’d be able to sit at home ordering Chinese take-out and streaming porn until Uncle Sugar borrowed our way out of yet another fix. The only thing those people are gonna bring home to their families is the flu.”
The changes read well, in my arrogant opinion, because if there’s one thing you can always bank on, it’s humanity’s inability to learn from its mistakes or avoid repeating history.
Anyway, this side project, plus my day job responding to this pandemic while also being my children’s teacher and daycare provider, is why I’ve been sporadically updating my author blog. Now that things are more (ha!) stabilized, I’ll be posting much more often.