Just last month, I finished Draft v1.5.01 of my novel, aka The One I Actually Send To Other People. (The other people being beta readers thus far. Agent comes later!)
I had been working on it lacklusterly for a couple years. (Almost three now? Two? Who even knows, time isn’t real, especially not now.) Last year, like many people, I was shunted into lockdown and Work From Home mode. I was initially excited—I could work on my novel! I had no more commute, no more work clothes (and thus laundry) to worry about, eating and cooking were not planned ahead, and so on and so forth.
You all know where this is going.
It didn’t happen like that.
I only spent a couple of months in lockdown. Even now, I am working at my day job in-office, but with a skeleton staff, as most others are still working remotely. That’s fine and safe enough. But it is actually unrelentingly nice to have a set schedule again. Really, if my school years had taught me anything, it should have been that I work and exist best with a set schedule!
So I hobbled out of lockdown, back to a sliver of normalcy in the form of a 40-hour workweek, and it actually improved my mood and work ethic. Last year, for the first time in a while, I seriously committed to NaNoWriMo. (Quick definition: write 50k words in 30 days, during November.)
I not only beat it in my own record time, but I hit 71k words.
And I only wrote on weekdays.
So that taught me a hell of a lesson about my best workplace experience and schedule (and that I also need to work at a desk instead of flopped over the couch). So the novel got written! That was fucking exciting!
But it was also fucking bizarre.
2020 changed the world and shone a light on a lot of things about our international society. I was not writing anything set during a pandemic; I was working on a supernatural fantasy. But every few scenes, I would pause, and look at my story. I’d imagine it.
And even after just a year of pandemic hell, it was hard to imagine this other world where it didn’t happen, wasn’t happening, and wasn’t referenced anywhere. Did the writers in the 1920s feel this way about the 1918 pandemic?
I was writing social situations and travel and dining out and not caring about washing your hands ninety times a day. I have a Japanese character who references wearing a mask when sick; Asian countries have long used masks as ways to avoid or temper the flu, cold, and other mild sicknesses. But now, everyone knows what that is like. (Personally, I hope mask wearing when sick culture sticks around in the Western sphere, too.)
My main romance subplot finds difficulty in figuring out date times. They have an entire city to visit and explore safely—the only restricting thing is wildly different schedules. (You know, jobs that actually require you on-site!) And it is surreal to think about it like that.
It’s not as if I’ve never experienced that. I’m sure most people have dealt with the frustration of trying to schedule a date with someone you really like, but your calendar just blows a raspberry at you. But it seems so far off now. It seems borderline surreal.
Now, I have friends who will not go to any indoor dining venue at all. I have to navigate not only work schedules, but figure out how to travel safely, where we can meet, what we can do, and what precautions what places or people are taking. And I’m on the lax side of things!
Writing anything while dealing with the all-encompassing pandemic is surreal. I like that word best. We have memories of pre-pandemic, of course. But for many people, myself included, there was such a sharp dip into lockdown life, that it was not like the next chapter, but another chapter of another book.
But I’ve had to pretend to be normal again through writing this novel of mine. It’s fantasy, but the weirdest parts were never the magic or creatures. A teenager going to school in a full classroom, a pair randomly grabbing a bite to eat, a zoo date, a large indoor meeting, and so on. Magic is easy; I can write the rules of that. But recalling a “normal” reality that we’re trying to return to? That’s the weird part.
