Tag: pandemic

Readjusting

Last night, after a day or so of feeling under the weather from my second vaccine, I realized that in three weeks, when my antibody count should be firmly up, that life will change.

For eighteen months, pretty much all I’ve done is write and exercise (and, yes, shower and eat and sleep, etc.) It started in our winter retreat to England in 2020 – that’s pretty much our lives there: long walks, the occasional movie, and writing time. Then the pandemic arrived, we came home, and since March 2020, with no lunches out, weekly writers’ meet-ups, movies, game nights with friends, visits to family….I write. And read and research. But mostly, I write.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay 

Blogs, guest blogs, newsletters, non-fiction pieces, verse.  And the current novel, of course. I’ve been hugely productive. But I can’t keep this pace up in a closer-to-normal world, and I have two more books to write in the current series, with ideas beyond that. Something is going to have to give.

At this moment, I’m not sure what. I value my friends and family, and I’ve missed them. Creativity needs the breaks movies and game nights give. Books already written need the exposure the guest blogs and interviews provide. It’s likely a matter of reducing, not eliminating. I write ‘smarter’ these days – more planning, more thought before hands-on-keyboard; not necessarily faster, but less tiring to my aging muscles, joints, and eyes, and my writing is cleaner, needing less rewriting and revision.

But the first step will be reacquainting myself with the bookstore I haven’t been in since December of 2019. After that, we’ll see.

Featured Image: by TaniaRose from Pixabay 

A Changed World

A year plus 10 days ago, I was in Rome, experiencing the feel of the city and visiting locations that would be settings in Empire’s Heir: the Imperial Palace, the Baths of Caracalla, others. The virus was a problem further north in Italy, but I had no worries about going to Rome. The world changed rapidly after that – we flew home to Canada from England a month later from an eerily empty airport, on a half-full flight, to restrictions that have fluctuated in gravity, but never gone away.

I hadn’t started Empire’s Heir yet: I had a general idea of the story, but little else. After I started writing it, it became quickly evident there were themes of loss and uncertainty I hadn’t planned, of separation and restrictions, and the meaning of space as something both necessary and isolating.

In my first trilogy, Empire’s Legacy, we were introduced to my protagonist Lena. Eighteen, facing war and hardships, she remains remarkably resilient – although not unscarred – throughout the three books. At the beginning of Empire’s Heir, she is forty. Mourning the sudden death of her third, unexpected child, she’s trying to make sense of her life.  Events set in motion at the birth of her oldest child, Gwenna, are shaping affairs both political and personal. She’s floundering, trying to reclaim some control of her own destiny – and she’s lost some of the resilience she had as a younger woman.

Cillian, thirty-three when we first meet him in Empire’s Hostage, is fifty-three. In a 7th century world, he’s far from young, and he’s coming to terms with the restrictions and losses of age.

I was growing old, and age brought loss, of things small and great: the acuity of hearing, the rapidity of thought… I had thought I accepted this decline; that my injuries had taught me to live with things lost.

The subplot of trying to live with loss, to rebuild lives shaken by uncertainty and unexpected change and its aftershocks, runs through the story, shaping it as I write. I can immerse myself in history and my faux-7th-century world. But the real world intrudes, influences, insists on inclusion, if in subtle and hidden ways; some, I may not even realize. Is this the book I would have written had there been no pandemic?  I doubt it.

Featured Image: The Aurelian Walls, Rome: Lalupa, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons