Idea for a Novel

Just reiterating something here that I was... ranting about? ...on Twitter, in response to this tweet:

On the other hand, small scale personal/emotional can be more important than ever in the context of even a slow moving disaster. See Emma Donoghue's gorgeous novel set in a 1918 flu ward, The Pull of the Stars. https://t.co/J2Tfw31MnP

— Sarah Pinsker (@SarahPinsker) December 20, 2021

You can find my response on Twitter, but I'm reproducing it here because not everybody follows me on Twitter. 

I swear I'm going to write a pandemic novel where everybody just keeps going to work and shopping and eating in restaurants and there's just this occasional aside like, "Did you hear about John? Yeah. Last Tuesday. Funeral's next week." Because honestly, that's how this feels.

Our protagonist will be training a new co-worker but there won't be any discussion of what happened to the previous co-worker, just a vague allusion to the handout from the funeral that's still on the bulletin board by the coffee machine.

Somebody will start ranting about how people need to be more careful and everyone will just look at them and edge slowly away.

Periodically there will be emails from management or bulletins posted from the Department of Health explaining that extra precautions are advised but not required at this time, but there will be no mention of what the precautions would be *for*. 

But other than that it'll just be a perfectly mundane slice-of-life book, with no dramatic character arcs and nobody really learning anything. Character growth? Naw.

Until *maybe*, at the very end of the book, the protagonist undergoes a full emotional collapse under the weight of all the things that everyone has been carefully ignoring the whole time.

I'm so tired, y'all. And it's not just the ongoing global pandemic, it's the persistent failure of leadership and the outright gaslighting from our Republican political figures and their pet media outlets. Yes, the global pandemic was always going to be horrible, but still: it didn't have to be this way. 

Blog-wise... I'm probably going to put something up for tomorrow, and there may be a few more entries next week, but it's also possible that it's just going to be radio silence over here until January. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and be careful out there: it looks like the holidays are making everyone a little deranged right now.