What a Novelist Does in a Pandemic

First draft, second draft, revision, BOOK. An oh yes, a little mourning.

All the grieving people you meet, right after your own spouse dies, say “take your time; wait a year.”

So as the pandemic shut us all down, I was walking to the one-year mark from DK’s almost gentle death, looking for how life might blossom again, anticipating stepping out a bit from the shadow of massive sorrow.

Instead, then, like my phone buddies (widows A and J and D), I kept saying “Thank goodness he didn’t live to see this pandemic. He would have been terrified, and dying would have been so much harder.”

A funny kind of mourning.

Then I got to work. I already had the start of a Vermont novel sitting on the computer: “Queen of the Kingdom,” where an 80-year-old fortune-teller in a nursing home feels dementia coming on … but can’t tell which is the illusion and which is her psychic vision. It took just one question to raise the tension of the book: What happens when COVID-19 arrives in her life?

From then on, every morning’s to-do list began with Q of K, write next chap. By July, the first draft was, can you believe it, done?!

Next steps: “beta” readers, pro editor, a couple of other novelists. And by October, QUEEN OF THE KINGDOM took form as a 116,000-word contemporary novel across generations (wait til you meet Queen Lee’s granddaughter Kira and her…