Depending on where you are, you may have experienced a sudden jump in how you and/or your community are preparing for or dealing with the coronavirus. Because I'm really bad keeping up with my to-do lists lately, this morning when I went to update my to-do list for the week, I saw that on my list for last Monday was "ask [friend] about getting together for lunch." I didn't get around to asking... and at this point I won't. I actually had a couple friends I was going to email about getting together to grab lunch and catch up, but that's now on the back burner indefinitely.
In addition to not having gotten much of my to-do list done, I also haven't gotten much writing done. The Wolf and the Sheath, as well as my other partial novels, sits as unfinished as it was in July when I had Elianna. I've been thinking a lot about it this week, though. The story begins not long after a an outbreak (Small Pox, though it's not referred to as such in-story) has died down and societies have started rebuilding.
When I first started the book, an embarrassingly large number of years ago, I just kind of slapped that setting on it. In November of 2018, when I went back in during NaNoWriMo to actually do some serious work on it, I started thinking more practically of things like the recovery process. What is the harvest like now? What kind of shortages (or surpluses) are there? Did some areas of society lose people disproportionately, or was it across the board? I had thought, and even worried, that having lived in a comfortable place and time where we hadn't ever had a major outbreak that I might not be able to understand and write this world. Oops...
I'm not saying I'm glad that this pandemic is going on - of course I'm not saying that. But as we start to see the number of cases take a sharp turn upward, I personally find that looking for the positive, the silver lining in this very dark storm cloud, is something is something that we can - and should - do to help keep our spirits up.
I am actually going to reread through a few of those newer scenes, where I address some of those issues (rather than the older ones where I just slapped a "post-pox" label on it and moved on), maybe see how dealing with the looming threat of a major disease affects how they read now. I actually would like to take one of these scenes, workshop it a bit to stand on its own, and post it on my My Works page*. We'll see if I can get that done in a timely manner.
*Normally, I don't post unfinished pieces, as that can affect their ability to be published later, but small excerpts from full novels are usually considered to be a small enough percentage of the story that publishers don't mind.
But back to the search for the silver lining...
Jason and I are actually very fortunate. His work is such that it can be done remotely (indeed, he already worked from home two days a week). His company's decision that everyone will work from home at least until April 17 is no hardship.
I had been planning on starting taking Elianna to story times at the library since before Christmas, but something always got in the way. Now Elianna has not, in fact, visited my former coworkers in Cobb County (which has one of the highest number of cases in the state).
We stock up on paper goods and soap regularly at Costco, and everything else when it's BOGO at Publix. When we started seeing shortages in stores, and recommendations to start preparing to spend and extended period of time self-isolating, we were not caught up short, unable to find what we need.
Despite the worry, despite the fear, it turns out I have a lot of silver linings. Do you have a silver lining? Maybe yours is that you didn't really want to go to that conference, or now you have more time to snuggle your dog during the day.
Find your silver lining.