2020 and the Luck of Writing
2020 has been a hell of a year and I’m not about to take for granted that it doesn’t have something horrible in store in the last month, but we keep trying to move forward, because collapsing on the floor is not an option. Although, maybe I better not say that while 2020 can still hear me, the bloody year might take that as a challenge.
It has been a difficult year to concentrate enough to work on my writing. Between the GOP being willing to toss away any pretense of democracy to Covid to losses in the family, reality has been bad enough to make it difficult to focus on my fiction.
That said I did accomplish something this year. Because I couldn’t focus enough to work on a novel I was writing, I shelved that book and instead worked on what I needed as a writer and as a reader: some super escapist, grim humored short stories, in this case set in my Dungeons and Dragons campaign world. I wrote about twenty in all, but then paired the list down to eight, polished those up and published them through Amazon with the title coming from my favorite of the stories: A Cookbook for the Besieged.
What I’ve been thinking about lately though is a rejection letter I recently received for a novel I submitted back at the first week of 2020. By June I was pretty sure this book would be rejected. The problem beyond the the normal longshot in submitting a novel and hoping it’s a good fit for the publisher: the main plot of this book involved a world wide plague albeit in a fantasy like world. I had no idea when I wrote the book mostly in 2018 and rewrote it in 2019, that there would be a pandemic in our real world. Thematically the book is all about using science or at least evidence based approaches to tackling problems. In one chapter an official denies that the plague exists and then insists that the peasants claiming the plague exists must be unpatriotic traitors. David Burkhart, doing a beta read in the fall of 2019 said, “Ordinarily I’d say this character isn’t subtle enough, but who am I kidding? This is exactly how a Trump official would react to news of a plague.”
“Would react.” Sigh. If I’d gotten this book done a year earlier it would have seemed downright prophetic. But as is, I had the bad luck of bad timing. I finished the book just in time for something way too similar to what was happening in my scifi/fantasy book occur in our reality.
This isn’t the first time I’ve had some bad luck with timing. In my second novel, End Times at Ridgemont High, there’s a side character, a biology teacher. I hinted in the book that this character was turned on by dead things, but I didn’t really go into it much, the character is a side character in that book and we’re never in his point of view. A year after the book was published I decided to write his story. I wrote a novella length story about how he came to be that way. Since he was obsessed with his butterfly collection including a Morpho Menelaus, I called the novella Blue Butterfly. I’d finished revisions after a second draft and was polishing up the submittable draft when the Venture Bros introduced the character Blue Morpho for the Monarch’s alter ego. Every episode the character Henchman 21 was suddenly shouting “Blue Morpho!” I probably could have made changes, found something else to put in there, but it seemed so intrinsic to the story, that I just felt like the timing was trying to tell me something. Also I wasn’t sure that the story, which included a fairly graphic necrophilia scene was really work I wanted to present.
The book that was just rejected on the other hand, I really believe in and I love the story, particularly the setup. But now I’m a little gun shy. I’m a little worried that if I rip the plague part of the story out and replace it with another threat, will that fucking happen in our world as well? Like if it’s a meteor strike instead, will the moment I’ve rewritten, polished and submitted the novel will there be a massive calamitous meteor strike in reality?
I know. Just do it and chance the consequences, but still, the luck of the draw is so precarious. Even barring a real life disaster, it’s a lot of work to do just to have the real news get in the way of the fiction.
