In the Plague Years . . .
Well . . . weeks, it just feels longer . . . .
So, high on Nyquil, short on sleep, but recovering . . .
Oh, my poor ribs! Don’t cough, don’t cough . . . Oh, cheese and crackers that hurt!
I’m always delighted to see how other authors manage to not curse in books that might be read by the young and impressionable.
The last two months of potential writing have been eaten by first a bad cold and just as I got back to the work-in-progress . . . COVID.
Sheesh. Almost three years since the first open admission of its existence. I was in Taiwan, and flew home on February 2, 2020 for heaven’s sake! Not a sniffle, then. Nothing since.
So anyway, it seems like my supply of good luck has run dry and autumn has not been fun. The writing has suffered worse than my sinuses. But no matter the aching ribs, it’s actually all the meds that shut down the words, and extended usage seems to require an extended abstinence for the stories to come back and start transferring into a readable medium.
But it’s done wonders for my TBR pile. One good series, another with potential, despite the desperate needed copy editing (Hey I was sick. It was entertaining words on pages, then three books in, it veered into stupidity, and the MC became an absolute dick, so I dropped it.)
Let’s see. I’m sure I had some point here, and no, I can’t keep blaming it on the Nyquil, it wore off hours ago. Oh, Mental lag time? Okay, I’ll accept that.
Oh, cussing in YA novels? Was that where I was going? Any rate, Arthur Mayor does an excellent and funny job of it, managing to get plenty of emotion into exclamations involving food and other unlikely things in his Superpowers Chronicles.
I recommend him to you, for sheer headlong action. I hope it holds up to non-medicated rereading. Tons of fights, lots of parkour (this Superhero can’t fly), with appropriate amounts of teenage angst, demon dogs, and magic cats.
Oh, wait. I know where I was going.
When you can’t write? Can’t even go shopping? Learn. Read. Watch TV.
You never know when knowing how a hippo deals with a lion may come in handy in your next story.
Everything, everything, is grist for the writer’s mill.
Binging Dr. Who while not quite all there is an interesting experience.
(Breaking for coughing episode . . . )
Oh, so that’s what people are talking about when they say “trying to cough up a lung.”
And remember how it feels. It helps with conveying to the reader how miserable your poor hero is. Actually a little humor helps, too. “Oh,” She moaned, tenderly dabbing at her raw, red nose. “This would all have been worth it if only I’d thought to buy stock in Kleenex last week. I could have made a fortune.”
And don’t worry if you’re not up to tackling what you should be doing. If you get an idea, a scene, a conversation, write it down. You’re warming up, getting back in the saddle. When you’re completely well, when you can do it justice, you can get back to the novel you “ought” to be writing.
I think I’ve got six good story starts down, in just the last six weeks. Probably overdue for another one any minute now . . .
And now I think I’ll go brew some tea and continue to eschew the nasty green stuff . . . if I can. Because I really do need to get back to writing . . .
Mad Genius Club 
12 responses to “Plagued”
While lying in bed on chemo a couple of years ago, I managed to chunk an awful lot of series book 3 onto an 8.5×11 pad of paper by my side, as isolated scenes, first, and then novel structures. Couldn’t sit at a desk and actually type in an organized way, but it helped to turn drugged fabulations into content. It all held up well once I was able to deal with it more intelligently.
Hope you feel better soon. Your advice is great: do what you can do when you can do it.
Get well soon.
Wife got sick beginning of last month and is still sick. Not covid, has taken multiple tests.
Myself, and then daughter, both got covid last month. For each of us it started with a really bad sinus headache (I would have sworn I had a sinus infection), extreme fatigue for about 3 days, and then started to feel better. Lasted about a week to ten days total. This was waaaayyyy different than when I had covid in ’20.
Unfortunately the dog picked up that nasty K-9 respiratory thing going around. He started coughing around 1AM Thursday and woke us up. I had to take him out to the living room for the rest of the night. And last night after I let him off the bed he decided to sleep downstairs. He has a vet appt on Monday morning, but from what I’ve been reading it doesn’t seem like there’s much that can be done right now. The only place he’s been besides inside our house, is our yard to do his business, and the groomer on the 5th. I’m guessing it’s got a week+ incubation period.
“Oh,” She moaned, tenderly dabbing at her raw, red nose. “This would all have been worth it if only I’d thought to buy stock in Kleenex last week. I could have made a fortune.”
But … if you were the one BUYING massive amounts of Kleenex, it feels like all you could do would be offset your costs a bit. Even if your Kleenex stock pays a dividend, you’re only going to get a part of the profits, and if those profits are coming from your own money….
Er, sorry. I know that wasn’t the point. But I’ve got a bit of a cold too (though nowhere near as bad as yours), and my brain is running off on its own tangents.
At this point . . . Logic has left the house.
Wondered why there hadn’t been anything since mid-November. Hope you’re feeling better! Thanks to a ton of prescription medications and vitamins of every sort, we’ve missed all the Winter illnesses so far. I look forward to the new stories, once you get well. Take care of yourself! We all love hearing from you.
Also depending on how long you’ve been coughing and what else has been done, you might need intervention… I couldn’t shake a cough last year of the kind you are describing (Oh, there’s my lung, how interesting and painful) until I got a dose of antibiotics. Very surprising but cough was gone nearly instantly. I wish you pain free sleep.
I heard of an extreme case where a woman’s heart gave out because of all the strain severe coughing put on it.
I’ve had a chronic cough for almost two years now, ever since part of a lung was removed. I saw my Primary Care Doctor about that and some other non urgent things two days ago. Now I have three more doctor’s appointments and a blood donation in the next three weeks. Bleah. When I was leaving the doctor’s office, I also realized that I may have had the cough since the week before the surgery because of the lung biopsy where they shoved a couple of large tubes down my throat. It was an extremely stressful time.
Hope you get to feeling better. I haven’t much in the way of health problems, just somewhat overcommitted on holiday and other stuff. Only last night I realized I wasn’t going to have my steampunk story done in time for a particular anthology’s deadline, and really ought to focused on getting blurb and print cover and all that good stuff ready for next novel’s publication at the end of December. Slept better coming to that conclusion.
Ah, plagues.
I used one as a plot device in A Diabolical Bargain so even the experience itself may be of use. They are oddly precise in how useful they are and when.
I really need to flesh out the actual biological plague hidden in the sci-fi story. They really are a useful plot device.