Pandemic Fiction: The Evil That Writers Do

Actually, I don't know what I'm doing.

For a while now, I've gotten up in the mornings and gone immediately to my computer to write the next whatever in this file some might call a role-playing game. Before I fully awaken I am immersing myself into a fantasy world, not as a character, not even as an observer (well, sometimes), but as a god, creating everything, pulling all the strings (though some may break), directing the action. And in this way, I entertain myself. I like entering the story each day. I like adding the next episode. I like seeing how my creations react to what I throw at them. And in this way I become evil.

In my latest evil incarnation, I've taken our very real pandemic and its associated unpleasantries and extended it into the future. I've introduced a family consisting of a teen boy and his single mother and thrown them into this near-future situation. Just to see what would happen if... if the pandemic, at its worst, continued for six more years. While other writers have taken viral pandemic-caused apocalypses into seriously bizarre or otherworldly directions, I've bent over backwards to 'keep it real'. Because the scariest situations come from real possibilities.

In Book 1 of my FLU SEASON trilogy, The Book of Mom (available now; click title to read more), an autistic teen son and his tuba-playing mom escape a city in chaos to seek refuge at the grandparents' farm - only to discover upon arrival that the location is undesirable as a sanctuary. Traveling onward to first one of the mom's sisters then another sister, trying to save other relatives, then to an island where the family has vacationed previously, we experience the kind of shocking episodes people in that kind of long-term pandemic would face: precautions for the virus, yes, but more likely and more often the violence of fellow survivors trying to get by in an every-man-for-himself 'new normal' world.

In Book 2, The Way of the Son (coming May 2023), our teen boy hero is a couple years older and has a family. But the situation has turned ugly. Exiled from their island sanctuary, the young family faces an uncertain existence in the dangerous outerlands where the deadly virus is less of a problem than are other survivors of the pandemic. Faced with greater responsibilities, they must grow up quickly and fight to stay together in this new normal. 

For the back cover blurb, I borrowed from text in the novel:

Everything changes when you lose your mother, even more if you lose her during a pandemic when everyone is fighting for survival and it's your responsibility to protect her and you fail. 

Now you have a wife and baby to protect in the savage outerlands - where danger lurks in every shadow, every man for himself.

I call it the Way of the Son - definitely not the way Mom would've gone. 

“The road is finite, and well-marked, so you only need to go along it, following the path that’s already set before you. Yet sometimes it will lead you in the wrong direction. Sometimes you will end up in the wrong place.” 

You have to find your way home again, wherever that may be - even through a pandemic and the chaos that comes after.

(Pre-order the Kindle version here! Delivered May 15, 2023.)

In Book 3, Dawn of the Daughters (coming Fall 2023), our family is hidden away in the forest of a national park - or so they think. Giving in to changing situations, new dangers and new opportunities pull them apart, leading to story lines that take us on the characters' contrasting journeys covering the decades of civil war and the reconstruction of a new world. We also learn the history of the precious tuba and why it matters.

To define "pandemic fiction" I want to ask: What is post-apocalyptic fiction? 

Answer:  A made-up story of how life is following some worldwide disaster that shatters the long-standing, ordinary, stable society of before and forces people to try to survive in new circumstances, none of which are easy. Imagining that kind of awful future isn't easy - mostly because we, being stuck in the present, can only guess how it will be. This brings me back to an assignment I gave my college composition students years ago.

I called it the Future Project. I allowed them to make it fiction (i.e., a post-apocalyptic story) or non-fiction (e.g., reporting on some technological development). Most students found the project fun and I got many great results from them. In the prompt, I asked students to look back 20 years and compare life then with life today. How much had things changed in 20 years? Then turn it around and consider the same degree of change that would occur in 20 years from today. To illustrate, we sampled music from 20 years ago with music today: what was popular back then vs. what is popular today. One requirement was to tie the subject of the paper to something that was real today; they couldn't simply go off into fantasy land and make up something that had no connection to what exists today.

I tried a similar approach when I wrote my vampire trilogy. The story began in the same year in which I wrote it (2013-2014), but the second book was set in 2027-2028. There was an awkward development in Book 2, however: one character, in looking back from 2028, describes what happened in 2020 - yet never mentions any pandemic. Book 3 was easier because it was set in 2099. But you get the idea: it's hard to stay current with future events. 

For my FLU SEASON trilogy, I deliberately kept things vague with regard to years. We acknowledge the start of the pandemic in 2020 but start the story six years later, what would be 2026. Obviously, the pandemic we experienced has been called off now (early 2023), no longer an emergency, so this trilogy becomes a great What-If exercise. I could calculate that Book 1 covers 2026-2028 and Book 2 covers 2028-2029. Book 3 is the generational epic and so it covers the years 2030 to 2098 - although the number of the years are never mentioned. Everything is different, anyway: ruined then rebuilt. So it hardly matters what the actual year is; it's a fresh start.

Bad things happen; that is what makes a story. (I promise my next novel will be full of happy events, one after another, and our characters will have easy lives and never lack anything, and nothing much ever happens.) For a post-apocalyptic adventure tale, however, bad things must happen, and they must:

1) be realistic or plausible in the story's context (that is, not just thrown in for the sake of drama), and

2) cause the reader to feel unnerved, sick/disgusted, uncomfortable, off-balance, shocked, and/or deeply concerned without using too many cheat codes (i.e., emotional tropes).

In the FLU SEASON trilogy, I "let" bad things happen, because they likely would happen in that situation. While I feel bad for putting the characters through these episodes, I know the reader will be better off for following them through. That is my hope. As one character says to another while writing events down in a notebook: "Every page is a lesson."

FLU SEASON is more than a cautionary tale of what you might have to face in an extended emergency (although you might glean some survival tips from the text). It is a story like most stories where you identify with characters who seem real, get to know them, care about them, and want to shout "Don't open the door!" when you can feel that moment coming on the page. That is what I do, like a mad scientist, like an evil god with a whole world to play with. That is what gets me up in the mornings.

FLU SEASON Book 2 THE WAY OF THE SON 

Available mid-May 2023 for Kindle and in paperback!

(Pre-Order for Kindle version here!)

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