Novel Coronavirus 19

These are pictures of the station and parking lot where I catch the train into work every day. It is sparse-- I'm guessing less than 10% of normal use. I have never seen so few people on a weekday.

And it's certainly because of COVID-19.

Massachusetts declared a state of emergency on Tuesday, 3/10.

I'm not going to talk about how the coronavirus works. That is better discussed here. Or how it produces symptoms. Go here for that.

What I am interested in is why we have to take this bug seriously and why preventing spread is a good idea.

People who should know better have spouted a lot of nonsense how this is no more than a bad flu. It's just a cold. How back could it be? All that sort of thing.

It's not terribly surprising that a virus comes along that is related to (but with radically more serious symptoms than) the common cold we don't take it seriously. It doesn't help that figures of authority who should know better are also not taking it seriously.

We need to.

Let's start with the demographics. For the record, I'm pulling a lot of data from here.

Unsurprisingly, COVID-19 attacks the elderly, immune compromised and those with co-morbidities harder than young healthy people.

The lethality of the virus ticks up beginning at age 50.














In part this is science's fault: we've gotten too good at handling diseases.

The big epidemics were still in evidence in the fifties when I grew up. Immediate relatives had died from Spanish Flu. If you didn't actually know someone who'd had polio, you knew someone who knew someone who'd had polio. FDR was still on everyone's minds and he'd had polio. There were people in my family who'd died of diphtheria in the thirties. One aging cousin of mine had lived through a case of lockjaw (tetanus).

When vaccines for measles, polio, and others came out people stood in long lines to get them. Sure, there was a risk. But they'd seen first hand the consequences of the disease and the risk was worth it. Most of those diseases were wiped from everyday life and, unfortunately, apparently from American consciousness.

We've never successfully developed a general vaccine for influenza. It comes every year. Some fairly small population dies of it. We get sick and we go on.

I am not saying influenza is trivial. It is most certainly not. Thousands of people die from it. Tens of thousands get sick from it to the point of hospitalization. Hundreds of thousands to millions get sick enough to stay home. It has high personal and economic costs.

But we're like the proverbial frog in boiling water: it happens every year and we're used to it.

So, it's not terribly surprising that a virus comes along that is related to (but with radically more serious symptoms than) the common cold we don't take it seriously. It doesn't help that figures of authority who should know better are also not taking it seriously.

Upcoming Zoom Event vs Writing on Writing

First things first.

I'll be doing a zoom event with Jeff Carver over at Annie's Book Stop in Worcester @2pm on Saturday, 5/9. The link is in there blog. (See here.)

Unfortunately, I was unable to get material to them in time so only Jeff is represented there. But the Facebook link is there to RSVP. If you want to join us on Saturday.

They asked several questions. Since these aren't going up on their blog, I thought I'd put them here.

• Can you please tell us briefly a little about yourself and your writing? How would you like us to introduce you.

My father was an engineer with the heart of a poet. My mother was a writer with the heart of an engineer. So I became a science fiction writer. My day job is as a software engineer in aerospace. Right now I’m working on the Dream Chaser vehicle intended to supply the ISS.

• Where can people find your work? (Besides Annie’s Book Stop of Worcester--though they should totally check here first!)

Annie’s first, of course. For the ebooks, first would be bookviewcafe.com and second, Amazon. The print versions are available at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Annie’s is clearly the first choice.

• How can we follow your work and share your awesomeness

I have a blog I keep up regularly. In addition, since I do most of my publishing with bookviewcafe.com, that’s a good place to go. They also have a newsletter.

• For readers unfamiliar with your work, how would you describe what you write?  What can readers expect from [newest release/spotlighted release]?

I’m interested in how human beings navigate novel situations. Simple Things is a story collection so there is a broad swath of things that happen to people and how they deal with them. Welcome to Witchlandia looks at what is now called “paranormal” and back in the seventies was called “psionics” in the context of athletic or cognitive ability. It’s a crime novel. Crime novels are interesting in the way they allow you to take characters out of their comfort zone.

• What kind of research went into writing this book?  What is your favorite research story? What cool facts and findings didn’t make it into the book, but you loved discovering?

Welcome to Witchlandia is deeply embedded in both Boston, Massachusetts and Columbia, Missouri. (Part 1 is in Columbia. Parts 2 and 3 are in Boston.) Since the main character has the ability to fly, her ability comes under FAA rules. I’m a pilot and this was very interesting to me. However, I could only reference a few aspects of flight in the book. Simple Things is a story collection and covers a lot of ground. One story, Jackie’s Boy, involves a young boy and an intelligent elephant navigating a post-apocalyptic landscape. They end up at (or near) the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee. Given their environment, I couldn’t explore the sanctuary there. However, it is a wonderful place and I happily shout out to them now: www.elephants.com

• What else can we expect from you in the near future?

I have a new novel, God’s Country, coming out in July. If you were to ask the question what do recreational drugs, the discovery of a higher beings, prostitution, cults and biochemistry have in common, the answer would be God’s Country.

• What is/are your passions when you're not writing? How do you make time for your non-writing hobbies/things you love?

I do a lot of woodworking and gardening. Like anything else, you have to make time for that which (or who) you love.

• While you're writing, do you prefer music, silence, other? Please elaborate!

Music without words or words in a language I don’t know. I listen to a lot of Japanese pop music.

They asked several other questions that I was uncomfortable in answering in this format. I had no snap answers. (Jeff, as you'll see from the blog entry, is far better at this than I am.) They involved the process of writing, something I've not talked about very much here.

Why not?

Well, that's a good question and I'm not entirely sure of the answer. For one thing, writing isn't really optional for me. To paraphrase Rorschach said in Alan Moore's Watchment: I don't do it because I choose to. I do it because I am compelled. It took a long time for me to come to terms with that.

Given that-- and given that it's important to me-- the actual process is a strange alchemical process that seems driven by its own opaque rules. I don't mean creativity is a mystery too arcane to be within the ken of mortal man. I mean I don't understand how my mind works with this. It is a compulsion-- if I don't do it for a bit I get itchy and irritable. I also get worried I'll never get back to it-- it's not like the world cares.

But it's even stranger than that. I underwent therapy a number of years ago (I'll talk about that someday but not right now.) and one thought I had was if I got better, would I stop writing? This, apparently, is a common idea. As if the writing was a symptom of some kind of sickness.

As an aside, in Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith, the drug, stroon, grants immortality. It is distilled from the exudates of sick ship on the planet Norstrilia. I wonder if stroon was, to Smith, a metaphorical equivalent to writing.

I got better and the writing improved. But it did not become any less mysterious. I sit down and conversations, scenes and characters come. I do work at breaking them down, lining them up and figuring out as much as I can ahead of time so that when I do sit seat of pants to seat of chair, the material is there to be put down.

That said, I've also found there's a delicate balance. I know writers that outline within an inch of their life. (An apocryphal story about Faulkner is he outline meticulously and then wrote while drunk. I have no idea if this is true.) I know others that don't. E. L. Doctorow said that writing is like driving in a fog where you can't see past the hood ornament. But Doctorow is clearly an uncommonly thorough researcher.

For me, if I know too much about what is going to happen, the work stop. If I know too little, the work stops until I know more. Sometimes I'll restart a section or work several times until I get the right take on the stuff and then it writes itself. I go from struggling creator to transcriber.

It feels like there's another entity at work here beyond my conscious mind. I'm not a particularly spiritual person so I don't think this is an intangible being. But I also can't tell whether it's my subconscious or the other half of my brain yelling across the corpus callosum. "Muse" might be a good word for this. "Harry" might be another.

The rest is finding time.

I get about 90 minutes a day, five days a week. Weekends are taken up managing the garden and the household. 9-10 hours a day are taken up during the week by my job. The remaining time is family  time, reading and all the other stuff. In that 90 minutes I have to write my own material, critique other people's material, format books and write this blog.

And that's pretty much all I have to say on writing. Time's up.