COVID-19 Reaction

The world has turned into a horrible stressful place because of COVID-19. But we writers have a creative outlet to help us cope. I’m not referring to writing about COVID-19 or how we are dealing with all the crap and changes associated with it. Yes, my last two posts have done just that.

But I have found another way that as a writer I  can use to cope much better.

Just write.

In a previous post I referred to writing both a memoir and the next novel in my Beyond mystery series in the same timeline, i.e., one day rewrite some of my memoir, the next day, write some of my  Beyond mystery novel. That did help, but it was too scatty, too fragmented.

So, I had to choose to write one at a time.

My publisher had given me a deadline for later this month to get the rewrite of my memoir to him. The mystery novel is not due until at least sometime next year (depending on COVID-19 interference with when book launches and the like can be held). So, I put the novel on hold, even though my interfering main character, PI Dana Bowman, is giving me hell and some choice words about that. I’ve restarted my Crime Beat Confidential TV shows, which Dana appears on (see here to watch a previous show), so that should shut her up, except in the TV shows).

PI Dana Bowman on Crime Beat Confidential

I also put one other thing on hold until the memoir rewrite is finished and the TV show is taped – finish editing that long novel that requires a heavy edit for a client. Client isn’t too happy, but is accepting it, as I have come up with a way to shorten my time getting his editing work done in future.

One thing COVID-19 is teaching me is “one thing at a time and if others don’t like it, they can lump it.”

And as I began focusing on rewriting my memoir, I found a bonus – something I knew before COVID-19, but had forgotten about thanks to skipping from one project to another.

When rewriting my memoir, I am transported to a different period in my life – in the mid to late 1950s, the 1960s and early 1970s – the grey ages as I call them. I think it is because it is the past that it gets me out of these horrid COVID-19 times for a few hours at a time. Even though life was not easy for me back then, it is done; it is the past, and I guess it comes under nostalgia.

Writing fiction – short stories, novels, novellas – can also transport you out of COVID-19 times – unless that is what your fiction is about. I don’t really recommend that, but if that is where your creativity and ideas lie, I’m not going to say “don’t do it”. It would be fiction based on fact, so go for it.

My Beyond mysteries are set in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The setting is loosely based on where I was living in the late 1990s until I moved back to Toronto. But I have been back to Aurora, Ontario (where I lived from 1975 to late 1998) and also to nearby Newmarket many times since then, but of course today shows the changes in those now small cities, which were large towns when I moved out.

You could say these novels are nostalgic too, although they are fiction, not my story. But again, I’m out of COVID-19 times, temporarily, thanks to writing Beyond Truth, and I am doing something creative. It doesn’t matter what terrible things happen in my novels – they are fiction and each has an ending.

So, escape into creativity for a few hours each day. It will raise your spirits, is good for the mind and body, too. And you have accomplished something and created something as well.

So…

Just write.

Cheers.

Sharon A. Crawford, author of the Beyond mysteries. All available in e-copies at Amazon. Link for Beyond Faith here.