Living in the Time of Covid

​It’s been a long time, huh?
I’m gonna blame it on 2020. After all, the year has given us:

• Massive and ongoing protests
• Violence
• Vandalism
• Injustice
• Hurricanes
• ZOMBIE hurricanes
• Meth Gators
• Murder Hornets
• Record-setting wildfires
• Political chaos and upheaval
• Covid 19 (200,000+ dead)
• Economic woes and potential ruin
• 130 degree temps in Death Valley
• 300,000 “recycled and reused” condoms in Vietnam

The point is, as Shakespeare wrote, “If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.” In other words, truth is stranger than fiction. In OTHER other words, you can’t write this shit. So, what does an author do when the RW is weirder and more full of plot-twists than his/her imagination? Well, in the first place, I take this strange scourge of events as a sort of permission: if reality is this off kilter, this bizarre, then fantasy must needs be more extravagant. I mean, the whole point of fantasy is to outdo reality.
Or to offer escape, which is certainly something we all need right now.
So, what am I working on right now? I wild yarn in which Shakespeare fakes his own death, sails to the Jamestown colony and runs into some truly horrific troubles, as in monsters. Why not? When life gets ridiculous, the ridiculous get ridiculouser. Yeah, that’s a word. Now. I hope this story will be out in the summer of 2021. After that, I’m onto a steampunk about a man who is mysteriously turned into a goat, and then a horror novel about a man possessed by the spirit of a slavery-era serial killer.
Plus, you know, there’s my day job. And you?