Rant #2,391: Everyday I Write the Book

Just let me start off by saying "thanks" to everyone for their good wishes about my sister.

She remains quite ill, but all indications are that she is getting better in heart, mind and soul, and physically, she is getting better by baby steps.

She has a long way to go, but she is closer to that goal than she was a few days ago, so there is really some light at the end of the tunnel now.

I spoke to a friend on the phone yesterday, and yes, he has the coronavirus too. Thankfully, he doesn't have it to the level that my sister does, and he is also getting better in small increments.

Having spoken now to three people who have the virus, although they all have it at different levels, the one constant seems to be that at some point in their sickness, they were all repulsed by food.

And I do mean repulsed.

Each one of them told me that not only didn't they have an appetite at some point, but even the thought of food made them sick.

That is an interesting point, and it just shows how this virus works on both the body and the brain.

That being said, I hope that each one of them--and every person who has this thing--feels better today and keeps on feeling better, and is able to kick this thing once and for all.

Me, I am doing fine, as is my family. I worry about my wife, who had to deal directly with the public as a bank teller, and I worry about my daughter, who works in a residential facility for at-risk youth, but at least right now, everything seems to be copacetic with them, and I hope that that continues.

Everyone who is home right now has had to cope with being there, and even though this is our home, we were certainly not ready to be staying there for such a long amount of time.

Some of us can work at home, some of us can't, and some of us have no work--we have been fired, laid off, furloughed--so we just have to bide our time doing whatever to keep ourselves up and about and sharp during this inactive period.

As you know, all of these people have now joined my world, a world I have been living in since October. It wasn't easy for me, either, to accommodate myself at home for so much time with little to do, but I quickly learned that this was the time to take the bull by the horns, and use that time as wisely as possible.

From Day One, I have continued to look for work, and that eats up part of the day, but since the coronavirus struck, job listings are down I would say anywhere from 33 percent to 50 percent--and a lot of the listings are reruns from long ago, meaning that the job listing companies are re-using listings to keep their lists as full as possible.

I even contacted one company myself, a company that I had applied for an editor's job right at the start of my unemployment, and whose ad continued to run non-stop for the past nearly seven months. I never heard from them at all, but the same ad kept running day in and day out.

So I contacted them myself, and they pretty quickly wrote back to me that that job was done and over with, so I firmly believe that once again, you can't trust the job lists being put out there, because they often run outdated and/or bogus ads.

What else is new? Things aren't going to change even as we go through a pandemic.

So after I look for jobs--two phone interviews, two in-person interviews in nearly seven months, and the two in-person interviews led me to believe one thing but actually delivered something totally different than I was prepared for--what else have I been doing?

Well, quite frankly, a lot of other stuff.

One of the things that I have done during the past nearly seven months is that I decided to expand my writing experience. As a professional writer.reporter/editor or whatever you want to call what I have done for the better part of my career, I have written what amounts to non-fiction, true stories about people, places and things.

They are considered to be news stories, or feature stories about true events.

So I decided to expand my sphere a bit, and do something that I have never done before, and that is to write a novel, and a fiction one to boot.

The idea came to me one day, and it allowed me to create my own world, my own characters, and my own set of circumstances that everything in the story I am telling revolves around.

I purposely did not put any recent references to date it, so there is no mention of things like the Khardashians, the Internet, Facebook, blogs or even television or radio in the story. I learned long ago, from reading an article where Carl Reiner was interviewed, that the last thing you want to do is to date your work with modern references, and that is why his own creation, "The Dick Van Dyke Show," has only a scant few references in its episodes, so as not to date the show.

So I pretty much did the same thing, with only one reference to pop culture in the entire 37,000-word opus. I mention this reference a couple of times in the novel's 40 chapters, but the reference has become so much a part of our culture during the past nearly 60 years that I didn't think that that one mention--which I used a couple of times to move the story along--would date it at all.

Anyway, without giving anything away, the story is about a fellow who was literally born as a square peg, with an affliction that prevents him from fitting into the round hole of the world as we know it.

Then one day, he gets his big opportunity, feels confident about himself, and then he loses everything one by one.

I didn't mean the story to kind of replicate what is going on in the world today, where so many of us felt so confident with what we were doing with our lives, and then have the rug pulled from under us as the coronavirus struck, but it kind of mirrors that in some weird type of way.

I had that vision way before most of us had even heard the word "coronavirus," so I make no apologies for using the analogy I described in the novel, but that is simply how it is.

I don't know even how to describe what I wrote, other than to say it has some comedy, some sci-fi, some drama, and some bathos and pathos in it, but I finally finished it yesterday after ramping up my writing during the past week or so.

I was so close to the end of the story I wanted to tell that I simply dotted the i's and crossed the t's a little quicker, and right now, I have a somewhat finished product.

A little later this morning, I will begin the editing process, and I should be done with this thing by the end of the week.

Other than giving me something truly different to do during my time at home, what do I do with my first novel when I am done looking it over?

I have no idea.

I don't know if it is good, or simply an experiment to stretch myself a little bit.

In this time of the coronavirus, I don't know if I need a literary agent if I am serious in putting this book out professionally. Maybe I can self-publish it if I want to.

I just don't know.

But at least I did it. I accomplished something I always wanted to do, and believe it or not, I have an idea for a second novel, one that is a bit racier than the "soft PG" one I just wrote, but I am not going to act on that idea until I find out what I am doing with this first novel, the name of which I cannot divulge at this time, because it kind of gives off a certain vibe that I want to hold back right now.

So, in addition to the 1,805,705,761 other things that I have done since I have been home, I found time to write a novel.

It might pack a punch, it might be a dud, it might even set off its own virus ... I just don't know now what I have in my virtual hands, but I did it!

And I am proud of it, no matter what happens with it or to it.

I did it! And that is all that counts.