Blog of the Plague...oh, I did that one already

When Daniel Defoe wrote his book, he had letters and diaries from the period to draw upon -- most certainly Pepys, possibly Johnson, and apparently largely from the journal of his own uncle, Henry Defoe. London was indeed suffering under a recurrence of the bubonic plague as he wrote, but the Great Plague had struck when he was but five years old.

It occurs to me that this will be one of the best documented pandemics of history. At least in the Western World. Because Shelter-in-Place has arrived on top of a mature Internet. In a weird acting-out of the scenario described in E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops we are all huddled alone with only our computers for company.

The Blitz hit London at a sort of height of diary-making and letter-writing. So the street experience of that was exceptionally well documented, and unusually, letters and diaries had been through the previous decades (and no doubt the previous war) been filtering down from the elite -- the "lettered" classes -- to all walks of life. It was not unusual for the lightly-educated to be prolific writers.

We are no longer exactly a letter culture. Texting and Twitter and the like have moved us to a fast, pseudo-conversational intercourse far from the long empathic reads of books and diaries and multi-page letters. That culture still exists, but it is circled back to being a minority; authors, reviewers, scientific papers, stalwarts like the Times -- I am thinking in particularly of the New York Times Review of Books, many of which seem longer than the books themselves.

And, yes, the novelists. Who are going uneasily through a changed landscape themselves, as the digital world is both wider and more fragmented, more open yet less lucrative.

But I digress.

***

My company is closed for at least the next two weeks. The future looks rough for it; we build high-end audio equipment and a big part of our client base is the musicians and shows who are currently suffering badly. So there's no assurance we'll get back to normal after this is over.

I have savings to last out the month and probably more. I have salable skills for the on-line economy, if that turns out to be the best thing going. So many of us were living close to the margin already, and the arts are always like that.

I spend decades doing gig work. The conundrum there is that you either have time, or money. Either you are working and have no free time, or you aren't working and have no money. Well, this one is different. I'm not working, I have a little money, but nothing is open. My town's been shut down since Monday night.

The line is still out the door at the local grocery store. I have food in the house for at least a week, but past, well, today that is with more and more creative improvising. As I look at the odds-and-ends I'll be increasingly faced with -- a bag of walnuts, some buckwheat flour, three small jars of saké -- I am oddly reminded of cooking in Skyrim, where after you are down to mostly cabbages you find out you can combine green apple, cabbage, and salt pile to make "Cabbage-Apple Stew."

Yeah. I was a bit zonked anyhow, so I cocooned in place -- turned out the lights and played Skyrim all day. I needed the vacation anyhow.  Played the Special Edition because that one has the three official DLC included, even though the mods available through the in-game handler are not as good as the ones I have loaded on regular Skyrim.

And oddly enough, Skyrim gave me a bit of an insight to the next novel. I'm still not liking it. I'm not liking the first. I'm not liking the choices I finally made, although I do not know if there was another set of choices I might have discovered.

Really, when you get right down to it, a story is a complicated and subtle enough beast that you can't sit back and logically work out all the pieces before starting. The only way to learn what is going to work, much of the time, is by trying it.

Well, there are choices I can still un-make. Despite there being print copies out there now (a surprisingly number of my friends and family don't read digitally). I'll see where plotting takes me in Book Three, assuming I am still on for it after the London book.