During the lockdown, I sometimes thought about my characters -- where they'd be, what they talked about, how they organized their lives during that time. It was a gentle distraction. Sometimes it helped me sort out their story trajectories.
Does it make sense to post installments that jump ten years into the future from my most recent chapter? Is it a productive use of my writing energy, when I could be pushing the story toward the finish line instead? Who knows. Probably not! But I'm not beholden to a publisher, editor, agent, or schedule, and my only remuneration is e-mails and comments.
I don't think of my story as capable of having spoilers in the traditional sense. If you want to be surprised in real time by how it unfolds, you can wait and read this later, in the normal order. At most, you could infer my general intentions of who will be in the picture and what they'll be up to later in the story. I'm not filling in background or providing exposition, beyond what people experience this spring.
I'll keep adding to this post. My thinking is that this section will run from New York's shutdown order of March 20 through the end of the curfew imposed on the City's protestors a few weeks ago. I'd like to claim that I'm writing this solely for myself, as a way of making sense of what just happened, through the idealized and somewhat more comfortable world I've created for the characters. Writing it feels cathartic. But if I were doing it solely for my mental health, I wouldn't feel compelled to share it as a work in progress.
Second installment; June 30, 2020
Third installment: July 13, 2020
