The Work in Progress

Cranked out 1,500 words.

And the words came easily.

They were all about the early days of the COVID pandemic. Patient Zero lurches into the tiny community ER & Grazia (who does not keep up with the news) immediately realizes she is out of her depth. Still. The mysterious respiratory ailment doesn't even have a name yet, let alone a diagnostic test. And the world outside the medical community seems to be plugging obliviously along.

I hadn't planned to devote today to writing, but I think I may anyway because the end of the next scene will be a natural chapter break. This means one additional chapter in Part 1, but that is not necessarily a bad thing: My original outline would only have amounted to 60,000 words, and 60,000 words is short for a novel.

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So! This scene is the Day Before the World Shuts Down. March 16, 2020.

Grazia and Neal meet up to march around bits of "what is left" in Kingston. They banter amusingly. They have lunch in a hole-in-the-wall Jamaican restaurant. Grazia sees her first civilian in a surgical mask. What other status details can I use for foreshadowing? Last sentence in this chapter will be something like, "When I woke up the next morning, the world had shut down."

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In Chapter 4, Grazia will have a psychological breakdown related to being floated to the wards & forced to care for patients who are actively dying, whose bodies are stacked on guerneys in the hall because there's no place to put them. Heretofore, she's avoided developing any kind of personal relationship with the patients she treats. But now she can't any longer.

Maybe she stops eating & sleeping for a couple of days? It's gotta be a psychosis, but it has to be clear it's a temporary psychosis and one that does not subtract from her integrity as a character.

At the height of her psychosis, she has some sort of spiritual vision, some intimation of an indifferent universe but essential oneness. Neal will rescue her, nurture her back to mental health. But the residue of the experience will be that henceforth Grazia has faith in an indifferent God.

Status details to include:

• Public Policy Eleanor's anecdote about scoring N95 masks from a drug dealer at 4 in the morning
• Those weird corpse guerneys

The end of the chapter (and the end of Part 1) has to segue somehow back to the scene of the four women on Neal's porch at the beginning of Part 1.

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Looking for something as good as Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, I started trying to read The Starless Sea. At page 50, I gave up. Not my kind of book.

But...

Its style—relatively short declarative sentences, externalized metaphors—is perfect for Daria's voice. Even more perfect if Daria is all in the present tense! Daria is a character who thinks in three languages simultaneously. This is difficult to convey when the author only knows English! 😀

That is the great challenge in writing this book. I want the three POV charaters to have very distinct & different voices.