Writing In The Plague Years

We are prepared

Writers have been preparing for this plague our whole lives. We sit alone in our rooms and write. I’ve been doing it for fifty years. At first I didn’t know what I was writing. I just wrote. And lo, it was crap. I thought I’d bang out a paperback novel and make some quick money. It took me thirty years to learn how to write novels because I’m a slow learner. But when I get it, I get it. I used to use drugs. I’d snort a line of cocaine and that was good for about ten pages. When I began writing comics, I drew each comic out by hand. My art was good enough so that the artists and editors could see at a glance what was happening. They loved it. I no longer do that, I write full script. Which is not to say the scripts are verbose. Quite the opposite. I’ll sketch if I must, but my scripts contain vivid and easily understood descriptions.

I haven’t touched hard drugs in decades. The older I get, the easier it is to write. I have written whole novels with no greater stimulus than coffee! Coffee is the drug of choice. It seems all I do is sit around with my thumb up my ass, yet somehow, these books and comics get written. I didn’t write for a decade when I was trying to take care of my ailing wife. She said we had to move out of Wisconsin or she would die. So we moved to Colorado and she died anyway. She overdosed on oxycontin and vodka.

Some months later, I tackled a big subject. A satanic rock band that comes back from the dead. I was about a third of the way through it when I thought, holy shit! I’ve got it! I understand story! What constitutes story? I could write a book, but I won’t because there are already a thousand books on writing that explain it better than I. That novel was Banshees. Since then I’ve written two more horror novels. I have always loved horror, but I find myself all over the place. Every time I went online there was another Florida Man story. Florida Man claims syringe found in rectum is not his. Florida Man leads police on three hour chase through Walmart attic. So I wrote that book. And now I’m making notes for the fourth Florida Man novel.

The pandemic didn’t affect me that much. I still sit alone in my room and write. Kevin J. Anderson, the best-selling author of the Dune novels as well as Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I., writes while hiking through the mountains. He dictates each novel into a recorder and has it transcribed. I couldn’t do that. I have to see the words as I create them. Every writer has a different method. There are writers today who pound their work out on a manual and then scan it into a computer. That appeals to me, although I’ve brown used to the convenience of the computer, and the internet is the greatest gift to writers since the printing press. How big is the world’s biggest anaconda? Where is Constitution Grove located, and what is its purpose? Metric/English conversions. Google Earth, which can zoom in on any location. But it still comes down to a writer alone in his room.