The Insecure Writer’s Support Group Blog Post for March 2022

Hard to believe we’re already into March. It seems as if the year just started, but I will be happy to see the end of winter this year. With COVID still on the rampage and other unsettling world and national events, it’s been hard to stay positive. I suppose like everyone else, this is the late winter slump, but it would be so nice to see normal again. Sadly, I’m not sure that will happen this year or even next.

This month’s IWSG blog question is – Have you ever been conflicted about writing a story or adding a scene to a story? How did you decide to write it or not?

With the onset of the pandemic, as a romance writer, I struggled with this because as a writer of contermporary fiction, the word contemporary to me means now. With lockdowns, masking, social distancing rules in place, I wondered how people met other people. For a long time bars, gyms, even cgurches were closed. The first pandemic book I wrote, I set the story fifteen years ago. That was fine, but it just couldn’t work all the time.

How did I deal with it? Well, I added the pandemic and all of its protocols to my books. Once we were allowed to go out again, we did so with rules–vaccines, masks,unless we were eating or drinking, social distancing, hand washing–you know the drill. It’s become part of my lifestyle, so much so that there’s an automatic quality to it. I get in the car, and put on my seatbelt. Now, when I get out of the car to go inside a store or a restaurant, I put on my mask. I step inside, I sanitize my hands. I decided if this was my real world, then it should be fictitious one, too. Not all of my author friends agree, and that’s okay. We are allowed to disagree. How boring the world would be if we all thought and did the same thing.

So, that’s my answer to this months question. My choice was to write books incorporating the pandemic. When and if things get back to normal in real life, I’ll do the same in my fictitious one.

You can read other answers here, or sign up and join the blog hop yourself! https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html