HOW ARE CRIME AUTHORS GOING TO ADDRESS THE PANDEMIC IN THEIR NEW BOOKS?

[Mme. Defarge]

https://crimereads.com/how-are-crime-authors-going-to-address-the-pandemic-in-their-new-books/

Only when an entire decade had passed had I gained distance and perspective to revisit that idea. Nightwatcher (HarperCollins), about an unhinged killer preying on vulnerable New Yorkers in the days after the 9/11 attacks, was published eleven years after I’d conceived it, in September, 2012.

Flash forward to March, 2020. I was between books, having just finished revising my upcoming release The Butcher’s Daughter (William Morrow, September 2020) and about to begin writing a new one, when the world was again irrevocably altered. My husband returned to his midtown office after lunch to find the building cordoned off, surrounded by law enforcement, the press, and medical teams in hazmat suits. It turned out that the first confirmed local case of Covid-19—the New Rochelle man whose illness would result in a cluster and the nation’s first lockdown right here in Westchester—worked in the building.

In short order, things escalated—Governor Cuomo closed the universities, the NBA curtailed its season, and businesses skidded to a halt. No more commuting to Manhattan for my husband and our older son; no more college for our younger son, two months shy of graduation and plucked from his Ithaca apartment to be locked down with us in his childhood bedroom.

With four of us suddenly stuck under one roof 24/7, perpetually short on supplies, with illness and death surging all around us, I put my new proposal aside for a while. My time was encompassed with domestic tasks that had become pervasive and logistics-challenged. When I wasn’t scavenging local shelves for paper towels and yeast, I was hiking in the woods to preserve my sanity and some semblance of fitness, and chasing grim nightly news reports with lullaby-esque Friends reruns. Throughout, my Writer Brain was in overdrive and the What Ifs kept coming—several ideas for crime novels that would take place, could only take place, amid this grim new world of quarantining and social distancing. But once again, it was all too raw, too fresh, as yet unfolding.

[Blue_playwright]

1. I'm wondering how to...

... address it in my WIP plays. Three are historical but one is set in the present. I can’t decide whether to make one person a survivor and weave it in a bit.

[AmyStrange]

2. I'm planning on have my talking Cat advise the President, but...

-

like an idiot, he won't listen.

Right now, my new book takes place in 2015, and since she's part of a top-secret team working for the FBI finding missing persons (and since she's already met Obama), she has to meet Trump.

Even though it's a pandemic, people still go missing, but since some of the members of this team are scientist, they will follow the guidelines, including wearing a mask, even the Cat will have one.

I'm actually kind of excited about some of the ideas I'm coming up with, because they will meet people who think wearing a mask is blasphemous and things could get heated.

Anyway, thank you for starting this OP.
============

[Mme. Defarge]

3. Fun!

😻👍

[Trueblue Texan]

4. I'm working on a cozy mystery series with dancing as a theme...

I was going to set it in 2020, but then Covid happened. There has been no public dancing since March. So I have to back my timeline up at least a year or more. And now I wonder how far out in the future I'll have to make the series if I can't make the timeline work by backing it up enough. Lots of math involved, which I am procrastinating on!

[TeamPooka]

5. we've been talking about this in Hollywood for months too. Do you ignore the virus in your TV series

or not?
Does THIS IS US and other contemporary dramas deal with it in their story lines and what about sitcoms?
Will viewers want to forget it and how do you ignore a worldwide issue?