Today, I justify my writing.

Yesterday on Twitter someone asked for the last sentence written in a WIP. Mine: “When I was a boy, I saw a woman die of tetanus after having a tooth filled.”

Strange how encouraging it is for me to read that line in the twitter thread. Why does it make me happy?

As a writer, the discouraging voices in my head start in the late afternoon, when I go into the kitchen and decide what past-the-best-by-date can I’m going to open for dinner tonight. “Who’s going to read your crap?” I hear, as I chop an onion or smash a clove of garlic.

“You are old. The world is ending. Why are you wasting your time?”

“Shut up,” I think.

My novel is fantasy, but there are no dragons, no sexy vampires, no massed armored cohorts gathering for battle. That rules out, not only readers who dislike fantasy, but an entire subset of fantasy readers.

It is set in the past, and my characters operate within the means, beliefs and assumptions of their eras. Even those characters who question the prejudices of their time do so, not as 21st century liberals or radicals, but as the liberals or radicals of the 1890s, the 1920s, the 1950s… Scratch off another swath of readers, who would not just put the book down, but throw it across the room, possibly even post an angry tweet about it.

There are fight scenes, but not many. Bye-bye another chunk of readers, who will get bored.

I write about magic, but as my story unfolds, I realize much of what fascinates me is how alienating magic would be, how terrifying even to those who think they believe in it.

A man makes a wish. It is granted. Magic is at last proven before his eyes, and he falls to his knees in horror. It’s not that a dirty trick has been played on him in the usual manner of three-wishes stories. The granted wish will, indeed, avert a tragedy, and save lives. What bad may come of it he already knows and accepts.

He is weak with fear because, from now on, the very ground he walks on will be questionable.

And what is magic to the magic-makers? What would make them fall to their knees? What tales would they tell for their children to grow out of, to say to themselves as they gain an adult’s understanding of the world, “Of course, that could never happen”? What power would they fear and barely understand?

Time. Nothing is more relentless. And time is what I write about even as I fight it.

I am not young. What will happen if I die without finishing the story I want to tell? The odds increase as I age. CV-19, or the heart problems that plague my family, or cancer, or accident, or worst of all, dementia. “Poor Jinx,” (heads shake). “She wasted her life writing stuff nobody will read.”

But I wrote. I write. I will keep writing. And I have the diamond-hard ego that keeps a writer writing. When I was nearing forty, I made the decision to tell the stories I wanted to tell, because I imagined myself at the age I am now, looking back on what I’d written, leafing through mounds of advertising copy, technical documentation, feature articles on boutique olive oils and finding barely a paragraph I enjoyed reading. I’d have to comfort myself with the depressingly small amounts on the checks I got for them.

I’d get more satisfaction from an opinion piece posted on the public forum that gets me not one penny — only a suspension and a warning note from a moderator.

Maybe I will never finish my novel. Maybe nobody will ever read it. Maybe it will just be one more chunk of debris for my husband, my siblings, my nieces to clean up after I die.

But it will still be mine. And when my body is gone, I will be what I was proud to have written, the story I would have wanted to read, the things I wanted to say, as well as I could.

Chilly night, sunny morning. As I expected yesterday, the fog was gone by the afternoon, burned off by the sun, blown off by the strong wind. By late afternoon when I went up to the roof, the sky was still clear but gusts were bending branches and turning leaves over and and roaring over the rooftops. The wind carried the scent of barbecue sauce, and I looked over the parapet to see a couple bent over a grill on the backyard deck of a nearby house.

It might have been in defiance of recent news about a possible shortage of meat. Tysons is closing meat processing centers. “The food supply chain is in danger” they warn. There are concerns about meat and other products going to waste even as hunger grows. How far will the Trump administration carry their “Die for Capitalism” agenda? Governor Newsome, at least, doesn’t seem to be on board. He has announced a program in which the state will pay restaurants to deliver free meals to “at risk” seniors.

Pandemics can change economies. The plague destroyed the feudal system by killing off so much of the population that labor became scarce. Perhaps the Coronavirus here will wake the United States up enough that we join the rest of the civilized world when it comes to health care and other necessities.

Or perhaps, it will solidify the social darwinism already driving American right wing policy. Shrugging off deaths can become normal if you see those who die as lesser beings, and despising the poor is a venerable American tradition.

In four days, as of Friday, I will have health insurance coverage again. I will be busy that day getting ready for our first cinema discussion on Zoom, but on Saturday I intend to take a walk. We’ll switch to me being the one who goes out, since Michael is older than I am and therefore (it’s presumed) more at risk. I’m a bit curious and anxious about what I will see.

We are socked in this morning. The fog has crept inland to where I can see no further than the Dashiell Hammett building a block away (Dashiell Hammett buildings are scattered all over the city. He moved around a lot, and almost every neighborhood has an apartment house pointed out by the locals as the very place where he wrote The Maltese Falcon.)

The rest is pale grayness and the distant, intermittent mooing of the fog horn. Quite a contrast to yesterday. which was bright and warm. This may burn off into a clear day by noon. It can take a lot of heat to kick up this much fog.

Our door buzzer rang yesterday, making us both jump. The cat growled and ran under the table. I started downstairs to see who it was and on the stairway I was overtaken by one of the bros coming out of their apartment. Handsome, bearded, slender and olive–skinned, like his two room-mates. “It’s all right,” he told me, smiling, “It’s just my dad. I think he locked himself out.”

Through the open door behind him I could see their empty place. “You guys moved already?” I asked.

“Yeah, Dad came by to help me get a few last things.”

“Well, so long and you stay healthy.”

“You too, Ma’am,” he said, as he hurried down. I’d glimpsed his family last summer when they were helping him to move in — a couple of curious younger siblings, Mom in a lavender sari, a large friendly family dog who’d come along for the visit and let me rub his cheeks in the lobby… The bros were considered too young and loud for the building, but I was still a little melancholy to see them go.

“Is this ever going to end?” I asked Michael last night. We were talking about the latest news. The first recorded death in the US from CV-19 was in early February here in the Bay Area, a fit, 57-year-old woman who thought she was recovering from the flu. Her daughter found her dead when she went by her apartment to check on her. An autopsy revealed she had CV-19, but had died from a heart attack, not respiratory distress. The poor woman’s heart had literally burst. Apparently blood clots and heart attacks can come with the sickness.

The World Health Organization has announced that there is no evidence that recovering from CV-19 makes you immune.

“It will end,” Michael said gently.

And it will. I have read enough about epidemics to know there have been many that were worse. AIDS, which in the ’80s was a long, agonizing death sentence. The Plague, of course, and the mysterious Sweat from the Tudor era, which made those who’d had it more vulnerable to reinfection, not less. Yellow Fever, like CV-19, would sometimes recede slightly, offering patients brief, mocking respites before moving in for the kill. Smallpox, Typhus, Cholera, all of those were deadlier. It’s just that this “now” sometimes seems like an eternity.

I find it helps to think about the bro I met on the stairway yesterday, and remind myself that for him, this place will likely just be nothing more than a slight tug on his memory. Decades from now, when he is my age, he may pass this building if it still stands and comment to someone “I think that’s the place I lived for a little while when I was young. Had to move out because of the epidemic in ’20. We threw some good parties up on the roof.”