Writer's Wednesday: Elaina answers two questions!

Hi, everyone. Due to a request to delay the interview slotted for this week, and given that a writer friend asked how I would answer the two pandemic questions asked in my interviews, I thought I'd fill this Writer's Wednesday with my answers.

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A fun pic of me:

Without further ado:

Now that the world has changed due to a pandemic, how has my writing changed?

It hasn’t changed to the degree that I can say, oh, look, this is pre-pandemic and that is post-pandemic (please let there be a ‘post’ soon!), and yet something else has me in a tizz. Given all the social distancing and what-not, I find it difficult to write scenes where there are crowds – I want to put masks on them! I want to avoid crowd scenes completely! The gatherings and interactions we use in our fiction are no longer ‘real world’ and that is a conundrum for me.

Even watching movies and series where people carry on as was our normal until early 2020 makes me grimace. It’s not real now. Then again, I write fiction and describing events and people as was ‘normal’ before therefore fits in with the fiction aspect … I guess, when our immediate future takes on more certainty, 'real' will feel real again when I write.

Many writers in the present either write far more or find themselves unable to write. Have I experienced one or the other in this life-altering time we now live in?

When lockdown befell us at the end of March, my outlook was positive. Time to write, I thought, without the distractions of my part-time job. Suddenly the world fell into silence and birdsong assumed supremacy – inspiring, optimum conditions to write in. It didn’t work out quite as I envisioned. Simply put, writing became something extremely difficult to focus on, and I landed up in a quite a funk. Did everything else instead: gardening, fixing stuff around the house, threw junk out ... anything to not write.

I thought perhaps I could give attention to the marketing side of thing. Ha. No go.

In fact, it’s only when the severe restrictions were lifted that I again found my voice and my energy. How weird we are, right? Time and silence, far less distractions, and the fount of inspiration dries up! Perhaps I am one of those writers who needs a bit of chaos!!

And that's it :) If we find ourselves without an interview to post in the coming weeks, I'll tell you about my most embarrassing moment, and the most inspirational.