This year of 2020 held such great promise for me, as it did for so many others, when BOOM—what happened?

Life, with all its uncertainties, challenges and unexpected surprises, threw us a new curve ball. The novel coronavirus pandemic, commonly known as COVID-19, happened and upended all of our lives, some to a greater or lesser extent than others.

For some, the virus was a death sentence. For others, their lives will be forever changed in other ways, and their futures are being rewritten one day at a time—one struggle at a time.

Although I’ve written about super bugs and the potential for pandemics in past blogs, I’m no expert on the issue. Although I remain isolated and in good health, many do not have that option to watch from the sidelines.

Those many challenges are highlighted on a daily basis on a multitude of news outlets. The histories and ongoing memoirs of those affected by this disease are chronicled daily in multiple news features.

As of late, with the current protests and ongoing struggles for racial equality, there are people collecting bits and pieces of that evolving history for future preservation in museums or for the written word.

This blog is not about addressing either the pandemic or racial equality struggles. The point I make is that we should all take a moment to reflect on the fact that we are witnessing history in the making—history that our future generations will read about in yet unwritten books.

In the years to come, many books (both fiction and non-fiction) will be written about the COVID-19 pandemic and how it changed life for so many, and many more books (again both fiction and non-fiction) will be written about the current social unrest and the societal changes that will result. Nations across the globe will be included in that change.

How many books will be written about the year 2020? How many of us, as authors, will tackle aspects of the events of this year and turn those happenings into linguistic works of art?

We are all living our personal novels right now and we are choosing the subject matter for each unwritten paragraph and chapter of our novels as we begin each new day.

I wonder how many books are evolving in people’s minds that will become literary reality in the years to come—whether that future author knows it or not as yet.

In my time of isolation and the disruptions to my normal existence, I have been fortunate to have had the time to complete a thriller novel that I’ve been working on for more than a year. It is in the editing stage at present with cover artwork to be completed soon. It is scheduled to be published in August. Links to the pre-sale will be available in less than a month.

That fact is the good that’s come out of this health tragedy for me personally. One personal casualty of this pandemic is that my next planned novel (book three in my Jon Masters series) was going to involve Jon facing the challenge of preventing a world pandemic from the release of a deadly pathogen with no known cure.

At this point, I don’t have the appetite to further that plot, and I’m sure there would be little reader appetite for such a novel. After all, how could I create more drama than we are all presently living? I’ll start that next novel, but the plot will definitely be much different than originally imagined.

Thoughts? Comments? I’d love to hear them!