On the 11th, the WHO declared a pandemic, and two days later, the afternoon before its opening night, “Room” was cancelled. The one advantage to having your COVID-19 experience start with such a body blow is that the rest has felt much easier to cope with. So, my main lockdown task was to go through the copy editing process for “The Pull of the Stars” at top speed. !”My novels, whether contemporary or historical, are not usually full of echoes of the time I’m writing them; this was an eerie experience, living through two pandemics at once. When Trump babbled about disinfectant I thought of people in 1918 (far less riskily) wearing garlic and eating raw onions.

Source: thestar July 24, 2020 15:00 UTC