Control: Self-Isolation, Part 99

I, Dalton Lewis, have to self-isolate again. I am in a self-imposed house arrest— caused by a supervillain. Omicron is killing people — people who are vaccinated, people who are sloppy, who go out, who take their masks off, who interact with the outside world. The fools. There are hundreds of thousands of new cases, every one preventable, and deaths are going up too — slowly, but they are rising. 800,000 Americans have died because of the super psycho death virus. And now — now — it has mutated and turned into the super duper psycho death virus. Omicron is the new supervillain. Grim.

This supervillain rampages out of control in America. America seems completely helpless to stop him. What do I do during this time? In a story I would fight said supervillain somehow. In the real world I have no capacity to fight Covid-19 except to stay at home and not spread it. What should I do? Why, I write, of course. I write more books and read more books. I’ve written a number of books during the super psycho death virus — including the most recent one, The Philosopher’s Guild.

I threw an immense amount of effort into this novel. In it I took the greatest philosophers in history and turned them into teenagers in a fantasy city-state and watched their subsequent adventures. Gotey — aka the Buddha — quits fighting early on and dedicates himself to a monastic life of study and religion. Carly Marksian decides to try to take over for the common man. Socrates makes flowery speeches with brilliant questions and makes Plato do all the real work. Mina Beauvoir fights for women’s rights and leads the guild.

I did research for the first time in a long time, and that felt good. I enjoyed doing research on interesting subjects — namely philosophy. It made for amazing and varied characters who could have dramatic conflict between each other instead of just trying to stop the bad guy. And the bad guys — I tried to make each one of them complex and sympathetic. I didn’t want them to just be idiots trying to destroy reality by creating a giant laser shooting a beam into the sky. That wasn’t this story. I leave that to the experts at Marvel and DC.

I sat, at home, for a year and a half. I have to sit at home again. I don’t look forward to doing it. It feels like forever to go without human contact outside my parents.

I know — I’ll write about a mentally ill person sitting at home, having mental health issues, and breaking down more and more. That sounds like an interesting story. That sounds like it would work as a story. I know that I wrote The Philosopher’s Guild because those characters seemed so wonderful and amazing to me — they jumped from my mind onto the page so easily. They were so iconic in their personalities and character nuances. It’s fun when a character just starts to do interesting things in a story, and that happened again and again in this story. That helped it a lot.

I wrote The Philosopher’s Guild during the period of Covid-19 during which we went out a little bit and wore a mask everywhere that we went. I don’t think that I got Covid-19 during that era because I think that I would notice. I wouldn’t get a mild version of the illness because I am over forty and overweight. I work out regularly and have lost some weight but not enough. I still chug away on the exercise bike, every day that I can, doing more and more minutes of exercise, trying to get into shape. I still eat wheat grain bread instead of white bread, and I don’t eat very many sweets anymore.

I want to write art. I am sick of writing for fun. I know, I know — I should write fun. I should write action sequences, and for certain I still will write some of those. I just don’t see myself writing Mecha Kaiju Mars right now. It’s a novel that I wrote 120 pages of and stopped. I stopped because NaNoWriMo interrupted me, and I don’t know if I’m going to finish. It seems like a blast — mecha robots fighting giant monsters — but I just don’t see the intellectual point. I know, I know — it’s about conformity vs. rebellion, and it has characters who go through interesting arcs through the story. I just don’t see how the story is a work of literature. I have to redo the whole thing and make it into a work of art somehow. I just don’t know how to do that.

Reading The Fountainhead opened my eyes. I need to write with integrity. I need to write about interesting and powerful people — flawed but amazing individuals. I don’t need to just write about failures. That doesn’t work. I can only write so long about people who are marginal and pretty good and kind of nice. I need to create larger than life characters.

That starts with the new book: Oliver and Amanda. Amanda is whip-smart and a pretty girl and a geek with an attitude. She is a geek who is a cynic who writes exactly perfectly. She is ambitious and wants to be the most famous, successful writer in the world. She wants to be the toast of Hollywood. She wants to become a legend.

Oliver doesn’t care about any of that. He wants to write art and realism. He wants to write the truth, the real truth of the world around him. He doesn’t have many close friends or loves. He is a loner.

That’s my characters for my old story and my new story. Let’s hope they turn into something worth reading.

Thanks, and take care, friends.