Police yourself

Books to avoid in the time of SARS.

"Blindness," by Jose Saramago.

"The Hot Zone," by Richard Preston.

"The Plague," by Albert Camus.

"The Stand," by Stephen King.

"The Coming Plague," by Laurie Garrett.

Ironically, they're all decent reads (well, maybe not King, but his stuff is ideal airplane literature).

Health update

I'm better. My stomach is playing nice with me. Wife worse. She's graduated to a sore throat.

Writing update

Came up with some new ideas for Patrick and Rayelle, the two main characters. Going back through the notes and found out I kept switching back between Rayelle and Raylene as the name.

SARS is giving me fuel for other ideas in the novel. On the surface, it feels very wrong to use a public health crisis as inspiration, but then I got dreadfully honest with myself. If it wasn't SARS, it'd be the 1918-19 pandemic, the Black Plague or some Ebola outbreak in the 1990s. With SARS, I can see the still-living in their cotton masks, roaming Asian streets and eyeing each other with paranoid suspicion. The panic is too palpable, too fresh, and moving on it for literary purposes seems opportunistic. Yet, I watch from my porthole, scanning Cursor and BBC News for updates or better links.

Every so often, I'm a vulture. It's an ugly condition that's part of writing with the whole process is a little more kinetic than watching TV. Doing what I do, I watch something and reflexively use the images and words doled out to me to imagine a next step, a character, a setting...and then I go write it up as ideas or plot points. Sometimes I feel like the cameraman who takes pictures of the starving African children for news magazines, but does nothing on the spot to feed them. Thanks for the inspiration, fellas, and hope you get better or something.

I also feel the same way about seeing homeless people begging on corners as I drive home to my nice, cozy condo. Deep down, I feel culpable for the situation, and if I don't have anything to do with it, like SARS, I get a guilty vibration in the percussion section of my soul when I see people in bio suits close off schools, movie theaters and other icons of socialization in Beijing. I know in me an idea is generating, and I'll get up to jot a few phrases that are burning in my head, right behind my optic nerves. Guilt comes after the sensation fades.

Good to see the tenacious vines of Catholicism still holding on tightly.

Incidentally, the novel is going to be called "Babylon by Twilight." It's going to be set in Seattle.