The Writer in Quarantine — STEVEN HARDESTY

What is a writer to do in this dreary plague year when he’s infected with PIM (Pandemic-Induced Malaise) and feeling too sluggish to write a single word? Why, he digs through scraps of old, half-done manuscripts for inspiration, right? Or maybe he shouldn’t.

Few weeks back, I burrowed into my own scrapheap of yellowing pages from the days when I actually wrote pen-on-paper and, later, on a thing called a “typewriter” and discovered some weird fantasy short stories I’d written in high school to charm pretty girls into going out with me.

That plan really didn’t work out, to my teenage wonderment. But my buddies carried the stories up and down the state on their surfing expeditions - in a kind of samizdat edition - and showed them around and made the stories famous in a smallish underground sort of way.

Those were the days, you see, when poets hawked their home-made chapbooks on street corners and hippies blocked traffic to recite their novels. My stories slid into that milieu.

Now, looking over these old stories with my PIM-infected eyes, I see how high-school awful they were. No wonder they didn’t win me any dates. But the stories and characters have a brash energy about them, and that special what-me-worry? teenage attitude toward life that I, riddled with PIM, suddenly found infectious.

So I flipped open the laptop and began hammering the keys to try to recapture some of that old feeling of youth, energy and mindless adventuring. Yep, I took a story idea or two from those old yellowed pages (the brawling warfrogs, for instance) and reincarnated some characters. But the new story needed a fresh character for balance, say, a blue-fanged troll watching and worrying for the youngsters running wild but joining in their howling adventures.

That’s why my new novel-in-progress - The Prince of Cowards - features a troll named Troll who lives forever, as trolls do, and has a forever perspective on life as he/she/other sidekicks for a grand but thoughtless sword-and-sorcery hero merrily squeezing himself into every freakish fix he can find on a planet filled with too many sentient creatures with a gourmet taste for human flesh.

And that, dear reader, is how one writer manages to drive away his PIM.

I should have the novel ready for publication early in 2021. Meantime, here’s the cover - and a cheer for beyondbookcovers.com - to ease your frenzied wait.

Stay masked and safe!