The news was dire, yet this window on the world was rose-tinted. It seemed churlish to hit all caps and respond, YOU DO KNOW THIS IS HOW WRITER’S EXIST ALL THE TIME, RIGHT? Especially churlish when, for one beautiful moment, social media was a nice place to be. In those early lockdown days, my social media feed was, in the most part, a narration of other people’s strange new routines: working from home, staying in pajamas, eating leftovers for lunch, seeing no one.

The just-released books that you’re reading now were likely written during Covid lockdown, a period that was weird for authors-this author at least-in the sense that, it wasn’t that weird at all.