When I started this story, all was right with my world. Then in early January, something called COVID-19 came to become a bane to humankind. While I wrote each word, the cloud of COVID was all around. Residents in the retirement village were dying at a rapid pace. My wife and I were quarantined for most of 2020, eating meals in our small apartment with little or no contact with humanity.

I continued writing, and it became a way to escape the madness. Then when I would listen to the news on the TV, they would up the numbers of the persons who had died from the disease I had to go back into my story to update the number of dead I had reported in an early chapter. I started writing when the death toll was under fifty thousand, and when I completed the story, I had to change the number to exceed five hundred thousand souls.

As I wrote each day, I was acutely aware of how lucky my wife and I were being in a secure location, not directly affected every waking moment as many people were. I quietly said a prayer each time I finished writing each day. My thoughts always went out to the families who dealt with such sorrow.