Prescience, or perhaps just bad timing, by Neil McGowan
I’ve come to the conclusion I’m either prescient, or just suffer from incredibly bad timing. Or, perhaps, it’s neither, but a form of pareidolia. Back in early March 2020, I put the finishing touches to my first Young Adult novel. The plan was to work out a plan to do some pre-launch marketing, try and build up some pre-orders, basically all the usual stuff we do as writers when we have a new book coming out. (I use the term book loosely, to include chapbooks, poetry collections, short stories, and so on.) I’d sketched out a few drafts of what I thought would make a good cover, worked on the blurb, written a synopsis, and was all good to go. A week later, we went into lock-down as Covid cases began to skyrocket. Normally, this would be a gift to a writer – all that time at home to write. (You’d think, anyway, but that’s a post for another time.) My average commute was around an hour each way – I never considered it totally wasted as I often cycled and used the time to let my sub-cons
