Victor Echo: Blog

Sorry for the delay friends, but my day job has been getting in the way of my fantasy life. I have just posted Day Five of A Sheltered Life. There is one more chapter coming. It is out being edited, and then I will take a look at it when it comes back (which is where this chapter was bottlenecked - I had to focus on a Value Stream Mapping exercise - a perfect example of the Theory of Constraints).

Thanks for reading.

I had an idea for a story this morning. Feel free to pick up the treatment if you would like to play with it.

In the winter of 2019, a new variant of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), called SARS-CoV-2, swept out of central China like a wildfire burning through dry tinder. Known as COVID-19, it left broken bodies and lengthy quarantines in its wake. Despite its virulent nature, those afflicted with it, discounting any underlying medical issues, stood a better than average chance of recovering, and indeed, despite the high death toll, it passed through the planet without much of a backward glance.

The passage of COVID-2022 was not so unremarked. Unlike its predecessor, COVID-2022 was a death sentence. The job of a _first responder_ took on a new meaning. Houses, apartments, hospitals were burned to the ground to prevent the spread of the disease. Quarantines were enforced at the end of a gun barrel. In less than a year, the population of the planet was cut in half. Of the remaining half, more than a third of those died of starvation. Entire cities were reduced to rubble, and there were barely enough people to fill the island of Manhattan if there had been anywhere on the island to live. Small pockets of population, off the beaten track, were all that remained of the North American society.

But that was only the beginning. It became rapidly apparent that many of the technological wonders we relied on could not be supported with such a small population that was left. Worse, those wonders began to fail-first, the telecom networks, then the power grids. Whole swaths of knowledge, locked in silicone and metal, were lost. This lead to a rapid descent into a new Dark Age.

Day Three of A Sheltered Life is in the queue and could be posted by the time I finish writing this post. There are three more chapters to come.

Note: There seems to be a posting bug with SoL which leads to the first paragraph being posted twice. It does not happen all the time, but I have been bitten by it twice now. Thanks for all the nice notes pointing it out. I am sure it has to do with the volume of stories being posted.

Thanks for reading.

Back in 2007, when I posted Purple Silk as my first story, I never thought that I would still be writing stories a decade or more later. Even more, I never expected any of my stories to rocket up the list the way A Sheltered Life has. My stories have generally gone up the rank one or two stories at a time, measured over months or years. The rank stack of stories has not altered much in the last three odd years. Luci is still my most-read story, at a little over 28K downloads (small when you compare it with other authors, I know, but I am happy with it). Number two, until this week, has been Rainy Night in Paris at a little over 3K downloads. It is now number three as Sheltered Life has passed 5K downloads (and there are still five chapters to come). The knock-on effect is some shuffling in the other stories, but nothing measuring in the hundreds, much less the thousands.
Regardless, I will keep writing. Thanks for reading.

While sitting around, trying to pass the time during this period of social distancing, or personal ignoring, or whatever we are calling it, I began to think about my summers spent being consumed by mosquitos, chased by moose, and generally enjoying being alone in the woods. And thus, comes this little story about a young boy who has lead a sheltered life.

Due to the rules of SOL, I have tagged it as mt et al, despite all the players being seventeen years of age or older. The story itself covers a week in time and I will post it as time and edits permit. It is complete, as far as it goes, but that does not mean there might not be more. It will depend on how long we have to stay locked up in our own minds.