I gave a lot of thought to this chapter. I started writing this story over the winter, with some parts going back to 2019. I wrote the section where the spring of 2020 occurred before anybody knew about coronavirus. At that point I went back and added a quickie paragraph, and that was what ended up being published. It wasn't long after that before it became obvious this was something truly disastrous. I seriously considered taking a break for a month before publishing this chapter in order to see what was happening with this mess. Instead, I compromised. I added quite a bit more but left some of the details vague. For all the readers who purchased a copy, first, thank you, and second, when the story is finished you'll be able to download the entire story with all the final edits and fixes.
One thing that has struck me about the current crisis is the plethora of heartwarming ads from various companies telling us all to stay apart so we can all be together later. It reminds me of a section in A Fresh Start during Hurricane Katrina, where Carl Buckman was talking to the head of ExxonMobile about freeing up some helicopter capacity. "I knew that three things were going to happen. After the storm, some of their helicopter capacity would be offered to the government, that some wonderfully heartwarming commercials would be generated about how they were helping, and that before I was out of office Lee Raymond would be knocking on my door for something worth billions of dollars and I would give in." Art imitating life, or life imitating art? Or maybe I'm just a cynic?
Another instance of life imitating art occurred just a few weeks ago, while watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with one very eerie scene. "Bring out yer dead." "I'm not dead." "Well, he will be soon, he's very ill." That was a very weird experience and nowhere near as funny as it once was.
For those curious, I took the details on the UGA history doctoral program from the Guide to the Graduate Program in History at the University of Georgia. It took a while to work through the UGA website to find it, but it gave me a lot of information on what Grim would need to do to get his doctorate. It's nineteen pages long; six pages are for the master's program and thirteen pages are for the doctoral program.
Minor issue at the end of Chapter 11, in that a reader pointed out that Oprah is now living in California. I simply added a line stating she had to be in Chicago for some reason and that was where they met. Hey, it's fiction.