I have a fiction Patreon site where I post a story every month. My plan for 2020 was to post 12 monthly light-hearted detective stories, all about the same detective, which should stand-alone but had recurring characters and ongoing plotlines. This is how far I’d got at the start of March.

As you can see there’s 5 complete (4 drafts) stories, 1 in mid-completion and 3 first drafts, which will take me up until September. However I thought I might get a head start, clear all the first drafts out and write the last three; by getting to the end I can fix the earlier stories so they are consistent with where it ends up.

Unfortunately October/November are where the personal plotlines finish in the Hen Night/Honeymoon not-two-parter (the actual mysteries are unrelated). And when I sat down to write a hen night scene I just blanked.

Will there even be hen nights in October? What will people be doing? What sort of crimes can you do in a quarantine? Can you carry on as a private detective?

Someone more ambitious than me might have scrapped what I’d written going forward and come up with nine new Coronavirus mysteries. Someone better able to concentrate would simply reset the stories to 2019 (there are a couple of references to the election in December – remember that? – and someone claiming to be working abroad when a crime happened which has a brief Brexit discussion, but nothing that can’t be editted out). Me though, I was stuck.

(As an aside see this tweet and the thread by Alexandra Erin about the influence of this year on serial fiction)

Anyway I eventually found my way in to the hen night, by making it a very formal, structured exercise. Lacey, our detective hero, has three conversations, then there is a silly hen night game, then she has three more conversations, then she wraps up the case. For each conversation and the game she has one drink, each different, each sort-of-linked to the person or the conversation.

My usual method for these stories is to create a crime or a character or a place or an event or something that I want to write about and then just write around it (which is why the second and third drafts are important to  make any kind of sense). Without quite wanting to offer advice, if you’re having trouble writing, especially at this particular moment, have you considered doing it in a different way? Events have changed our circumstances, maybe you could write like someone else for a change?

I’m just reaching the halfway point in The Events Of The Low-Key Hen Night. It takes place in 2019. None of the characters know what’s coming for them next year. I don’t either; it seems that I can’t write that.