I’m starting to think about a holiday story for this season, and I keep waffling about one issue. Do I write about last Christmas, with the setting options familiar and untouched by the pandemic. Or do I try to extrapolate to this year? Can my guys go out to eat in a crowded restaurant, like in every book I’ve written, or do they need distancing and masks?
It feels easy and safe to drop back, and pretend in my story that nothing has changed. And perhaps that’s what readers want – escape that doesn’t rub in how things are (hopefully temporarily) altered in so many ways large and small. Warm and cozy is harder to achieve when the virus, and the politics, separate us.
But part of writing M/M is that we’re working to put real life into the stories. Amongst the fluff and the fantasy, we have books that tackle all kinds of human challenges and stresses head on, proving that love springs up through the rockiest soil. So should this year’s stories of holiday hope be set against pandemic reality? Or is too soon (and too uncertain) for that? 
I haven’t decided. Maybe I’ll wimp out completely and write something alternate-universe fantasy. What about you as readers? Are you ready for stories that tackle the world we’re dealing with this year? Or do you want the easy and familiar of football games and crowded stores and choirs and big family gatherings in books, even if they may not happen in real life this year?
I foresee a romantic dinner at home!
The nice thing there with that is that it’s not rooted in one specific year. So yeah, alone together works. 🙂
There’s also the issue from a marketing standpoint (bread and butter for some authors) and that is: is setting a story during Corona times evergreen enough? I suspect that we all hope things will return to normal in a year… And maybe we want our Christmas books to be able to be read and bought from year to year. So there is definitely a financial aspect to the decision too.
I waffle a bit on this, though, because you also bring up a good point about representing the real, current struggles of gay men falling in love and dating in this time.
It’s interesting.
For now I am pretending (in my books) that Corona doesn’t exist.
That’s true – holiday stories are ones we hope will have an ongoing life relevance… and of course, we can’t know yet what this Christmas will look like. So many variables hanging in the balance. Makes it hard to extrapolate. Nostalgia may be the ticket for this year…