Hello from a very swift and sudden 4-day lockdown in Perth, following the discovery of a community-transmitted case of the COVID-19 delta variant in our city. Our State Gov doesn’t muck about. They picked up on the case, made the call, and let us all know via a press conference last night.

It’s been interesting observing the news and people’s reactions to things like this. There’s so much distrust and worry, not just around this situation, but built up from situations in the past, and compounded with fears around other things that are wrong—things that may continue to go wrong because it looks like no one’s doing anything about it. There’s a Here & Now side of me looking to find manageable, sustainable actions that I can contribute towards making a difference. There’s also a Helpless Observer side of me who deals with these things by taking notes and writing stories about situations turning out okay.

Stories are so important, I’m realising, and writing scifi and romance fiction at a time like this no longer feels like a frivolous pursuit—I mean, it could be, but it doesn’t have to be.

One thing that followed me home after visiting Boola Bardip was an idea of the important role stories play in capturing history on the ground. Facts and figures are useful, but they’re not infallible. They can be diluted, reinterpreted, misrepresented, and misapplied, particularly if they’re cold, hard and dry. They are not the immutable trustable truths we’d like to believe they are. Perhaps if we were machines, they might be. But we’re human. And we can’t help but wield cold data the way humans will—for our own purposes. In a way, facts are stories too, but of a different kind.

Stories, and the emotional messages they carry, help us relate to actual experiences of those facts. Writing fiction, therefore, seems like a radical act of preserving history, encoding elements of the zeitgeist between threads of fantasy and fancy in world-building, plot events, character development.

At least, that’s what I’m telling myself on Day 1 of this lockdown, as I pace between my study and fridge, shop for more flat-nose-friendly face masks, and procrastinating on my novel WIP.