Why nothing bad can happen to a writer...

Blazing Reader,

My hand had swollen to twice its size. It itched, burned and throbbed.

As I stared at it, I remember thinking, This day's just getting worse and worse.

The summer before last, one day each week, my son and I would bike 12 km (7 miles) to an organic farm and volunteered for six hours of "hard, back-breaking labour." Actually, my back didn't find it that rough at all. In fact, I loved being outside weeding cornfields, digging up garlic, climbing apple trees and picking peas.

Jonah and I were learning so much, we felt we should have been paying them to let us help out. (You never know when growing food may be a life-saving skill.)

Then, one week, I was asked if I wanted to help with "canning." Without much thought, I said yes. Boy, was that a mistake. We ended up stuck in the kitchen (on a beautiful summer day) coring apples and blanching peas. After lunch, I couldn't take it anymore. I escaped to the strawberry fields and found some weeds to pull.

And that's when my hand was stung by a wasp.

At that point I called it quits, hopped on the bike and pedalled back to the city with my enlarged left hand.

Fast forward about 15 months: I'm working on my upcoming novella, All the Humans are Sleeping, and I suddenly found a use for that dull morning in a farm's kitchen.

In Chapter 6.05, a robot named Domestico has been running a large greenhouse in Northern Norway for three years, while the rest of humanity is "sleeping" in the metaverse. The chapter opens with...

Domestico scooped another kilo of shelled peas from the bucket on the floor into the large iron pot of boiling water. Beside the stove top, lining the counter, were forty plastic bagfuls of blanched peas.

From behind him, Domestico heard a series of beeps. He turned and looked down on the floor. Forty crabbots were scurrying into the kitchen. Half of them were pulling and half were pushing a cart. He nodded at them as they stopped at his feet.

After rapidly filling the cart with the bags of blanched peas, he told them, “That’s it.”

He didn’t have to speak. Certainly not in English. But he did so anyway.

The crabbots beeped back, and began pushing and pulling the cart of peas out the door, heading for the walk-in freezer.

The chapter quickly moves into a confrontation scene with the Secretary-General for the United Nations, all while the purple robot, wearing an apron and chef's hat, continues to (accurately) follow all the steps to blanching peas.

I feel it added a little amusement to an otherwise harsh scene. The steaming pot even allows Domestico to shed "tears" in the last line of the chapter, after receiving genocidal orders from the UN:

Steam condensed around the robot’s yellow eyes, and trickled down its silicone face.

I'm thrilled with how it reads. It was worth being stuck in a kitchen on a summer morning.

As American novelist Philip Roth once stated, "Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material."

Now I just need to find a use for the wasp sting.

—John C. A. Manley

PS My time on the farm also served as research for the sequel to Much Ado About Corona — in which  the unvaxxed are confined to quarantine camps where they need to grow much of their own food. Book two (Brave New Normal) should be out sometime next year. So if you haven't read book one yet, you'd better get your hands on a copy (or else I know a wasp I'll be sending your way).

---

---

---