As they say, hindsight is 20/20, a prophetic statement if ever there was one. Everything changed when the pandemic attacked. Unemployment skyrocketed. Everyone was afraid to go outside. The only thing you heard about on the news was the latest hospitalizations and death totals.

I consider myself one of the lucky ones. As a web developer, I was already working from home some of the time, so working from home full time wasn’t a huge stretch. A corner of my bedroom became my new office. Having my kids home all the time was a bit more disruptive, but we managed. The toilet paper shortage convinced us to try bidets, which was a positive change that I recommend. Other than that, day-to-day life didn’t change very much.

There were other sacrifices, of course. I’m an introvert by nature, so I’m better suited to the hermit life than most. As the pandemic stretched into its sixth month, though, even I was starved for contact outside of my immediate family. I hadn’t seen my brother or parents since Christmas 2019. I hadn’t met with my tabletop buddies in person since March. I hadn’t LARPed since the previous October. It was like someone had pushed a giant pause button on the world.

It was near the end of September 2019 that I started writing. I’m not entirely sure why it happened. My best guess is I was bored and needed a creative outlet. I was between anime seasons, wasn’t actively reading any books or playing any video games, and what little tabletop gaming I got to do online didn’t scratch the itch.

So I just went for it. I didn’t plan the story very much. In fact, when I started Original Enchantment, I wasn’t sure why Ike was in the game or if I’d even finish writing the story. It was just a flight of fancy, something to pass the time.

In retrospect, not taking it too seriously at first may have been the key. It gave me the freedom to have fun with it, to write for my own enjoyment rather than treating it like a project with a goal and a deadline. It flowed organically. It scratched the itch. I was giddy to wake up in the morning and read my wife what I’d written the night before.

For any aspiring litRPG writers who may be reading this, that’s the best advice I can offer: Just start writing. Write something you enjoy. Don’t worry about what comes after. Loving the process will make your writing that much better. If it turns into something worth publishing, you can worry about that later. If not, you got some practice and had fun doing it, so it was hardly a waste of time.

Make no mistake: I would wish away COVID-19 if I could. I would wave a magic wand and return all the lives and jobs it has taken away without a second thought. But I can’t deny that the pandemic changed my life in positive ways. I continue to work from home full time. Because of that, my family was able to move out of suburbia and into a nice, quiet home in the countryside.

And it gave me enough boredom and isolation to finally realize my dream of becoming an author. I’ll refrain from any trite lemon-based aphorisms and just say I’m grateful I was able to make the best of a difficult situation. 😉