I read Everybody started a diary during Covid.
And Everybody thought they were very original, and that it was so unoriginal that in fact you were more original when you did not have a blog or a journal or a book documenting your life during the pandemic.

So suffice to say that I’m aware that I have to win you over on this one, and why mine is worth reading.

Firstly, and I m writing this July 22 2021; my Covid Diaries are a bona fide mess.
Just like the way the pandemic has been managed in many countries and in the Netherlands for sure, the pandemic on this blog has been managed without a clear ending point in mind.
Without a clear vision of where it is, that I am heading.

But, unlike the pandemic, it is a rounded story. It’s done.
Just that I have to dive into this blog and collect the stories that were written, and line them up for you.
I will blog/ post new additions, and ultimately everything can be found on the project page, in their neat and chronological order.

However, the most unique selling point I have to offer you is not the flying by the seat of my pants like fashion in which these diaries have come into being the past 16 months, but the unique perspective they’re written from.

Because I would know few, if any, diary writers, who would have the let’s call it the “horrific” baggage as I do, to watch the pandemic through a lens that may have been a tragedy on a personal level,
but that is of course artistic gold.

I started this alterego LS Harteveld in 2006, and wrote many erotic stories, which brought me inside the community of people who wrote them.
What struck me was that although many could have blamed me for being archaic in my writing and my stories of lacking contemporary value because they were leaning on the style of Anais Nin’s early 20th century erotica;
I liked them that way.

If I read erotic stories that are set in this time, I pretty much choke immediately, and not in a good way, on words like texting, dating sites, Tinder if I d read stories the past few years which I haven’t.
And I m also thoroughly unhappy with contemporary writing styles.
Giving.
Me.
Pleasure.

*exclamation mark*

I ADORE (those capitals were intentionally) contemporary writing styles and my work exists predominantly on and through social media, but for erotica?
Mother of God, can we please keep it civil?
Leave the cell phones out?
Not mention leather or latex, but dress in white linen shirts that gently caress our skin? 

I thought modern day erotica was a far cry from Anais Nin’s work, and that the craft had actually deteriorated.
If you’re Dutch you can buy my Dutch erotica book here, and see for yourself.
Or browse the bookshop incl English books

And that comparison between my erotica and what I found was mainstream erotica, is about the same expectations I have for the ample Covid Diaries not written by me.

They will all be very relatable, and about face masks, hospital tragedies, the consequences for families and individuals.
They will be about the struggles between groups who are pro and those who are against vaccination, the Covid measures, and there will be analysis of Covid from economic, sociological, psychological and political perspective.

But will there be anyone who writes about the Steven King worthy Evil?
A force like the entity from It, whose physical form was a simple clown, but who drew out the most malignant side of every adult living in Derry, Main.

Will Everybody’s Covid diary acknowledge that just like in the town of Derry, Main, the missing children were  just a sign of a deeply festered evil?
That Covid has shown us the It of our times?
Because it has.

Covid has tapped straight into the previous pandemic of aids in the 80s, which was the era of the novel It, released in 1986.
A raging, distorted fear of aids, raising a generation of coming-of-age gay boys but also heterosexual teens, to whom sex would always be tied to sickness, death, and social exclusion.

The book It (1986) as well as the movie It (2017), both use this paralyzing and toxic fear of aids.

“It’s” (the movie, LH) open-faced engagement with adolescent fear
provides a perfect setting for reminding audiences
of the lived experiences of those coming of age during an epidemic.

AIDS, It, and the Horror of the 1980s by Aaron Lecklider 

The consequences for “Those coming of age during an epidemic”
were indeed dramatic.
As they will be for the ones growing up now.

So if you want to know how the Covid pandemic looked for someone who has lived through that experience of coming to age in the Derry, Main era of the 80s?

Where adults and government organisations were poisoned by something, that only appeared on the surface to be a deadly disease, only appeared to be a clown who abducted kids.
But that in fact was Evil itself.

If you want to know how the Covid pandemic has been for us?
Those children of the 80s who see it happening all over again?
Then this is my story.
.

 ~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

It’s Chapter 2
is the introduction of The Covid Diaries