The Covid Family

The news correspondent had already moved on, but the amusing tidbit about someone named "Corona" and their unfortunate experiences during the virus stayed with us. We wanted to know more about the world behind the word, and so my brother and I decided to create one for ourselves. We binged Disney's animated shorts to gain a better understanding of concept and design, how to weave a story in a limited amount of time and space. We storyboarded on index cards, and the pencil marks scuffed and erased all over the paper proved them to be only legible to us. We started drafts and edited color schemes, fonts, angles, and point of view. Afterward, we tackled the writing, spending hours rhyming aloud to each other until it became automatic for us to assign rhyming schemes and syllable counts in conversations outside of the book. At last came the round of final drafts. Finishing a week early by no means meant we were done. We showed our book to family and friends before incorporating their final words of advice into the finished piece. In the end, I'd like to think the experience mirrored what our main character went through: although there were some arguments at first, with a little luck and determination, he found the sense of community and togetherness he'd always wanted.