The photo looks like a writer happily on vacation, working on his book while sitting by the lake on a breezy summer afternoon. Actually what it shows is me out of bed for the first time in almost a week.
We went up to the family’s camp in Maine to try out a new sailboat (didn’t happen), do some badly needed maintenance (didn’t happen), and talk with contractors about some bigger maintenance jobs (which my wife did without me). What happened instead was from Thursday to Monday I slept for about 80 hours, getting up only to pee and to puke (and puke and puke and puke) and for one short visit to the ER for IV fluids.
I say I slept, but much of it was in a sort of half-conscious delirium, bathed in sweat and feeling as weak as if my muscles were made of wet toilet paper. Part of my subconscious went into overdrive. Like, I had really intense earworms, for one thing. Bach organ music thundered at full volume inside my head. Through much of those days of semiconsciousness, my current writing project (The Family Demon) unfolded in front of me. I lay there, watching and listening to the characters talk to each other, tweaking a scene and letting it replay with changes if something didn’t quite ring true, and making mental notes of things to write down when I was strong enough to sit up at a desk again. I drifted in and out. At one point I realized the character was actually a kid I taught in second grade twenty-five years ago and I was describing him while revising my résumé. That’s how delirious I was.
But along the way, I saw a way to really boost the tension in The Family Demon, making the protagonist a LOT more passionate about her goals. She’s the estranged daughter of a rich, abusive, billionaire corporate mogul. Instead of working in the costume department at a theater when she’s notified of his death, I saw her in the middle of getting arrested as part of a direct action protest at one of his factories. That gives her agency, lots of it, right from the get-go. We see her values and goals in action without waiting to have her explain them, and it sluices us right into the novel’s theme: trying to use the wealth and power she inherits to make the world better, and instead finding it (along with the demon) pushing back and controlling her in ways she never anticipated.
Boom! Suddenly the story is a lot juicier.
Not the kind of writer’s retreat I’d recommend, though.
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