An Inopportune Conk Out

or when your favorite tool takes a break, literally

Vacation. Relaxation. Sandy beach, pool, palm trees, colorful drinks in tall dewy glasses. The first thing that comes to mind is that golden opportunity to make a dent in the towering to-be-read pile. Have you noticed that people read a lot by the side of a pool in tropical climes? Suntan lotion and paperbacks are the perfect tie-in. When you’re a writer of stories, vacations replenish the idea crockpot: sights, smells, tastes, faces, mannerisms… observations that may come handy in the next book.

I planned to get new stuff going, maybe revisit a stalled work-in-progress.

Yeah. Right. My eight-year-old MacBook had other ideas. Vacay means log off, girl, or didn’t you get the memo? Terminal log off rather, DOA. Boom, broken, flatlined, no sign of life.

But, but… I moaned, I have that one-story-a-week thing I want to do, and the newsletter is due, and the acknowledgments to write for STREET SONG (looks like early April for the release)… please, don’t do that to me!

Too bad, sweetie, that’s a big NO.

Family and friends chorused: your machine’s dead, it’s a sign, it means you need to take a break, push that writing stuff aside for a while, it can’t always be work, work, work.

Two things, at least, are wrong with that advice.

First, even if I say “I’m going to work” when I sit at the keyboard, in my mind it isn’t Work, as in Labor, or Duty, or Chore. It better not be because it doesn’t pay the bills. If it was Drudgery, I would have retired already. It isn’t “a little hobby” either, a way to while away a few idle hours - a comment that brings to mind the condescending way their contemporaries viewed 19th century female novelists (an attitude that isn’t totally extinct yet, I’m sorry to say). No, telling stories is simply the job I choose to do because it makes me happy.

Then, there’s the fallacy that pausing is a good thing. And it is, if the break is voluntary, after a draft, after completing a manuscript, when you need to clear your head, or when you run out of fuel and have to recharge. This interruption wasn’t anything like that. I wanted to ask my friends if they would advise a runner prepping for a marathon to “take a couple of weeks off” because their favorite shoes fell apart. I refrained. It felt over-dramatic. Writers are only long-distance runners metaphorically. Except for a guy I know who both runs and writes… I admire that energy. Anyway, the training analogy has legs (ha!). Regular exercise builds confidence and flexibility. When you stop, you lose momentum, and getting back into it is hard. Anybody who’s tried to write with a modicum of stubbornness knows that.

So, I coped… Pen and paper are always an option, but I would have had to write in all caps, ransom-note style, because I’m illegible. So, I’m writing this post on my phone and it’s OK, kinda clunky. I wrote a short story on my husband’s iPad, accessing my Google Docs (talk about user unfriendly), and learned new workarounds. When there’s a will, there’s a digital way.

Maybe my old workhorse can be repaired (it would be the second time) but I doubt it. Some cash will change hands. It’ll be a new year, and a new shiny word chisel. We’ll see what it carves…

That picture is from when everything works as it should …

Short Stories

Roi Faineant published Key Ring, a tender story of teenage friendship and long-buried secrets. A reviewer said: “this piece drew me in on the first read.” Take a look (it’s free, folks).

What I’m reading

I’m deep into Wilkie Collins The Moonstone. Published in 1868 and worth revisiting. It established many of the tropes of the modern detective/mystery novel: a missing diamond, a country house, a professional investigator hired by the family, many possible suspects, red herrings. Add to it, three mysterious Indians trying to recover the stone (stolen from an Indian temple by a British officer) and the epistolary form of the novel. Wilkie Collins was a friend of Dickens but his writing style is radically different. It’s fun, ironic, “loose” (one character even exclaims “Cool!” at one point), and the social observations about servants and women are worked into the recollections of the various contributors to the narrative: the butler, the lawyer, the spinster cousin (she’s a hilarious religious fanatic dropping pamphlets all over the house), the doctor’s assistant. The book is free to download on the Project Guttenberg website (also available, for a little coin, from Amazon and others).

And to finish, something about Birds!

Fascinated by Frigatebirds these days. Watching them glide for hours and they never flap a wing. They pluck fish from the surface of the water without getting a drop on them. Because they can’t get wet, their feathers are not waterproof. If they dunk, they’re waterlogged and they drown. Some compare their wings to pterodactyls, I find them more like… you know, the bat signal in Christopher Nolan’s trilogy?