Beneath the Synthetic Skies of Creation
Back under the forever dusk, finding creative energies, finally writing the ending
Writing Renewed
I’m writing this from the crawlspace, or the “loft area” as we retitled it during the Covid years. There is a significant nostalgia sitting at this desk, where a significant portion of my first novel, The Sequence, was written, along with many of the short stories I’ve submitted to NYC Midnight over the years.
It’s a different environment than the years when we lived here, cleaner without question. There are no to-do lists, no monitors filled with unread emails, no piles of unread letters (let’s be honest, those unopened envelopes are all bills).
Today was a test run. I have written before about couch-writing, and how it had become my most productive workspace. Today, alone in my Whistler home, I tried it out again. I laid on the couch, a can of Coke Zero, four different reference books, my kindle and the laptop. I wrote, admittedly just a few sentences, then I read the ending of Tom Clancy’s Games of State for some reference material after which I promptly fell asleep. For an hour. After a quick trip to Portobello for lunch I decided to try my old writing space. Make no mistake it’s low back here. Four foot ten inches. There is also plush carpet, a thick underlay and the Ikea desk which I put together back here and is never, ever leaving. So it is not entirely a cave as some would suggest. But what I have found is that there is something creative about writing in a confined space like this, like it has a dulling effect on the outside world, like the buzz of humanity is kept out so that what I can hear are the stories roaming around in my brain, begging to be let out. A thousand words today. An ending that makes logical sense, is exciting to read, and not too tropey. I mean, it’s a little tropey but then that’s why you read thrillers isn’t it? To escape to a world that doesn’t exist? Yet. #wink. The world keeps catching up to my ideas and I need to finish this book before I’m writing a history lesson vs. vaguely prescient ideas. So back to it. The keyboard in the loft-area beckons.
“…who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly…” – Theodore Roosevelt
Ciao for now.
