It was hard to get back to the desk today. I spent the week of July 4th with Mallory and our girls at a family reunion on the Outer Banks, and I came home on Saturday evening happy but tired. We spent yesterday with my mom for her birthday.
This morning, I was up at 6:00 to eat breakfast and read a few pages of Gabrielle Zevin’s new novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow before my Pilates class started at 7:00. Yes, I do Pilates. My cholesterol was through the roof, so for the past six months I’ve changed my diet and worked out a lot, and it’s worked wonders for my health. After Pilates I had to go in for a physical at 8:30 am where my doctor was cautiously optimistic about my cholesterol labs, and I was sitting down at the desk in the office Mallory and I rent by 9:00 a.m., ready to work. Usually, before I work, I do a couple of breathing exercises I learned from James Nestor’s book Breath that supposedly stimulate relaxation and creativity. They seem to work, at least for me.
I forgot to mention that I use a computer app called Freedom that locks me out of the internet for however long I choose. No email, social media, news, etc. Today, I scheduled Freedom from 6:00-11:00 am. But I had a hard time getting back into the book I’m working on. (Is my editor going to read this? My agent? Are they members of This Is Working? No, so no sweat there!) I believe in this book and I think about it all the time, but it wasn’t happening easily today.
I spent about an hour forcing a few pages of new writing, but I decided to take a break and get down some new ideas for a new novel that came to me last week. I remembered some advice that my friend and fellow writer Jess Walter had given me years ago when I asked how he was able to write so many different types of things - novels, short stories, nonfiction, etc. Jess said he’s able to get a lot of work done because he’s always able to write something. So that’s what I did: the novel I’m supposed to be working on was on drip mode today, but I wrote something that I really found exciting when I took a break from it and turned toward something else.
I worked at my desk until 11:00 am, and then I went to the library and rewarded myself with two books I had on hold: The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning by Ben Raines and The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony by Andrew Lawlor. I read Lawlor’s book in hardcover when it came out and I gave it to a friend, but after spending the week in the Outer Banks I found myself wanting to read it again.
After the library I came home and took over the household duties so Mallory could squeeze in a couple of hours of work at the office. I made lunch for the girls and me, but mostly I sat on the porch and read The Last Slave Ship and then took the girls to piano practice, where I sat on the piano teacher’s porch and read. I’m already 100 pages into it and learning a lot about this heartbreaking story and the community the survivors created.
But here’s what I need to do and what I’ll probably do first thing in the morning when I sit down to work. I’m going to reread everything I’ve written for the novel-in-progress to find the thread that will get me back into it. Also, I think I might find myself handwriting again. Onward.