My wife and I sneaked away to Ardmore for the weekend. I don’t usually take off a week at a time for work holiday. I prefer taking an occasional Monday or Friday off, adding it to the weekend, and getting away. We usually do this every couple of months. I’ve found that week-long vacations don’t really last a week, and you’re right back to work. And you only get a couple of those a year. I’m doing this six to eight times a year. Zing!
Anyway, the theme of this weekend’s trip, besides relaxing and celebrating her summer break from teaching sixth-graders, was for me to spend some real time working on my sixth novel. Having finished Red Bell earlier this month, I went back to working on Starstruck, which is a working title. I haven’t yet decided on the actual name.
So I set up a little workspace in the corner of the pool house we’re staying in. I brought a TV tray, my laptop, an extra monitor and stand and a lap desk and set up a nice little writing area.
It’s so crazy to me how this one came together. I planted plot devices all throughout the book, just thinking I was writing. Just having fun, telling a story, getting to know him or her here and there. I had no idea these little plot devices would so strongly tie into the end of the book.
Now there’s your chicken/egg argument: did the end rely on those plot devices because I had put them in already? Was I subconsciously moved toward using them that way? Or did I really, actually write these things that ended up being divinely utilitarian? I think it was the latter. I don’t understand a lot of how I write. Or rather, why it works. I just know it does. I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth though. What I will do, is have my traditional cigar and whiskey in celebration of finishing another novel. Because, yes, our little weekend getaway to Ardmore gave me plenty of writing time. And I wrote around twenty thousand words over the last two days, finishing the book.
I’m excited about this one because it’s a different kind of story than I’ve done before. I call it the anti-romance, but that won’t feel true as you’re reading it. There’s a lot of romance in it. Dancing in parking lots between two vehicles, car stereos blasting into the night, while snow falls in their hair? That kind of romance. I think you’ll enjoy it.
Then it’s on to my next project, which I hope to start and finish all within the same year! Imagine that.