The Outermost House
The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of editing, polishing and — most of all — cutting. I had about 20,000 words to humanely slaughter before my deadline, and this was after already cutting 60,000 before I started pitching.
The first 10,000 died quietly, without much of a fight. But the next 5,000 were tough, and the 5,000 after that were almost impossible. I was reduced to scouring through every chapter, searching for errant thats and its to execute on sight.
My little weekend trip to the Southern Highlands, then, came as a welcome break. I say ‘break,’ but it was really a working holiday. My goal was simple: to spend several days in uninterrupted, splendid isolation, embracing the ‘author aesthetic’ and working on my draft of Book 2.
Some would say this is putting the cart a little ahead of the horse, given the looming Book 1 deadline. But the truth is that even though Book 2 won’t be out for quite a while, I still feel its shadow creeping up on me like some fast-moving express train. With Book 1, although I did most of the good stuff in the last year or two, I still wrote it puttering along at my own pace, sometimes leaving it untouched for months at a time. This will be the first book I’ve ever written on a deadline. And of course, along with that come all the fears common to second-time authors — that I’m a big fraud, that the first time was a fluke, that I won’t be able to deliver, that I’m going to be uncovered as an imposter.
With these gloomy thoughts in mind, I booked myself a nice long weekend at a very remote fruit-picker’s hut. No distractions, no entertainment. Just me and My Craft.
It would be nice to turn this into a life-affirming story about how I spent the three days bored and lonely, and how it taught me the true value of companionship, and how I learned that the best work is produced in the comforting bosom of friends and family.
But to be honest, it was one of the best weekends ever. I loved being by myself. I loved having absolutely no sound but the tink of rain against the windows. I loved shuffling to the kitchen and making myself steaming bowls of pea soup. I loved sitting on the couch with the blanket pulled up and writing and then looking at the clock and realising three hours had passed.
There were some bad moments, of course. When I couldn’t open my jar of soup, and had to seriously contemplate the possibility that I might starve. When I almost slipped getting into the bathtub, and realised that I might very easily lie there dead for days before anyone knew. At night, I found myself keeping the TV on high volume, just to hear the sound of human voices. By the end of my stay, I found it oddly difficult to make eye contact, and if not for a visit from a local friend I might have lost my grip on reality.
But was it productive, you ask? It certainly was. I’d never actually tried to write all day before, and I wasn’t sure how much I could actually expect to do. 10,000 words a day, surely?
As it turned out, I was a good deal slower than that. 1,000 words per hour was about average, but it turned out I only had about 5 hours of writing in me before my brain turned to mush. Still, that added up to 15,000 words — a decent chunk out of my 105,000 word goal.
I’m already planning my next visit, hopefully during the winter when I can make use of the fireplace. And next time, I’ll bring something to help me with the jar lids.
I leave you with some photos from my home-away-from-home.
