Writing Retreat 2022: Tuesday

Read­ing in bed, in the morn­ing, I noticed the mir­ror on the wall had a neat sym­me­try, reflect­ed the boards of the ceil­ing, so I snapped a photo.

After break­fast I wrote up some quick blog posts for Sun­day and Mon­day, which you’ve prob­a­bly already read. Then I stepped out onto the deck, intend­ing to see if the table there was dry enough to set a lap­top on (I do enjoy writ­ing out­side). The air was misty; it was­n’t rain­ing, but every so often it felt like a drop touched my skin. I grabbed my cam­era and head­ed down to the dam over the lake to snap some pho­tos of the fog. 

Then I sat down for my morn­ing writ­ing stint. After that I biked across the dam to the cof­fee shop, where I used the wifi to post the afore­men­tioned posts (and these pho­tos, while I was at it.)

After that, I read a few chap­ters in Catch-22, had some supper—leftovers, because it had start­ed to rain and I did­n’t feel like bar­be­cu­ing in the rain—and wrote for anoth­er hour or so. The rain came and went dur­ing the evening, but the clouds nev­er broke—at least not before mid­night, when I decid­ed it was bedtime.

I wrote about 2,200 words again yes­ter­day. Here’s a very first-draft sam­ple for you.

The hand­writ­ing end­ed. The next page was blank, and the next, and the next. All the way to the end of the book, as far as she could tell, quick­ly fan­ning through the remain­ing pages. June closed it and set it on the desk.

Did it mean any­thing, she won­dered, that the girl—Evelyn, she remem­bered, glanc­ing at the book’s cov­er, the author’s name in that faux-Goth­ic font—that Eve­lyn had cho­sen to rewrite a trick­ster story?

She sat alone for a long time under the mist­ed win­dows, wish­ing she could see out to the world. It looked like a bright sun­shiny day out there.

After a while, she got up and start­ed to pace. Back and forth, forth and back, slow pon­der­ing steps across the breadth of the Gath­er­ing Space. (Was it real­ly still a Gath­er­ing Space, if at most two gath­ered there? But then what was it that Nathan’s Jesus had said, Where two or more of you are gath­ered? Right? Some­thing like that. So she sup­posed it must count.)

(Especially—and her mind recoiled from the thought—if they two were all that remained in the world.)