As I mentioned last time, I’m going to be putting my daily writing habits to the test in a difficult new way this year. I have to travel more than I did last year. In fact, I will probably travel more this year than I ever have in a single year ever before.
To answer the obvious first question, yes, I’ll be very unhappy about leaving The Bern behind. But I’ve tried taking her out in the RV and she just makes cat-in-a-microwave kind of noises until I bring her home. It’s too bad, since I had her in mind when I got the thing in the first place. But sometimes things just don’t work out the way you want them to. Anyway, I think I have good arrangements made for her to stay with people who she likes. It’ll be even better if their dogs don’t eat her.
To answer the obvious next question, the reason why I have to travel so much this year, especially by RV, is that I want to move in the next year or so, but I don’t know where I want to move to. So I need to explore a lot of different places and see if any place appeals to me in a special way. As some short guy once said, I’ve put this off for far too long…I’ve lived where I am for three times as long as I’ve ever lived in one place before, and being fundamentally nomadic in mindset, I have to move. I’ve also been in a rural environment for a really long time, and while I like that kind of isolation and will probably go back to a rural setting one day, I think I’d like to be in a city for a year or so. We’ll see.
So that’s a key goal for me: to find the place where I want to move. Could be Seattle, or Portland, Oregon, or Portland, Maine. Could be Austin, Texas, or Kansas City, Missouri. Could be Atlanta, or Florida, or who knows where. That’s sort of the point.
But another key goal is to keep writing daily. It is unacceptable not to do that. I want to finish the first book and get going on the next. I have to do it. Furthermore, isn’t the point of a writing career that you can do it from wherever you are?
However logical all of this sounds, it didn’t work out so well last year. As I mentioned before, it was a total failure; I did not write on road tripsat all. So what’s different now?
I’m counting on one thing: routine.
Before, I didn’t have the infrastructure of writing software, backup routine, familiarity with the tools, etc., but now I have. I hadn’t developed the writing every day habit, but now I have. The question is whether the write-every-day habit will carry over from a daily Starbucks routine to the much more involved task of finding a place to park the vehicle for a couple of hours (ideally with a view), parking myself on the RV’s little sofa, and really doing the work.
If someone else is with me and taking a shift driving, in theory I’ll even be able to write while on the go. Carsickness is not a concern. Loss of road trip cameraderie time is, though. The kind of conversations my friends and I tend to have on these kinds of trips often offer a gold mine of humorous dialogue that I really need to start writing down. It’s possible that would qualify as writing time.
That’s not even rationaliziation: I can’t imagine a better real-life source of hero’s journey banter than road trip banter. But I have to be careful not to let myself slide; documenting conversations to later mine them for dialogue is not something I’ve practiced, just like I haven’t practiced writing down descriptions of the places I’ve visited around the country and the world for later use as setting or backdrop.
A friend suggested that I could also look for Starbuckses on the road and do my writing there, and that’s not a bad idea if I happen to run across them. City people might say, but they’re everywhere, how could you not run across them? Of course, out there in the massive open spaces of most of the US, they are a little harder to come by. But it’s not at all out of the question that I would come across one every day or two, and when I do I could at least go and do the work in there.
So I guess we’ll see what happens. Bottom line is, one way or another, I will write every day on the road.
Conversely, I doubt I’ll update this blog as often on the road. On the other hand, there’ll be some nice photos and certainly some humorous anecdotes.
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