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| At the Merrion Hotel in Dublin last year, telling James Joyce how a real writer works. |
As I write this, my wife and I are packing for our second trip to Ireland; when it posts, we will be wrapping up and heading home. We plan overnight stays in two locations from our previous trip—the Merrion Hotel in Dublin and Ashford Castle in Cong—but all other overnight stays and stops along the way will be new to us.
What won’t be new is how I mix travel and writing: I don’t.
Unlike many writers who adhere so strongly to the “write every day” mantra that they carve out time during their travels to pound out a few pages every day, I use travel to get away from writing, to cleanse my brain, and, to the best of my ability, to live in the moment
Oh, if I happen to have a brilliant idea—which does happen on rare occasion—I might dictate a few notes into my phone and email the file to myself, but I don’t carry pen and paper or my laptop computer with me.
STORY BLOCK
I’m uncertain when I first began separating writing time from travel time, but it has worked well the past several years, and I usually return to my computer refreshed and ready to write.
Other life events, though, sometimes conspire against me.
Late last year, for example, Down & Out Books closed up shop, leaving many of my anthology projects in limbo. I spent the last of 2025 and the first of 2026 scrambling to find new homes for projects that were finished but not yet published as well as many published projects that were ripe for republication.
(So far Audecyn Books has rereleased Jukes & Tonks and Scattered, Smothered, Covered, and Chunked, and Crimson Gate Books has rereleased Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun. Other titles are forthcoming from White City Press and Crimson Gate Books, and Level Short has some original titles in their queue that were edited specifically for them.)
What this meant is that much of my available time was spent dealing with the fallout of D&O’s closure and was not spent writing.
When I finally returned to the keyboard in earnest, I found a disconnect in my writing. I wrote good sentences, good paragraphs, and even good scenes, but the first few stories didn’t gel. In each case, the whole was decidedly less than the sum of the parts.
I was frustrated. That’s not what’s supposed to happen.
I set those stories aside—maybe I’ll return to them in the future—and I floundered around the house for several days wondering what had gone wrong. I clearly didn’t have writer’s block—which I don’t believe exists—because I was clearly capable of writing good sentences, good paragraphs, and good scenes. I had—if such a thing exists—story block, the inability to assemble scenes into a coherent whole.
A PAGE A DAY
Then, more by accident than intention, I started writing one good page a day, asking nothing more from myself than that. Each page built on the previous day’s work, and each page worked to move plot forward until I had finished drafts of stories that worked.
Between the time I stumbled into this process and now, I have produced four stories. One has been submitted, two are complete drafts which I will reread, edit, and submit after we return from Ireland, and the fourth is a nearly complete draft. (All the elements are in place but some of the scenes are rough, and I will not be able to fix them before we head to the airport.)
Is this my new process, and I’ll return to it upon return from Ireland? Is this just a temporary approach, and I’ll return to my prior, sloppier way of banging out pages? Or will I find yet a third way of writing?
AN ASIDE
One interesting—to me, at least—connective tissue these four stories share: all were begun in response to calls for submission. The submitted story was written for an invitation-only anthology and submitted well before the deadline. One I had started a few years ago in response to a submission call but set aside unfinished. One was written in response to a submission call, but I’ll not meet the deadline because we’ll be in Ireland. And the last was written in response to a heads-up about a potential anthology. (The editor is waiting on thumbs-up or thumbs down from the publisher.)
THE WAY
Regardless of which approach I take to writing in the future, one thing remains true: As a writer, I will always find a way.
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Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun was rereleased by Crimson Gate Books on August 10. If you missed the anthology when it was first released, now’s your opportunity to pick up a copy.
