Month: September 2022

I am sitting at my local coffee shop (Coffee Tree Roasters on Walnut) and mostly looking out the window as the sun comes up. I’d come down here early in the morning intent on adding a page or two to E________ when it occurred to me that, in all likelihood, I will never write here again – certainly not regularly. My day job’s much- threatened transfer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Edinburgh, Scotland is finally happening. Tomorrow, I drive the cats to Washington, D.C. to meet the people who will acclimate them to their cargo crates but fail to explain important concepts like aircraft, jet lag, or mice with Scottish accents. That job done, I will board a flight at Dulles and return to the land of my birth.

I’ve been away for 23 years and although I’ve visited regularly, living there again is going to be a completely different experience. I have so much to learn. What the heck is Sky Atlantic when it’s at home? Why is the paper money made of plastic? Where is the sun? It’s going to be an adjustment.

Like my mother, sisters and child, I was born on a Thursday. According to the old rhyme, Thursday’s child has far to go, and our family’s Thursday-born have certainly lived up to the prophecy. I am not a hundred percent certain I could recite all the places I have lived at this point. Leaving somewhere is miserable. You make friends, you get to know your way around, you feel . . . settled.

But arriving somewhere is exciting. A new adventure awaits. There will be new people to meet, new sights to see, new stories to hear and, of course, new stories to tell. I will need to find a new coffee shop, though.

When I got here this morning, I gave the barista my usual order. I didn’t tell her it was to go because that would have made no sense: I was staying to write, after all. Nor did I tell her that this would be my last time here: like all my family’s Thursday-born, I hate goodbyes.

I did, however, leave a ridiculous tip. I hope it’s enough.

E________, first draft, 78,800 words

We are a little shy of a year since I started work on E________. Armed with my trusty chart (outline), I set sail for an unseen destination full of hope and anticipation for the voyage ahead.

It’s been a far stormier journey than I could ever have anticipated. In my own mind I expected to drop anchor in a sheltered cove labeled “The End” maybe six months after I set out. Yet here I am, five months past that, still sailing the ocean blue, thanks mainly to the hurricane unleashed by the ill-advised Russian invasion (re-invasion, really) of Ukraine. Given that my day job (financial counterterrorism) requires an intimate knowledge of, and involvement with, sanctions, the West’s unprecedented economic response led to several months of 16-hour days turning political pronouncements into financial reality. It was important work but utterly miserable, the only consolation being (as I’ve said before) that no one was trying to drop artillery shells onto the roof of my house.

But 16-hour days are not conducive to creative endeavor. If I have any talent at all it is not for writing so much as time management: 16 hours of work plus two hours of family time, face stuffing and chores leaves six hours for . . . sleep and nightmares. There is literally no time to write. I don’t care how motivated or organized you are, time is a zero-sum proposition. If you can’t kick something else out of your schedule, you can’t write, end of story. Or, rather, no story at all. I went weeks and months without writing much of anything. E________ languished. Ideas festered in my head, trying and failing to find a way out.

Fortunately, it is not just good things that come to an end. The pressure eased off at work and I was able to return to the keyboard. First in fits and starts and now more regularly. Then, yesterday, I realized something about E________, something shocking.

I can see the end. I’m the sailor at the top of a tall, swaying mast crying “Land ho!”

There’s still a ways to go, admittedly. I’m ten, maybe twenty thousand words out but I can see the destination on the horizon, all green trees and waterfalls. Knotted plotlines form a jagged reef between ship and shore, but I can see a way through. I am definitely going to get there.

The timing, though, is ironic. I am coming to the end of a metaphorical journey just as I’m about to start a real one. At the behest of the megacorp for which I work, I will be transferring from the States to Edinburgh, Scotland, thirty-odd miles from where I was born. I’ve lived in America for 23 years. Going home feels . . . odd. A stranger in a once-known land.

There’s got to be a book in that. Somewhere.