Bill's Book Boot Camp

The book was going nowhere. I'd found other work and distractions for months and given my writer's group not a single page. I still claimed to be writing a novel, but it was all in my head and in cryptic notes on wrinkled scraps of paper. Well, not all. I had sixty or seventy manuscript pages. I have a few novel starts like that, all dying in their youth, never reaching a hundred pages. If I can get to hundred manuscript pages, I will finish a book. That seems to be the critical mass for me. But the last several attempts have fallen short of that goal.

Then my last writing teacher, my mentor, and the editor of Nadir's Fire, Bill Allen, invited me down to his west Texas home for a two week stint of writing. As soon as the work on the farm subsided for the season--including a two year effort on a new barn--I took the invitation.

And now my back is sore from sitting, and my mind is mush from the emotionally draining effort of writing or revising four to eight hours a day--and a novel is growing where a whithered stem had been.

There's simply nothing else to do up here. I'm on a 6,200 foot ridge in the Davis Mountains surrounded by choola cactus, mule deer, and west Texas misfits. Damn few misfits, however. I e-mail a lot, but that's an hour of my day, and I instant message one very special person, but I can take up only so much of her time. She has a life, and I have a job: finish a novel.

Bill assumes that I will write and he will review, advise and edit. But more important to the process than that is being treated as a professional writer, with all the attendant expectaions that I will produce, and at a high level. It's more than trying to please a teacher, it's living up to my own expectations for myself. I expect professionalsim from myself up here. Everyone in the area only knows me as a writer, not a carpenter or a farm hand or weightlifting coach. I'm Bill's writer friend. Wherever I go or whatever I do here, I'm a writer. So I act like one. I write. And my back hurts, and my eyes are sore, and my carpal tunnel acts up and I keep writing. My brain rebels and doesn't want to make up one more thing, but my fingers keep moving. Becasue I'm a writer up here and that's the expectation.

Bill will get his pages every morning. And when I leave, I will have my 100 pages and many more. And I will once again have earned with sweat the right to call myself a writer without qualification.