A Season in Hell: November 23-28, 2022

The glory of choir practice; the constant pressure of money; and Thomas Kinkade, the Painter of Light

This is the choir practice wharf. Nice wharf, right?

A Season in Hell is a series of journal entries I wrote in 2022-23, chronicling the last few torturous months I spent working on my novel The Bright Sword—going from stuck to unstuck. If you want to take it from the top, start here.

November 23, 2022

Up at 6 to drive my daughter to her cross-country practice. Then back home to supervise my son’s cello practice. Then around 4 I’ll drive him to his choir practice.

Or I could attend a study habits workshop at my daughter’s school, and my wife will take our son to choir instead. Which? My wife and I are both ridiculously covetous of writing time right now. We’re constantly brokering diplomatic compromises as to who gets to write and who does the rest of it. I’ll take our son to Kumon if you’ll take both son and daughter to swimming. Fair trade?

It is a fair trade, just about. At Kumon you can sit outside on a stool and write, though you have to ignore the traffic and the other parents talking on their phones. At swimming you can write sitting by the side of the school pool, where it’s quiet. But it’s also very damp.

Choir practice is the brass ring. It happens in a big public arts building on a wharf jutting out into Sydney harbor, where it’s quiet, and the view is amazing. And it lasts an hour and a half. From a writing POV, choir practice is the shit.

November 25, 2022

It’s not that our family is broke—we definitely aren’t broke—but we’re not very liquid, financially speaking. We are running out of ready cash. My wife’s on sabbatical on half pay. Our stay in Sydney is partly funded by the rent from our house in Brooklyn, where the rental market is wonderfully overheated, but it only goes so far.

It’s a source of anxiety which I struggle with at the best of times. I won’t get paid the next installment of my book advance till I turn in an acceptable manuscript. I’d better hurry it up. But I don’t want to hurry up too much because then the book will be bad, which will be a disaster both personally and financially. It’s a balancing act.

November 28, 2022

Now I am in a brightening phase with the book, adding little touches here and there to make the important moments shine and twinkle and feel real. Did you know, for example, that knights used to grow their hair shoulder-length, so they could pin it up under their helmets for extra padding? This evocative fact appears in the gloriously named Ewart Oakeshotte’s A Knight and His Armor. It sounds a touch implausible to me, but as we used to say when I was a journalist, some facts are too good to check.

(Also it will give the knights the same haircut as Quentin in The Magicians.)

I strongly associate the brightening phase with Thomas Kinkade, the famous “Painter of Light,” who used to charge an extra fee to go over one of his mass-produced paintings personally, adding little extra touches to make it extra-vivid. Then he died, reportedly of too much alcohol and valium, at the age of 54. Which is exactly my age right now.