A Season in Hell: October 4, 2022

A diary of being stuck and then getting unstuck

My writing space circa October 2022. Also the laundry room

In October of 2022 I had just moved from New York to Sydney with my family. I was trying to finish The Bright Sword, a novel I’d been struggling with for eight years. I felt stuck and exhausted.

But I was still convinced that the book could be good. Plus I’d already spent the advance. I had to finish it. And over the next six months, bit by bit, I did. Mysteriously I went from stuckness to unstuckness.

During those six months I also did something I’ve never done before: I kept a journal. It’s about writing and craft and frustration and creative renewal. It’s tetchy and whiny and overly confessional, but as part of this Substack I’m going to publish it, an entry or two at a time, in the hopes that it might help other people who are going through the same struggle.

I was going to call this series Novel Diary, but that didn’t seem pretentious enough, so I nicked this title from Rimbaud instead: A Season in Hell.

Here’s the very first entry, which I admit doesn’t have much to do with anything, but I’m going to stay faithful to the timeline. And it does set the scene:

October 4, 2022

I do my writing under the house, in the laundry room. That means I’m always the first to know when the laundry’s done, which means I have the least excuse of anyone in the family for not hanging it out to dry.

Also I’m the closest one to the clotheslines. Australians have no truck, or at any rate very little truck, with dryers.

Not that the laundry room is a bad place to write. It’s cool and quiet in the laundry room. It’s separated from the driveway only by a glass door, which means that the judgmental gaze of our rental car is always on me as I’m typing. I’m always hearing the banging of the slightly-off-balance washing machine, which sounds like it has a demon trapped inside trying to get out.

The washer lives in a permanently damp alcove that doubles as a mosquito farm. Strangely the mosquitoes don’t take much interest in me. I must smell wrong. Not Australian. They float around me like harmless motes.

I put mosquitoes in a scene in The Bright Sword, but everyone who read it said it felt anachronistic, to the point where I took them out again. And it’s true, it doesn’t feel like there should be mosquitoes in Arthurian Britain. It’s not that kind of place. Malory never mentions them.

Still, I’m pretty sure they were there. It’s just that nobody wanted to talk about them.