I left my house at 11am on Tuesday.  I arrived in Mexico at 2pm on Thursday.  I spent 52 hours traveling.  It was a fucking nightmare.  Let’s be honest.  Traveling truly sucks.  If it weren’t for the destination being so goddamned perfect all the damn time it wouldn’t be worth it.   Don’t get me wrong, there are those who believe that it’s not the destination that matters, it’s the journey.  I have been a proponent of that for a very, very long time.  But, when it comes to being snowed in a shitty hotel after your flight has been cancelled, and have to rebook and replay your entire trip, flights, hotels and layovers.  There’s not much journey there. Just bureaucracy and digital paperwork.  It’s not fun. It’s not a great story.  It’s boring as shit.  It took 52 hours to get here.  End of story.  Do with it what you may.

At the same time, Alice was born from the boredom of that journey.  SO maybe the story is in the journey itself and not the destination.  I’m currrently just under 8000 words in a very short period of time.  I have two beautiful chapters that I am very proud of already.  I have plans for this book that will be shocking, especially to the readers of my style of writing.  I feel that I am growing as a writer and with every paragraph, description and line of dialogue, I am getting better and feel that after two novels, I am finally considering myself a writer.  The story comes first.   

Those that truly know the inner workings of my process know that I have been a big advocate of Steven Pressfield’s “War of Art”. During this travel period I plowed through Stephen King’s “Of Writing” and am now a big advocate of that as well. For a writer there are a lot of very important things in that book.  A lot of them, I found myself surprised that, I have already adopted those habits myself.  Mr. King just put it down into concise terms.  

I have gotten a little bit of flack from my SO about writing while on vacation, but honey, when the muse hits, I’m going to follow it.  Those words will fade if I don’t listen to them.  Seven Isaacs was born out of an image in my head and it concluded with a dream.  Two nights ago, I dreamt a dream of wildness that in some way was connected to Alice the Fifth.  The dream set the course for where I was going and although the scene from the dream won’t ever appear in this novel, it opened the door.  It let loose this demon of a vision of where this story is and what the theme is.  I’ve tapped into this current in The Universe, much the same way I did on Seven Isaacs.  Samurai was an exercise.  I’m no dummy.  I know that’s all that was.  It was preparing me to open the floodgates for this one.  I just didn’t know it at the time.  Alice the Fifth is the work.  I’ll probably begin Chapter Three tomorrow.   And Mr. King, it’s tough to close that door while I’m on vacation in Mexico, but the story is doing the hard part for me.