From SRP author Mark Posey:
I wrote an entire chapter the other day.
That might not sound particularly remarkable. I am, after all, an author. Writing chapters is one of the things I’m theoretically supposed to do. But lately, a chapter of Fall From Grace has generally taken me two or three days to finish. This one was done before the day was over.
Naturally, I had to figure out what had gone so unexpectedly right.
It wasn’t that I’d slept better. I hadn’t uncovered some brilliant new plot twist during the night. The words weren’t waiting in perfect formation, ready to march onto the page the moment I opened the manuscript. As far as I could tell, the only meaningful difference was that I hadn’t gone and sat in the recliner.
This was troubling news. I like the recliner. The recliner is comfortable. It sits in the living room, where I can drink my coffee, check the news, glance at social media, read something interesting and spend a few minutes catching up with the world before I begin writing.
You may already have spotted the flaw in this arrangement.
The recliner has apparently been running a long-term deception. It presents itself as a pleasant place to sit for a few minutes before work, but it is actually a productivity-eating swamp. Once I settle into it, time behaves differently. Five minutes becomes twenty. Twenty becomes forty-five. Eventually, I look at the clock and discover that much of the morning has vanished while I’ve been doing absolutely nothing I intended to do.
Worse, I’ve been allowing myself to believe that the remaining time is no longer useful. If I have only forty-five minutes before I need to make our smoothies, there’s hardly any point in starting. If yoga is coming up in an hour, I might as well wait until afterward. If lunch is approaching, perhaps I should begin fresh in the afternoon.
This is how an entire day gets murdered in small, perfectly reasonable increments.
The other day, I simply didn’t sit down there. I went to the table where I write, opened Fall From Grace, and started working. There was no dramatic surge of inspiration. No angelic choir appeared over the laptop. I just stayed in the place where the writing happens, and by the end of the day, there was an entire new chapter where there hadn’t been one that morning.
This is especially significant because Fall From Grace has been waiting a very long time to be written. So have some of you. I published Saving Grace in early 2020, already intending this book to follow it. More than six years and several other published books later, Thomas Billings and Grace Worthington are finally back on my screen.
That history gives the book a certain weight. I know people have been waiting for it, and knowing that occasionally makes it easier to work on something else—something newer, shinier and unburdened by expectations. Apparently, it also makes the recliner unusually persuasive.
But the chapter got written. Then another morning arrived, and the table was still there. So was the manuscript. Unfortunately, so was the recliner, sitting across the room looking innocent.
I know better now.
The recliner is not my friend. It doesn’t care whether Thomas and Grace ever make it through this story. It would happily keep me comfortable while Fall From Grace remains unfinished for another six years.
I’m not going to let it.
— Mark