Guest Post: Writer’s Haven or Hell? by Kris Lackey

Please welcome author Kris Lackey to the blog today. Coming this summer is Ten-Acre Rock. This is the fourth book in the Bill Maytubby and Hannah Bond Mystery series.

 

 

 

Writer’s Haven or Hell? by Kris Lackey

 

 

     Promotions come to me from writers’ retreats.  You’ve seen the places—rustic cabins on coastal islands in Maine, rustic cabins in the Georgia pines, rustic cabins perched on Montana scree. Many of them have no electricity.  They all promise the same things—isolation and silence.  For a week, a month, or—horrors!—months.  They all send a bolt of terror down my spine. 

     Some of my writer friends seek out these hermit cells and thrive there, writing like a house (sorry, cabin) afire.  I am happy for them.  But how anyone can write in silence and isolation is beyond the powers of my imagination.  It’s lonely.  It’s boring.  I swear, I would bust out of that cabin before lunch the first day, walk to the nearest road, and hitchhike to a café or diner so I could get some work done. 

     Give me the coffee shop’s hushed convos, the old C&W ballads on speakers turned low, the hiss of the steam wand. And throw in a half dozen college-town baristas—Russian language students, math theory majors, painters, gym rats. They can answer more questions than Google.  “What is this called?” I ask the painter as I point to the edge of my palm.  “That’s the blade of your hand.  I learned that in figure drawing.”  I knew that once but could never have recalled it in a million years. 

     Also, because I am old and often write about younger characters, I have to ask how they describe lowering a car window nowadays (they “put it down”) and what to call the meat you put in a hot dog (“hot dog”—never the “weiner” or “weenie” of my youth, for obvious reasons).  They still know the Three Stooges!

     Before COVID I wrote three of my four Maytubby-Bond crime novels, published by Blackstone, in two Norman, Oklahoma, coffee shops, mostly the Gray Owl.  Working in two daily shifts of seventy-five minutes, awash in human white-noise, I finished each in two years.

     Good to know I’m not alone.  Richard Russo, whose novels I love, writes in New England diners.  My friend and fellow Oklahoma City novelist, the Edgar-winner Lou Berney, writes in coffee shops.   

     Then COVID shut down the coffee shops. 

     I took to walking long distances every day, coming home to a silent study—the dread retreat cabin--to work on the fourth novel.  YouTube offered a trove of ambient coffee house sounds, which I launched each afternoon at five.  My favorites were from Japan and Holland:  I could not understand what people were saying.  All the better.  The clinking of spoons and clattering of saucers still cast their calming spell.  (There is one startling moment in the Dutch shop when someone—a barista I guess—says, “Roger, you have a cappuccino.”)

     And for the first time I drank some alcohol—vodka and tonic—as I wrote during my ante-pandemic happy hour. My editor and early readers of the fourth novel, Ten-Acre Rock, have not found anything awry. Nevertheless, I’m back to writing on caffeine solamente.  

    So, from my perch at the Gray Owl, here’s to my friends who write to the sounds of bustle and gab, steam-wands and Hank Williams!   

 

Kris Lackey ©2023

Kris Lackey is the author of the Chickasaw Nation Mysteries, featuring tribal policeman Bill Maytubby and deputy sheriff Hannah Bond.  The fourth in the series, Ten-Acre Rock, appears July 7, 2023.  Kris lives in Norman, Oklahoma.