Writing is a lonely existence. At the moment, mine is lonelier than usual — my wife is being a mensch, living with a friend who just lost her husband — but it’s a fleeting and tolerable kind of solitude. We are a unique pair, she and I. We prefer shared silence over continuous chatter, and the time apart has actually made us more talkative when we do connect.
Meanwhile, I am free to design my days as I see fit. Life without a boss has tremendous flexibility — eating ice cream at midnight, for instance — but a pattern of regular writing is emerging. As a writer, I could not be called a plodder, a plotter, or a pantser. Type-casting would be very difficult in my case.
I have a peculiar gravity around the ideas I pursue. Long and comprehensive drafts come without much difficulty, owing in part to a huge storehouse of blog posts and journal entries in my backlog. I never have to look far to find an excellent seed or a poetic phrasing. So my habit is to write a complete draft, design a cover, and sit with it a good long while — searching for the ill-fitting parts, the ambiguous positions, the rough transitions. Eventually, I can collapse all the wrongness into a simple critique of the last effort’s gestalt. From that, I start again, usually keeping the best ideas but blending them with a new direction.
In short: the message refines, but the presentation and positioning morph until I finally have a story worth telling.
With my current work in progress, Zero Defects: Better Living through Rocket Science, I’ve found a stable formula, and the bones of a publishable draft are emerging. Originally, this material lived as a “rocket science for everyday use” manifesto, but the geek factor was far too high.
Late yesterday afternoon, I stumbled over an idea that changed everything: embedding heartfelt, engaging fiction to make the material accessible.
Enter Maria Dominguez, a New Orleans housewife trying to survive the frontal boundary that is Thanksgiving for too many real households. I opened the book with a compressed, day-of before-and-after involving a good Catholic family, feuding cousins, missing ingredients, a critical mother, and a new girlfriend — who keeps kosher — wading into her first exposure to a traditional ham-on-Thanksgiving family.
And one undefrosted turkey.
When I reread my scene draft, I cried. Then I laughed harder than I expected.
Success.
I found a way to make the magic of engineering real, personable, and useful to everyone. Getting through a complex day — the logistics, the emotions, the small disasters — now feels like exactly the kind of problem engineering can handle, with the right amount of love and compassion mixed in.