Notes from the Glamorous Writing Life / 6 April 2026

There are many romantic ideas about how books come into being.

People imagine an author in a candlelit study, perhaps, gazing thoughtfully into the middle distance while wearing something textured and impractical. Tea nearby. Rain tapping at the window. An elegant fountain pen involved for no sensible reason.

My recent writing experience has not looked much like that.

A fair amount of this book was revisited either in hospital, on hospital-adjacent furniture, or while wearing a wristband that did very little for my sense of literary mystique. If you ever want to strip the glamour from the phrase “creative process,” I highly recommend trying to make plot notes while someone wheels in a machine that beeps like it’s personally disappointed in you.

And yet, oddly enough, it helped.

Inpatient treatment involves a great deal of waiting. Waiting for test results, waiting for medication, waiting for meals, waiting for someone to explain why the machine is beeping, waiting for someone else to explain why the first explanation was apparently incorrect. In those gaps, I started reopening old story files and discovering that the outlines I’d written years ago were not bad, exactly — just slightly abandoned. Like a garden shed full of useful tools and at least one mysterious object you don’t remember buying.

Some of the best work I did was simply paying attention again. Asking better questions. Cutting the scenes that were trying too hard. Noticing where the story actually had energy.

It wasn’t glamorous, but it was real. And sometimes real is better. Real gets the job done, even if it does it under fluorescent lighting with a cup of tea that tastes faintly of administrative despair.