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June 02, 2005

The Vermonter

Combine the business tasks required of you as an author with an approaching publication date, add in a four-person family and a fairly overwhelming day job, and let's just say it’s a bit of a challenge to advance the ball on book number two, month in, month out. And because I seem to find less and less regularity from the windows that do roll around, I’ve established a few ways of motivating myself. Forced discipline, I guess you could say. Among these methods is a monthly page count requirement – hit the goal each month, and I'll have the first draft finished in time to go through it a few dozen more times before delivering the thing. (It only takes me fourteen or fifteen drafts before my writing becomes legible.) Miss the goal and – well, I'm not sure what sort of punishment will be exacted, but it'll be severe. But to date I haven't missed any targets –

Until the last week of May rolled around.

Panicked – and frustrated at my usual laziness – I examined the calendar in search of hope. Weekends don’t work well – too much going on with the kids, and with the few friends you are able to keep when you work all the time and write the rest of the time. (Plus, somebody's got to be taking care of the kids while you're doing all that stuff all week, and that somebody needs some goddamn relief on Saturdays and Sundays). Ah-hah – I spotted a Thursday and Friday that appeared fairly open. And Thursdays, anyway, we’ve got a babysitter most of the day . . . done. I would take two days of vacation and catch up on the page count.

But then again, by day, the house is busier than the office – what was I going to do? We weren’t talking coffeeshop here – I needed hours upon hours. I'd read recently that Harlan Coben really cranks in the latter stages of writing his books – that his record was 55 pages in one day. Granted, I'm a one page per day kind of guy -- fifty-five will never happen, not even if they strap a dictation/transcribing machine directly to the synapses at the base of my brain – but I figured I had a shot at five or ten if I could muster eight to ten hours of isolation. Starbucks or the home office upstairs? Not a chance. Too many distractions. Plus I get so proud of myself after two hours of work I'm ready to throw a party or eat some lunch.

But wait a minute, I say . . . there is something I’ve always wanted to do. I've wanted to do it more as a statement of my own freedom than anything else, but I've also romanticized how cool it might be unto itself . . .

You see, I'm a train buff. (Auto racing, too, if you must know. Look, I'm a lifelong two year old kid, okay?) I even have an N-scale model train collection, which someday I’ll have the time to look at . . . probably not ever actually assemble. And so this thing I'd had the idea of doing for so long was this: jump on an Amtrak train, plug in my laptop, ride to the end of the line, and turn around and come back. Write, think, brood, eat, drink, and listen to music the whole time – all the while watching the workaday shlubs such as I usually am get on, read their paper, get off, and be replaced by another set of them . . . and another . . . and so on. A feeling of total freedom . . . with nowhere to go. With nothing to do but write, or avoid writing and think about the fact that you’re avoiding writing and there's nothing else to do but get back to it.

I procrastinated making the reservations until the morning of my first of two days off, but find just such an "out to the end of the line" scenario I did: log on to Amtrak.com, check over the routes and pricing, and there it was: $62 each way, noon departure, nine p.m. arrival, an 8:30 a.m. return train getting in at five.

The Vermonter.

Bought the tickets, went for a run to avoid a heart attack during the voyage, got the OK from my wife, booked a room at the Comfort Inn in St. Albens, Vermont – thirty miles from the Canadian border – kissed the kids and wife goodbye, stocked up with a sandwich, and boarded that sucker out of Stamford, Connecticut, bound for nine hours of forced creativity.

Funny thing is, I spoke to a few people along the way, told a few others before and after what I had in mind, and nobody, except maybe my wife, really got it. Mostly, I heard, "Man, I can think of a couple better ways to relax than that," or something of that sort. And, yeah, it got a little dreary, eight hours in, with the train delayed an hour and the sun well down beneath the horizon . . . not much of that picturesque Vermont countryside to take in after dark. But you know what? I loved it. Missed my kids by the time I passed out in the hotel (same place where the crew stayed, by the way, nice bunch of guys as worn out as me by the end of that haul), felt like a bit of a weirdo riding in the cab from the train station to the hotel and back a few hours later – Why is he doing that? Is he a terrorist? – but I whacked out ten pages on Thursday. Got up early, ran at the sports complex across from the hotel to stave off total lethargy for another few hours, hoarded some coffee, Coca-Cola, and peanut butter sandwiches from the hotel’s complimentary breakfast layout, and jumped back aboard for another day on the Vermonter.

I wonder whether it's The Vermonter when you're headed south on the thing?

Anyway, long story somewhat short, I got 13 pages in on Friday. The last five were painful, but no worse, I think, than when I spread that pain across two or three days the way I usually do.

The verdict: crossed the page count goal three days before the end of the month. Even got to take two days off from writing, or, more accurately put, I got to take two days off from getting pissed off for not writing on those days.

Impressions: much of the northeast, particularly the swaths that lay along the train corridors, is almost grotesquely industrial – abandoned industrial, actually. Maybe everywhere is these days. Question: what happened to all those jobs in those huge brick buildings that used to be full of work and stand now in total, decaying disrepair, too hazardous to remove or use again? Suppose Lou Dobbs would say Chinese, Korean, and Mexican citizens have those jobs now, and Americans (regardless of heritage) may never have them back. Say what you will – there's nobody in those buildings anymore, and there are a lot of them. Think I lost count around a hundred and fifty, and I wasn’t even through Springfield, Mass. when the numbers started to blur.

Impression #2: not many people travel by train any longer, and you can kind of see why when it takes nine hours to travel the same distance that takes two and a half hours by plane. I think we stopped at four stations for twenty minutes plus, at one point turned around and switched engines, and at another point had to wait half an hour for the CSX freights – seems they own and therefore control a certain stretch of track north of Springfield – to laze on by. This is how Amtrak looks to remain competitive in 2005?

Impression #3: there are actual farms in Vermont. Living in the burbs outside of New York City, and spending a few years of my life in Southern California prior to the current phase of my life, I think I had forgotten that farms even existed, let alone what they looked like. (They look pretty much the way they used to, only with bigger, more expensive tractors. Built, no doubt, in China.)

One way or the other, I had a good old fashioned American taste of freedom for a couple days in late May, and I was a writer on those days too. There is no doubt I will do it again soon . . . may, in fact, be forced to, judging from the way the page count is inching along here in the new month.

Posted by Will Staeger at June 2, 2005 04:28 PM

Comments

Posted by: James Shields at October 15, 2005 01:45 AM