Time Away to Write

Last week I was on a work trip.

I travelled from Sydney to Broome via a connecting flight to Perth. The first leg of this trip alone was four hours. Knowing this, I decided to print one of my works in progress, The Midnight Man, because I’ve been feeling the urge to get it ready for submission.

It is already up to sixth draft stage, but as I haven’t worked on it for a while, I though time away from home was the perfect space it needed.

The last time I had this urge, it paid off.

Years back my intuition told me to work on Drama Queens and Devilish Schemes, even though I was without a publisher. The company that published the first two books in its series had gone broke. Shortly after working on this book again, I was signed to a new publisher who republished its prequels along with the new work.

So last weekend I went to Officeworks to print The Midnight Man and another work, Winter Masquerade, which I was planning to revisit when I got back to Sydney.

Night shot from within the University of Notre Dame campus, where I stayed.

Something odd happened.

Winter Masquerade printed. The Midnight Man didn’t. The staff tried several printers and even changed the document into a pdf just to get it to print. It simply wouldn’t.

I took this as an omen. On the four-hour flight to Perth I completed an edit of Winter Masquerade. It’s a novella so that time was all I needed.

As for The Midnight Man, well, I trust there’s some cosmic reason why it refused to print giving the other work priority.

I did, however, submit Winter Masquerade many months ago.

It hasn’t been accepted yet, and the new edits should take me an afternoon to complete. Whether it will be accepted or submitted to several other publishers I have in mind is a matter of wait and see. But I trust my instincts, even if those printers had other ideas.

Staircase to the Moon. It happens in Broome for several nights this time of year.

Afterthought.

I was staying at the University of Notre Dame campus in a small tin house during my work trip. These guest houses are for staff. Sometimes while I lay in bed, I thought I heard footsteps from the kitchen or a strange creak from the front door.

It took me several days to realise that there was a cemetery a stone’s throw away from my neighbour’s cottage.