Dear Readers,

Someone dropped me a private note and asked about my writing schedule and what it’s like to be a writer on a day-to-day basis. I suspect he expected a tale of workaholism. I’m not a workaholic, but I’m committed to this work — and have been, my entire life.

Here we go– when I don’t have something unavoidable going on and when I’m not heading into a deadline (deadlines make me get up at 6 or 7 and fall asleep sometime after midnight — even if the novel is done, yet I want to keep revising it and cutting it as long as I can):

1. Wake up between 8:30 and 10.

2. Make coffee, take dog out, take dog back in, feed cat, check rabbits and mice.

3. Time with spouse. Figuring out the course of the day. Knowing that it may be chaotic. Usually check facebook, often from the treadmill or the exercise bike.

4. At some point, my lack of puritan work ethic kicks in and I think of doing things other than write.

5. Somewhere between 11 and 1, I sit down and do some writing.

6. Now that we’re in a new house, there are about twenty extra things to do each day. If I’m lucky, I manage one of them. Because of the recent move — and the fish pond and other property maintenance — I’m sore in ways I haven’t been since never. I’m convinced I’ve dislocated my shoulders and knees and I may be missing a rib.

7. I think about writing no matter what I’m doing, unless I’m sleeping. Even then, I’m not so sure.

8. I quit writing for the day when I can no longer write for the day. This doesn’t necessarily mean exhaustion — it often means when a problem in writing presents itself and I have to spend time thinking about it, wandering a bit, mulling it over. Or else, it’s when a friend calls to go grab a cup of coffee and it’s easier to say yes to that than stare at the page. Or when I’m reading Haruki Murakami’s new novel and I’d just rather live in that world awhile. Some days go great and I write and write and write until supper. Regardless of whether I’m writing for eight hours or twelve — or three — I tend to avoid all but a handful of friends when a book is in my head.

Too much socializing invades the privacy of my imagination and starts to push it back down into the deep well. I honestly would be happy in a monk’s cell or a prison cell, so long as I could write and read and maybe watch a few junk tv shows each week (or gothic classics from the ’60s like The Real Housewives of the Valley of the Dolls etc. ) And perhaps — in both a monastery and prison — I’d need a supply of cigarette for trading in order to explore the finer aspects of such an existence.

9. Writing fiction is a point of view on life as much as it is a job. If I resist writing, I’m living in hell; if I give in to it, and it goes well, I’m living in a better place; if I give in to it and it goes badly, it’s straight back to hell with me. But I love it. I’d rather be in hell writing than in the other place, not.

10. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I get up and go to my desk and start writing because some lightning bolt hit and I don’t want to miss that moment. But this is just now and then, and I can’t depend on lightning.

11. The physical act of writing can be with a fountain pen or Bic, Macbook or iMac. I tend to write in longhand when problem-solving because there’s something about that extra bit of direct contact of hand to pen to paper that pushes out what I’m holding back. When the “flow” happens, I’m on the computer.

Side note: I find that mathematics helps relax my mind. Not really difficult math problems — closer to arithmetic and algebra, both of which I hated as a kid. But somewhere between creating equations out of everyday events — and some Sudoku — I can sit at my desk and take a writing break that seems to refresh my mind. Doodling in my notebooks helps, too. I’ve been a lifelong doodler, and I think it opens my brain a bit — and the images seen to be almost missives from some undiscovered world.

12. Sometimes I dictate sections of a book using Dragon Natural Speaking software — but these are rough notes and brief paragraphs just to break up a boulder in my mind. Often, these are research notes. As have many writers before me, I’ve discovered that research often confirms the flights of the imagination.

What I haven’t mentioned are the walks, the errands, the despair (at times), the deep conviction that I’m not up to the task of the current book, the crazy-in-love feeling when a section of the book goes great, the wintry pause when doubt slams me in the face and I read every page as if it contracted some terrible disease — no doubt some wood-boring beetle that is, unseen, destroying its foliage. These are foibles of the frozen mind, and at some point, I skate over its pond and manage to make a joke of my own worst thoughts. If all goes well. And I love the entire thing. And it drives me a bit nuts.

Dark Inspirations – How I Came to Write It

You love the disturbing, vaguely nightmarish roadside attractions out there in the middle-of-nowhere hellholes of America, right?

I know I do.  To me, it’s not a road trip if it doesn’t involve stopping in some godforsaken spot for some oddball site or bizarre experience. And one of the most memorable was running into THE THING.

Ever see THE THING?

Few roadside attractions are MORE bizarre than The Thing — that grand-daddy of southwestern gas station stopovers that blows away the rest in its sheer weirdness and twisty corridors.

When we drove with friends across the desert one Christmas holiday, we stopped at the nearly-unavoidable roadside attraction.

Now, the southwest is full of bizarre, unusual and downright messed-up little roadside attractions with snakes, scorpions, two-headed babies in jars…but The Thing was something more impressive than most — for all the right reasons.

The rule of a Roadside Attraction is:

The exhibit can never be as disturbing or creepy as imagining the person — and the deranged mind — that  put the attraction together in the first place.

The Thing satisfies on oh so many levels.

First, the entry fee  (back then — several years ago)  was about 75 cents . Good price! I believe the price has only gone up very slightly in the intervening years.

Then, you have to walk down these hallways full of Tim Burtonesque desert driftwood — and it predates Tim Burton — until you come to the most bizarre exhibit I’ve ever seen in my life:

A torture chamber, with women being whipped and people being beheaded (or at least, that’s how I remember it) — all carved from tree stumps.  Creepy! And yet compelling. And yet…creepy.

And then, like the cherry on this bizarro sundae — right next to the crushed nuts — there’s the Nazi car.

This vehicle is made all the more disturbing because someone put it  in this collection with the wood-stump torture chamber and The Thing itself and those Tim Burtonesque mangly desert-wood creatures.

What old crazy desert rat spent a lifetime amassing this collection? It’s not the current owners. It was someone who had a dark imagination, and maybe the kind that spilled into daily life. The Nazi car did it for me. And I hadn’t even seen The Thing at that point.

And it’s disturbing to have gone through the corridors to that goal — that Thing — but when you get to the Thing, it’s not shocking as much as it is just another spoonful of “Danger, Will Robinson!”

Should I reveal what it is?

Naw.

You’ve got to see it for yourself.

After visits to The Thing and to some other roadside attractions, I decided to write a horror version of this kind of place when I wrote my story, The Attraction.

Which, coincidentally, has one of my least favorite covers on the paperback and digital edition.

Take the video tour:

The Thing  is off that odd stretch of the 10 Freeway between Phoenix and Tucson — in an area of the desert with the strange name: Dragoon, Arizona. Plan your next vacation around it! It has earned its spot among the Places of Eternal Darnation.

Here’s the Book Trailer for The Attraction — made by COSProductions.com. Nice ‘n’ creepy. Be sure and turn up the sound, too.

Best,

Douglas Clegg