Just When You Think You’re Through

I had a plan. I would spend the day meticulously, obsessively searching for mistakes. Read through Chasing Arctic Fire (again!!), catch the missing words, the misplaced commas, the things I cannot believe I’ve missed after reading the same sentence seventeen times. Put it all together. Finish the damn book. Be through.

Meanwhile, here in the Panama cloud forest, the coffee harvest has just started and the coffee pickers are roaming around looking for perfect, ripe, coffee cherries.

The kitchen drain stopped draining. The plumber needed a shovel, which was in the depósito, the keys to which were in the pocket of someone who had gone home. And then the plumber wanted to know where the grease trap is. I don't even know what a grease trap is much less where in the weeds it might be hiding!

One of the men I depend on to help keep this place going keeps getting drunk and texting me weird shit.

There are days when living on a mountainside in Panama is exactly as lovely as it sounds. And then there are days when you would like everyone to go away, preferably not pocketing the keys.

The very nice plumber got the drain unplugged. Turns out there is no grease trap. Did I mention I live in a renovated old migrant workers' barrack built half a century ago?

By the time the day was over, my brain was done.

Tomorrow, I told myself. Tomorrow I’ll get back to the book.

Which I did.

Chapter 17.

Oh my.

There is a particular sinking feeling when you read something you’ve written, something you’ve already revised and more or less accepted as done, and realize it’s weak.

Not a typo. Not an adjective that’s trying too hard.

The chapter. The whole premise.

This is weak as fuck, I thought.

Then, almost immediately: Oh, it’s good enough. Just go on.

I have been working on this book for two years. The characters have survived a great deal, some of which I inflicted on them deliberately and some of which resulted from my discovering, rather late in the proceedings, that they needed to be somewhere else on Monday.

I would like to release them into the world. I would like to think about something else. I would like to read a book without wondering whether I should be working on mine. Or whether mine will ever be as good as...pick a name.

Good enough has considerable appeal.

So I got in the car and drove down the mountain.

“No, damn it,” I told myself out loud as I navigated the sharp hairpin curves with the bad pavement, “it’s not good enough.”

There was no one in the car to dispute it.

The trouble with changing Chapter 17 is that Chapter 17 has connections. Things have been set up before it. Things depend on it later. You cannot simply pull out a piece and insert something more interesting without checking what you’ve done to Chapter 2. Or Chapter 34.

So now I’m brainstorming. What could happen instead? What would catch Gus’s attention? What belongs in this book and might also open a door to the next one? How much can I shift without having to rewrite the whole damn thing?

These are interesting questions. Under other circumstances, I might be delighted to spend a morning considering them.

At present, I am considering them while the coffee ripens and other parts of my life make their own arrangements.

And now, of course, I’ve thought of a Substack post about all this.

I keep imagining there will be a point when I can look around and say, Right. That’s done. All of it. Now I can sit down.

At seventy-five, you might think I would have examined the evidence.

But hope persists. Along with the coffee, the plumbing, the people, and Chapter 17.

What did Granny say?

“Honey, there ain’t no through.”