Dana Hunter Reporting for Duty

While my heart-sister NP is on maternity leave, giving my gorgeous first nephew a proper start on life, I'll be taking time away from the world o' pollyticks and general inanity to post a few thoughts on writing. Regular drinkers of the Coffee-Stained Writer shall also have the opportunity to sample other fine brews. This coffee house never closes, my esteemed fellow scribblers!

In this post, I'll be taking the coward's way out and talk about how I've spent the summer not writing. This may come as some surprise to the poor regulars at my cantina, who are subjected to several posts per day. So let me qualify that: I've spent the summer not writing fiction. I've not even read any fiction. Which is a rather strange thing, considering my central ambition is to become a wildly-successful fiction author.

I can 'splain. Or at least sum up.

There comes a time in many authors' careers when they realize they don't know jack diddly about anything at all. Oh, they know how to turn a phrase, sometimes well enough to give it motion sickness. They know about plot, character, theme, setting, and all those other things Writer's Digest books assure them are so vital to good fiction. They can tell stories that don't leave friends and family members forcing themselves to maintain a pasty grin whilst assuring the anxious author that no, really, it wasn't that bad. And for some, that's enough. They can tell ripping good tales that people enjoy, they get the job done, and everybody goes away happy.

Some writers, on the other hand, are bloody perfectionists. Versimilitude of reality isn't enough. A thrilling tale is only part of the story. We've got to know everything about - well, everything.

Which is why I've spent the summer running all over the Seattle area and most of Arizona poking my nose into various and sundry, absorbing the differences between desert and ocean, small town and large, and playing in the dirt (where available).

It's why I've read nothing but science tomes for months. Biology, evolution, physics, geology, plate tectonics, sociology - everything I could get my hands on. Anything that will help me understand in appreciable depth how worlds work.

It's why I've forced myself to do a ton of things I've never done before, like walk on the rim of a meteor crater and take a ferry ride, paying intimate attention to every single detail.

And it's why I've refused to allow myself to write so much as a paragraph.

This enforced absence is an experiment of sorts. And it's possible it will fail. My worldbuilding may be no better for all that. My stories might have worked just as well without all this effort.

But it's not wasted time. The more you know about the world, the more beauty you find in it. Discovery is a delight. And I'll be returning to fiction a little less miserably ignorant than when I started out.

Most importantly: you'll all get a chance to laugh while I struggle to knock the rust off my poor disused wordcraft. I promise it'll be amusing.

Have any of you ever taken a hiatus? Did you come back refreshed or regretful?