So it came to pass last month that I boarded a miraculous machine that can fly through the air, intending to spend a few weeks with my Talespinner working on the fifth draft of our novel Spin in seclusion.

Life, as they say, is what happens when you make other plans. Our plans did not account for hail, floods, and other disasters, more fule us.

It was a simple plan, I thought. A good plan. A plan that inspired confidence. I was to fly to Springfield, something I hadn’t done in almost exactly a year thanks to a certain orange buffoon’s ridiculous war of choice on Iran that led to airline prices hitting the stratosphere, but when a rare opportunity wandered by my Google alerts for a round-trip ticket for only $140, I lept upon it, and off I did go.

When the day arrived, I stumbled to the train station at an awkward hour—that $140 flight was truly horiffic, with brutal arrival and departure times and an extended layover in Texas. As I waited for the train, an inauspicious pigeon occupied the only available seat at the train stop and would not be moved.

That should’ve been a sign.

Inauspicious pigeon is inauspicious. And also had zero fucks to give.

Nevertheless I persisted on my way, eventually reaching Springfield at an ungodly hour of the morning more or less intact.

For a while, all was quiet. Too quiet.

Well, I don’t mean that literally. There was considerable noise, but of the good sort, mainly screaming and such. My Talespinner is a lot of fun in bed. Like I mean a lot. No, more than that. But I didn’t go out there for sex—okay, I mean, I did, ngl, but not just for sex. There was also the creativity! Namely, our novel Spin, which we’re currently shopping to agents.

What is Spin, you might say? I’m glad you asked. Imagine if Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children had a love child. When we pitch it, we call it a “far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel,” which it is, but that doesn’t tell you what it’s about.

So imagine that thouands of years from now, human civilization has collapsed, the population is far smaller than it was, society is at a pre-industrial level even though they know about everything from atomic physics to metallurgy to genetics because it doesn’t do a whole lot of good to know how to build steam engines if all the surface deposits of iron and coal are gone, fertility has cratered so those few fertile women become Mothers in the care of the Church and have babies until they can’t anymore, and every so often someone comes along with the ability to reweave reality. Unreliable narrators are cool and all, but we wrote an unreliable reality story, where things that happen in chapter 6 can un-happen in chapter 7.

The nation is a quasi-Calvinist theocracy built on a foundation of reproductive slavery, yet most people are generally happy. That’s the thing about The Handmaid’s Tale: you get the sense that everyone in it, from the Handmaids to the aunts to the Commanders and their wives, is miserable. It’s hard to build a stable society if everyone including the leaders are miserable. But ah, if most people are generally happy, and if most people are able to look away from the ugliness at the core of the society, now things are different, right? Right?

The fourth draft weighed in at about 150,000 words, but we got feedback that most agents won’t take a new client with a work over 120,000 words, so that meant 30,000 words had to die.

To accomplish this massacre, we devised a Cunning Plan. We would print it out, go off to the woods, and spend some time going through the book with red pens, editing the old-fashioned way in a place near where the story’s action takes place. (We’d recently followed the path our protagonist takes through the Dominionate, so it seemed fitting.)

Ah HA ha ha ha, oh the things Nature does to the plans of puny humans.

To implement our Cunning Plan, we first needed a printout of the manuscript. That proved harder than we expected. The FedEx Office website is a mess, attempts to create a FedEx account to get a break on the price were for naught, and it turns out that the Fedex site gives you a 404 Not Found error when you click a link to enter business tax ID information. Seriously. It’s amazing these people can run a shipping empire, or even a hot dog stand.

So we ate the cost of doing it without a corporate account and ended up with…

You’ll note it’s in a binder. This was not the original plan. The original plan was a Big Box of Paper. This original plan was also a stupid plan, as my Talespinner’s other boyfriend pointed out. He insisted we get a binder, which, as it turns out, saved our collective asses…more on that in a bit.

We detoured for a time to spend a few days in a remote, secluded cabin where we had nothing but endless kinky sex interspersed with making art from EL wire and body paint, before we set off to rural Missouri for secluded camping and wordsmithing.

We chose our campsite in the rain (which should have been a warning)…

…before setting up camp in the rain (which should have been a warning).

Nevertheless, we soon had a camp…

…and by the next morning, the weather had cleared, and I thought all would be smooth sailing from then on.

Oh, how I was wrong.

The morning sun rose on clear, fair weather, perfect to go down into the word mines and massacre some words.

I even took the time to film a video on cyanobateria and gray goo, as one does, because I apparently seem to have started a video channel without really intending to.

For a while, all was good. We worked on the book, massacring words with ruthless enthusiasm until red ink spilled down the page in a river of blood and tears.

And then, Gentle Reader…and then…

And then, my Talespinner’s other boyfriend and I went to the store for drinks and candy bars. And oh, the tragedy, the tale of woe that unfolded next, tribulations so ghastly as to make Job quail.

The rain started, large fat drops falling from a sky the color of television tuned to a dead channel, but, like, an old-fashioned CRT television, not a smart TV because kids these days have no understanding of what that means. And oh, did the heavens open, in a re-enactment of the Deluge, but, like, real.

And then we got The Text.

The Text came from my Talespinner, and, well…

Three simple words with an entire universe of badness behind them.

Let me pause a moment, Gentle Reader, to ask you a question. Did you know that gel pens use water-based ink? The reason will become clear in a moment, but let me say that I…did not.

So.

By the time we reach the campsite, it’s a wreck. The tents are flooded, along with all our bedding.

And so did the manuscript. Remember how I said gel pen ink is water-based? Yeah. The rain completely obliterated our edits on a handful of pages—fortunately not all (the manuscript printed this way is three hundred and eighty-something pages long!), but some of them.

We bailed to a hotel. I will spare you the trials of finding a hotel room in the middle of the night in the pouring rain, to hit only the highlights, like the fact that when we finally found one and were checking in, someone stole my Talespinner’s smartphone right off the reception desk, bold as you please.

So after we checked in, my Talespinner and her other boyfriend dealt with the stolen phone, her by filing a police report (which involved trials of her own, because the process demanded that she do part of it by email, but she couldn’t log in to her email because it uses two-factor authentication with the code sent to—wait for it—her phone, because of course it did, because this part of the trip was a fractal series of unfortunate events) while he blew up the phone with texts and messages to make life for the thief as unpleasant as possible.

Meanwhile, I used the hotel hairdryer to painstakingly dry the manuscript.

The hotel itself turned out to be surprisingly nice, all things considered, except the part about “people steal your phone right in front of you.”

We slept (well, I slept; there were in which Shenanigans I was much too tired to participate), followed by the first stroke of good news in a while: my Talespinner’s other boyfriend called her stolen phone and, amazingly, someone answered. It seems the thief, having grown frustrated that he couldn’t unlock it (or perhaps that it kept ringing over and over and over—it turns out on Samsung smartphones you can’t turn off the ringer when you don’t know the passcode!) had stripped off the case and abandoned the phone on the side of the road, where it’d been found by someone who returned it.

So, that done, after a brief delay checking out owing to the fact that I got lost inside the hotel, it was back to the campsite.

The day, as if apologizing for its previous mischief, grew bright and sunny and wonderful, perfect editing weather, but for the fact that cleaning up our campsite took precedence…

…which is how we learned that a massive branch had fallen during the hailstorm and damn near flattened the tent with my Talespinner in it.

So that was a bit unnerving.

We also discovered that in our absence this furry little fucker had chewed his way into our supply tent and ransacked our supplies.

I can’t escape the feeling that we had it coming. In Spin, we put our protagonists through hell, a great deal of which involves being cold and sodden in rural Missouri, facing down miserable weather and wildlife.

I don’t know if there’s an equivalent of Method acting for novelists, but if there’s such a thing as “Method noveling,” we did it.