This summer has been all about sea adventures—though at this point, the sailing has all been in my mind.
What does that even mean?
First, I spent my August mornings sailing into the past.
This involved writing the course of a tea ship in 1841 on its journey from New York to China, while a captain and his wife struggle to find their new marriage’s feet. Ellen wasn’t the first captain’s wife to accompany her husband to sea, but she was unprecedented for the 19th century in the fact that she came aboard as his navigator.
This new book will become the first book in a series of Historic Sea Adventures. And yes, this is based on a juicy true story. And yes, it goes in some really wild and amazing (true) historic directions. But I’ll try not to spoil it just yet.
The writing process was a gorgeous mix of excruciating and amazing, and the first draft is now done. It took 8 months instead of the 8 weeks I was hoping for, but that was still an improvement on the 8 years it took me to draft The Prisoner’s Apprentice, so I’ll take the win. Also, I’m super jazzed about it. Tons of work yet to come to make it worthy of your eyes, but it should be published and ready for you to join the journey sometime in the next year or so.
Meanwhile, I spent my afternoons sailing into the future.
The final specification for our sailboat was due, and it took all our powers of research, visualization, and patience to come to a set of decisions. It was an amazing opportunity to build a boat according to our desires. It also meant making consequential choices about things well outside our daily knowledge zones, and knowing we’d have to live with them for a very long time.
In normal life, Colin and I both tend toward the minimalist end of the spectrum. Pretty far, actually. Speaking for myself, as in, if I ever got a tattoo on my ass, it would probably be Greg McKeown’s motto: Less But Better.
But most of this boat stuff is difficult to add later if we change our minds. And the creative writer in me had no trouble imagining desperate scenarios where we were far off-grid and missing this or that critical piece of gear.
I named this primary fear messenger Gear Regret. He wanted me to say yes to everything—just in case. But I had to balance his voice with that of his quieter, yet just as serious cousins.
Cost Regret was there to make sure we left enough in the bank account for buying books, and side trips, and, you know, financial viability and all that.
Space Regret wanted to remind us how much we hate the feeling of being so over-stuffed that we can’t access something, or remember where to find it, or even remember that we have it at all. Being that boat life may be reasonably compared to living inside a Fiat, this was pretty top of mind.
And finally, Complexity Regret—the quietest of all—whispered reminders about how much work it would take to maintain every bit of gear. How, in an endlessly shaken, corrosive, saltwater environment, everything we add would be guaranteed to break. Often. Never in a call-the-repair-person-and-call-it-a-day’ kind of way, but a fix-it-yourself-even-if-you’ve-no-clue-how-to-even-begin kind of way. It would almost certainly require troubleshooting, swearing, greasy knuckles, customer service hold music, and delaying our plans while waiting for parts.
But thanks to those fear messengers, and many more coffee dates with them, we finished the spec with—I believe—the best possible choices for us. Perfect ones? Ha. Is anything ever?? Was the process ideal? See my previous answer. (Somehow, everything I get done in my life seems to be through some unholy alchemy of strategy and grit.) But we’re confident that we’ll be really freaking happy with the end result.
So with that done, it’s back to full-time sailing into the past. There’s a manuscript to edit!
Fair winds,
Cheyenne
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