Chris Orcutt's Blog

[image error]Dear Reader, Early readers and reviewers have raved about Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome (to be published January 20, 2026), but a recent review from...

[image error]Greetings, Dear Reader. I’m dictating this blog entry while walking on my treadmill, so please excuse me if I ramble or my “smart” phone substitutes...

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A month ago, I finished the third draft of what I’m calling my “teen epic.” Between December 2023 and the end of April 2024, I cut 175,817 words (or 11.4%) from the 1.5 million-word manuscript, trimming it down to a 1,365,148 words. The epic novel is now actually 10 novels, and my aim is to cut the gargantuan series by another 10 to 15% during the fourth draft, which I’ll start on Tuesday after Memorial Day.

All of this talk about numbers might make it seem like I’ve been doing nothing but cutting words, but I assure you there’s a lot more to it than that. I’m pleased with the finished third draft because over the past six months I really refined the story and accentuated the storylines that I want to be a part of the finished book and cut a lot of extraneous material that doesn’t drive the story forward to the conclusion I’ve envisioned for nine years now.

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Part of my process over the past six months has been having the “computer lady” read the manuscript to me from my tablet. I’ve listened to my book for hundreds of hours while driving, working out, walking outdoors, etc.

That’s another thing: it hit me recently that I first started this series nine years ago, in the summer of 2015, when I made some initial notes on what I envisioned as a straightforward novel about teen experience in the 1980s. What started in the first draft as a partially autobiographical story has since developed into a 10-volume “teen epic” about a group of fictional teens in the years 1985-87.

Recently I did all of my ’80s fact-checking for the fourth draft, and in addition to correcting matters of fact in the next draft I’ll be shaping the elephantine manuscript (now 4000 letter-sized pages) into 10 distinct novels.

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The author as his alter-ego, editor Max Perky (with apologies to his editor idol, the great genius Max Perkins).

Novel-writing is about drafts. Most readers know nothing about how novels are actually put together and therefore think that the novelist simply sits down and types out a story that’s in his head, and the result is printed and bound and sold in bookstores. If only it were that easy. The reality is that writing a novel is a constant flux of building up and tearing down. You might spend weeks or months writing a section of a novel only to discover later on that the section is merely scrollwork or a preamble to the real story.

You then spend days, weeks or months cutting the parts that don’t fit and writing new material that improves on the previous draft or goes in a new direction altogether. The point is, while the reader gets to experience the finished, polished product (without the stops and starts of construction), as the builder, the novelist has to keep building and tearing down while constantly revising and refining (and compromising on) his vision for the finished product.

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The author taking a short break with his best friend, Dashiell Hammett. Photo by the author’s other best friend, Jason Scott.

The process reminds me a little bit of Thomas Jefferson’s home in Charlottesville, Virginia Monticello. Today when visitors to Monticello see the house and surrounding plantation, they’re seeing the finished product: a beautiful Neoclassical (style) mansion with Jefferson’s “gadgety” architectural touches (like the dumbwaiter that brought food upstairs from the kitchens to the dining room).

What visitors don’t see is the half dozen iterations that the main house went through. In fact, if you read a biography of Jefferson about his architectural ambitions, you’ll see that his original vision for the mansion bears no resemblance whatsoever to the finished one, the one we see today. It took Jefferson multiple “drafts” until he finally figured out his ultimate vision for the place, and, sadly (for him and his slaves that built it), Monticello wasn’t completed in his lifetime.

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Over the past six months, as I edited the third draft, my wife bought, painted and assembled these shelves for 15 my of 20 typewriters.

When I’m in the middle of a draft, I don’t do much reading of other writers; I usually don’t have time. During the third draft, for example, in order to cut 175,817 words from the second draft in 152 days (an average of 1,157 words cut per day), I had to work between 10 and 14 hours per day every day. The point is, I barely have enough time to read and revise my own work, so I’m not able to do any pleasure reading during a draft, and instead have to cram in all my reading between drafts.

During this most recent break, I’ve reread a number of books including John Irving’s The World According to Garp, Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage (about the expedition of Lewis and Clark), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. The aim is always to read (or reread) work that is different from what I’ve been immersed in for the previous months so I can forget my own writing. I need to forget my own work so when I return to it, it will be fresh, and the bad stuff will stick out.

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Editing on the back porch with Mr. Hammett. Note the reading glasses, red pen and ubiquitous cup of coffee.

During this break, I’ve also refilled the well by watching the entire TV series, Columbo. What a magnificent mystery series, and what a great character Peter Falk created! As a longtime aficionado of Sherlock Holmes, I can state with authority that Detective Lieutenant Columbo (we never learn his first name) is the second-best fictional detective.

What started out as a brief, clear report on my progress on the third draft has meandered into irrelevant territory. What was it that I originally wanted to say?

I guess the impetus for me writing this blog/journal entry in the first place was to document the feelings of doubt during the third draft, and the questions I’ve had about my own sanity. I can’t tell you, for example, how many days I’ve woken up and wondered if I was crazy to continue working on a 10-novel “teen epic” that takes place in the mid 1980s. Almost daily at the breakfast table, I’ve moaned to my wife and muse, “Who the hell is going to want to read this stuff?”

“A lot of people,” she replies. “There are millions of people our age and older who want to go back to a simpler time, before social media and the internet, before all of these wars and mass shootings and political unrest. There’s a readership out there that is starving for nostalgia, to be taken back to when they had very few responsibilities, and the world just made sense. You’re going to be giving readers a time machine back to the 1980s, and at ten dollars per novel it’s going to be the cheapest time machine they’ll ever find. You have to keep going, Chris. Your books are going to scratch an itch they didn’t even know they had.”

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The Hudson River near its headwaters in the Adirondacks. Two of the 9-10 episodes of my teen epic take place in Adirondack Park.

She’s right of course. So, on Tuesday, May 28—the day after Memorial Day—my submarine, the U.S.S. Bodacious, will submerge again for 218 days—until end of business on December 31. That is the amount of time I’m giving myself to finish the fourth draft.

I have several aims for the fourth draft. The prime directive is to shape each of the 10 episodes into a novel that can stand on its own, with its own plot and character arcs, climax and denouement. The second goal for the fourth draft is to cut away irrelevant characters and material—any stuff that leads away from what the series is ultimately about. Third, I need to refine the novel and chapter openings. Fourth, I need to more skillfully weave in mentions of current events and make corrections to matters of fact. And finally, this is the draft in which I want to make the language really sing.

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My wife’s birthday gift to me: a JBL boombox so I can listen to the ’80s soundtrack of the series while I’m writing, editing, working out or even showering.

While I’m submerged, I’ll see a handful of people very seldom, I’ll go on a couple working vacations (meaning I travel someplace, like to a cabin on a lake in the Adirondacks, and keep working), and I won’t watch or listen to any news about what’s going on in the world. Because this is a Presidential election year, invariably there will be a lot of social unrest, protests, riots, etc., but to complete my epic series, I have to block all of that out and focus exclusively on the events, music, TV, movies, and culture of 1985-1987.

You’ll hear from me again in January 2025, when I resurface briefly before the fifth and final draft. I’m setting a publication date of January 2026, which means that pre-orders for the epic series will start in November of next year, and I’ll actually be starting advance publicity for the series this winter.

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Mr. Dashiell Hammett (a.k.a., “Dash”) mugging for the camera at a cafe table at our favorite restaurant, Momiji hibachi in Rhinebeck, NY.

. . .

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As you can see by this clearly 100% real photo (AI had nothing to do with it), I also took a couple weeks off earlier this month to visit the Himalaya and climb Mount Everest (with apologies to Sir Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay).

. . .

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About five months ago, I bought a countdown clock that sits directly below my computer monitor, and for 157 days it’s been ticking down.

It’s been ticking down to my self-imposed deadline for the second draft of my behemoth epic novel (a series, actually). Last December, I set a deadline for myself: I would finish this draft by September 30, 2023.

Well, I finished two days ahead of time.

I’m proud of myself. If nothing else, I’ve been incredibly productive. In 157 days, I wrote 337,397 new words (or an average of 2,135/day); I revised 189,858 words (an average of 1,202 words); making for a total of 527,255 words (3,337/day). To do this, I routinely woke at 3 a.m. (especially during the final 30-day push) and worked 16 hours a day.

Speaking for myself, the second draft of every novel I write is usually the hardest. It’s the hardest draft because it’s the one in which you need to definitely determine what the story is, and you need to put in EVERYTHING so that when you start work on the third draft, you can focus on cutting. Basically, if you liken the novel-writing process to sculpture, the first two drafts are when you’re making your block of clay or marble, and in the subsequent drafts you chip away everything that doesn’t look like the story you’ve envisaged.

But now that the second draft is complete, I believe that all of that hard work has been worth it. My teen epic (the first of its kind) now totals 1,542,148 words. I did the calculations the other day, and the 1.5 million words of my epic is the equivalent of 300 five-thousand-word short stories.

[image error]Snoopy and Woodstock, trembling beneath the 2,900-page Brobdingnagian manuscript.

Recognizing that modern readers prefer their stories in more compact, “bingeable” sizes, I have divided this Brobdingnagian tale into 14 more manageable “episodes” of about 100,000 words each, and when I publish the series in approximately two years, I’ll do it serially—with a new installment coming out every two to three months.

I’ve been working on this teen epic for eight years now. Eight years. In the time that I’ve been writing, the planet Earth has revolved around the sun eight times; the world underwent catastrophic upheaval from COVID-19; and my nephew, who was five years old when I started, celebrated his 13th birthday (but he’s still into Legos—good for you, dude).

And to power this word output, over the course of these eight years, figuring a conservative average of 5 cups per day, I have drunk 14,600 cups of coffee.

The second draft is done, but there’s obviously a lot of work to do on the series. Starting in December, the work will shift to revision, particularly to paring down the mammoth manuscript. My aim is to cut about 300,000 words (or 20%) so that when I finally publish the series, it will be a dozen volumes of 100,000 words each. This will make my series twice as long as Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Why am I fixated on all of these numbers, you ask? Well, I’ve written about this on my blog before—and mentioned it in interviews and podcasts—but novel writing is as much a numbers game as it is a words game. In order to write a novel—and especially a long novel—you have to produce a lot of words (at least 1,000) a day, and you have to produce consistently.

And to produce consistently, you have to drastically reduce (if not eliminate) the distractions in your life. You have to—selfishly and unequivocally—make your writing the center of your universe. This means not engaging with social media. It means not spending as much time with your friends as you might like. It means sacrificing sleep, family gatherings, birthday parties, Christmas parties, movie premieres, vacations, and even knowing what’s happening in the world.

The computer I use for writing does not have an internet connection; I have purposely set up my work process and tools to be free of the internet. (Indeed, I enthusiastically agree with novelist Jonathan Franzen who in his “Ten Rules for Novelists” writes (Rule #8) that anybody with access to the internet while they’re writing is probably not producing very interesting fiction.)  I check my email once a day (on my phone), and I only go on the internet about once a week. There are only two people in the world with whom I text regularly: my wife and Jason Scott Sadofsky. I don’t have commercial TV (only streaming), so I don’t watch the news or see commercials for products. I don’t listen to the news on the radio, and if I’m listening to music on the local classical or classic rock station and the news comes on, I shut it off.

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Over the years a few people have asked me what it’s like to be a novelist, to spend all of your waking hours (not to mention your sleeping hours) inhabiting and writing about worlds of your own creation. To answer their question, I’ve given people a number of analogies, but I think the best one is that it’s like being on a nuclear submarine when it’s gone “deep and quiet.”

You’re submerged, umpteen fathoms down, cut off from the rest of the world, focused exclusively on your mission. Over the course of those eight years, I’ve probably gone “deep and quiet” for five or six months a dozen times. This means that I’ve been out of touch, focused on nothing but my mission, for approximately five of the last eight years.

While “deep and quiet,” however, I’ve had to contend with the equivalent of fires aboard my submarine, but I haven’t let those divert me from my mission to write and FINISH my epic-length series. Over the past eight years I’ve had to write through tooth abscesses and implants, contracting COVID, a broken hand, getting sober from alcohol (I will have 5 years’ sobriety on 11/11/23), car breakdowns, my spouse getting sick with COVID (and taking care of her), moving, house-hunting (without success 3 separate times for six months to a year), computers dying, an uncle dying, “runner’s knee,” and back issues. The back issues became such a problem (even despite my $2,000 Aeron chair) a few months ago, that I had to get a motorized sit-stand desk.

Invariably, when I resurface after one of these long “deep and quiet” periods, a lot of stuff has happened—stuff that other people encounter and deal with in their daily lives, but which I know nothing about. When I resurfaced earlier this week, here are some of the things I just found out about:

– Ukraine is beating back Russia.

– Putin is still a major DICK.

– The Island of Maui burned to the ground.

– The economy of Venezuela collapsed, and thousands of refugees have been hiking north through the jungles of South and Central America to get to the U.S.

– There’s a new Student Loan Forgiveness program.

– Chad Lookabaugh, the local tennis pro I took lessons from and did workouts with, died suddenly in January. He was a great guy, and I’ll miss hanging out with him in the winter in front of the fireplace in the lobby of his tennis club.

– Inflation is a very real thing; yet, mysteriously, gasoline prices remain steady (hmm…).

– Kids’ cereal icons Count Chocula, BooBerry and FrankenBerry now have a female counterpart (well, it’s about time!) named Caramella.

– Sadly (because I own a good amount of Tesla stock), Elon Musk seems to be behaving like Veronica’s dipshit rich brother in the Archie comics.

– The makers of products—especially food—are up to their old tricks again with shrinkflation: charging you the same (or more) for less product.

– The U.S. government shut down, or is/was about to shut down, or something.

– And instead of Cracker Jacks, it’s now all about Cracker Jills (good riddance, Jack; you and your friggin’ mutt on the package had like a 90-year run, and towards the end I COULD NEVER FIND YOU F-CKS anywhere!).

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What’s my point? Although it’s a bit of culture shock to resurface and learn that so many things have changed while I’ve been preoccupied—on my mission as it were—I don’t regret a minute of it. For the past eight years, I’ve been happily ensconced in 1986–87 America, specifically in the world of teenagers at that time. I can’t tell you anything about what’s going on right now, but I can tell you that in October 1986 the U.S.–U.S.S.R. talks at Reykjavik broke down, and that in November 1986 the Iran-Contra scandal came to light. I can tell you that in September 1986 the song “Venus” by Bananarama was at the top of the charts, and Huey Lewis and the News’ “Stuck with You” was rising on the charts as well. I can tell you that in October 1986, during the season premiere of Dallas, it was revealed that everything that happened in the previous season—when Bobby Ewing died—was a dream in Pam Ewing’s mind.

For eight years I’ve been inhabiting a world when the U.S. was on top, when China was just a country with almost a billion people that rode bicycles everywhere, when the U.S.S.R. was crumbling, when Ronald Reagan was President,  when “cellular telephones” were extremely rare and were bigger than military walkie-talkies (see the beach scene in the original Wall Street)l, when The Cosby Show was #1 on TV, when phone booths were still available, and when—GASP—there was no internet.

[image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error]A gallery of some of the 1980s images I’ve surrounded myself with for eight years.

I’ve been submerged here for quite a while, though, and so it’s good to come up for some 2023 air. With this in mind, I’m giving myself the entire month of October off. What am I going to do? Take naps. Hike. Swim. Lift weights. Run. Climb a mountain or two. Stretch. Play with my dog. Seek out typewriters at vintage stores. Visit vintage clothing stores for apparel for my editor alter-ego (to debut in November or December—stay tuned). Listen to jazz and classical music (anything but ’80s rock and pop, which is all I’ve been listening to for eight years). Have some great meals out. Go to Boston. Go to the Adirondacks. Buy a set of cross-country skating skis for what I hope will be a record amount of snowfall this winter.

[image error]I’ll be spending a lot more time with THIS guy in October–my faithful writing companion, Mr. Dashiell Hammett. :)

And last, but not least, read about 20 books (a dozen of them will be re-reads) during the break so I’m not thinking about my teen epic, including Lolita, Robinson Crusoe, The Odyssey, Goldfinger, The Longest Day, High Adventure, The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Editors on Editing, Immediate Fiction, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, a book about fonts entitled Just My Type, and books on grammar and punctuation as I prepare to undertake my favorite part of the writing process in December—revision, editing and polishing.

Right now, however, I’m archiving my work on this draft and printing the completed draft. It’s staggering to see the stacks and stacks of pages I’ve produced to bring me to this point—the dozens of legal pads of longhand notes and pages from the novel; the hundreds of pages typed on one of my typewriters and scanned and OCR’d into the computer; the dozens of spiral notebooks of character sketches or scene ideas; the reams of ’80s pictures and research files. All of this material is being boxed up and stored out of my purview.

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I printed two copies of the novel. One copy is stored in my basement, and the second is in the trunk of my car. Each copy is 2,915 legal pages (single-spaced). These are solely emergency hard-copies—in case all of the 10–12 hard drive and USB stick backups of my writing are suddenly wiped out by an EMP.

[image error]Poor Snoopy and Woodstock with my epic novel (6 reams of legal paper) looming over them.

For the past 30 years that I’ve been revising my writing, I’ve always made hand-edits on printed pages, then entered those changes into a word processing file. But having just finished the 2nd draft, when I engaged in that process for literally thousands of pages, each page with dozens and dozens of small edits on it, I realized that if I want to finish this colossus sometime during my lifetime (seriously, I want to publish in the fall of 2025), I can’t use this paper process anymore. It triples the amount of time that revisions take.

No, sir…this time I’m going hi-tech.

For this part of the process my darling wife just bought me a new Microsoft Surface tablet, which will enable me to read the novel anywhere and either make edits on the device or at least put in short comments, flagging spots that I need to fix. Anyway, I’m excited about it because I have a feeling it’s going to make this part of the process much more efficient.

[image error]I have to say, Microsoft has seriously upped their game in recent years with the advent of their Surface tablets. Glad I’m a stockholder!

The moment I got the tablet, I gave it a serious test. The hardest part of the process was getting it updated, logged in, etc., but once that was done I loaded THE ENTIRE 1.54-MILLION-WORD NOVEL onto this thing that weighs about a pound, is smaller than a sheet of paper, and only as thick as 20–30 sheets of paper (maybe). It’s incredible, and I am confident that it’s going to revising the 3rd draft much, much more efficient.

My plan for this coming draft is as follows:

1. Take the month of October off completely. Dedicate my days to working out, eating well, going places with my dog every day, going to thrift stores, going out to lunch with friends (all 2 or three of them). On rainy days, I’ll consolidate the papers (random notes, reference materials, etc.) and come up with a master list of ’80s-related “stuff” that I want to make sure I work into the novel.

2. Starting November 1, I will read (without editing; not an easy task for a novelist) the entire series. This reading will be done in three main ways: a) on the tablet, b) on the printed hard copy, and c) with the “computer lady” reading the book to me as I walk on the treadmill and work out—maybe even as I’m hiking! While reading, I will NOT be making revisions; this first read is to try to get a view of the entire forest, to step back and see the vista without becoming obsessed about one or two trees.

Rather than making edits to the manuscript, I plan on keeping audio recordings (this is where the tablet comes in) of notes of errors, things to fact-check, and overall impressions of each day’s reading, chapters and episodes. Keep audio recordings of all this stuff so I don’t stop reading to make edits. Do a journal entry every evening with that day’s impressions—what pages I covered, my gut impressions of that day’s material, and my thoughts on what will need to be revised.

3. Starting December 1, literally putting on my editor’s hat (stay tuned), I will begin the revision and editing. I’m giving myself one year to revise the entire series. My plan is to quickly “swoop” through the entire series three times in a year, starting by making the largest revisions (any big CUTS that need to be made) first, and gradually making my revision and editing more granular as the year goes on.

The main way in which this draft is going to be different from the process I’ve used with all of my previous books is this: there will be NO hand-corrections made to a paper draft that then need to be entered into the computer. In the past, this is the part of the process that has consumed the most time. Honestly, I really, really prefer this leisurely, tactile method, but I don’t have the luxury with this behemoth novel—not if I want to release it in late November 2025. With the tablet, I’ll be able to read and/or listen to the book and make edits to the file itself. 

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Honestly, though, I’m a little sad that I have to give up the paper editing. Especially in the fall, when one of my favorite things to do in life is to sit on my deck with a hot cup of coffee, a crisp stack of pages, and a red pen. But there will be other, shorter novels for that.

The most important thing for me in the coming year is to just get the sonovabitch DONE. I’m breaking the year up into three 120-day “swooping” periods; during each 120-day cycle, I plan to “swoop” through the entire manuscript, starting with identifying large sections that can/should be cut, and making my revisions and editing increasingly granular with the next two “swoops.” My plan is that by next December (2024) I will have gone through the entire 14-episode series three times. And then, in 2025 and 2026 I’ll polish each episode prior to publication.

Check back here in late October or early November for the debut of my editing alter-ego.

[image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error]My dog, Dashiell Hammett, is utterly “pooched” (a Downeast Maine trope) after the months of hard work.

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My friend Jason Scott and I have been friends since 5th grade–that’s over 40 years–and during that time Jason has continually introduced me to, and shared with me, the latest in computer technology.

The other day, Jason shared with me some art that he’d created using an artificial intelligence (AI) art engine called Stable.Diffusion and a plugin called Dreambooth. He showed me about a dozen portraits the program had generated of him.

Intrigued, I mentioned offhand that I wouldn’t mind seeing a few of myself. So, using 30 images of my face (taken from previous photos), he input them into the AI engine. The next day he sent me a link to 60 images, and the next day he sent me a link to another 100. Each piece of art, he said, takes the engine about 10 seconds to render. The following are just some of the results. I have to tell you, I am blown away by the results.

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A couple weeks ago, I finished the second draft of the third episode (or volume) of the epic-length novel I’ve been writing for seven years. I’m now headed into the homestretch with this draft, since the next episode will be the last one in the series.

What this means is, I hope to be finished with the second draft of the entire million-plus-word series by this time next year. After that, it’s “simply” a matter of letting the book lie fallow for a few months, then going back and reading it with fresh eyes and revising it for the third (and hopefully final) draft.

I began work on the second draft last winter, and although I haven’t finished the second draft of the whole series yet, I have managed to revise (or write anew) 708,000 words. (That’s longer than three copies of Moby Dick; that’s longer even than War and Peace.) Doing this, however, has been an unbelievable amount of work, requiring at least 10-hour work days for six days a week, and has left me mentally, physically, and emotionally spent.

And while deep in the Sisyphean midst of this overwhelming mountain of work, macabrely my thoughts have turned to a comment I’ve heard many times—a comment that forms the title of this blog entry.

[image error]The workstation where I wrote or revised over 700K words in the past year.

While I’ve been writing professionally for 30 years (in 1992, I got my first writing job straight out of college as a reporter for this now-defunct newspaper), this year marks the 20th year that I’ve been writing fiction full-time. Two decades of waking up every day and writing stories, creating characters and worlds.

Over the course of the past 20 years, upon learning what I do, many people have commented to me, “Man…you’re livin’ the dream!” The most memorable time, the comment was made by a staff writer for the HBO series Hung. We both had entries in a play festival and were explaining our backgrounds to each other. Very quickly I figured out that this guy was overworked, unfulfilled and stressed-out from having to crank out episodes of a TV show. Then, when I told him that I wrote exclusively my own fiction and (at the time) did speechwriting work occasionally to supplement my income, his face lightened and he appeared to be visualizing “the dream” for himself. When he came back to reality, there was a little envious twitch in his brow, and then he said, “Man, that’s great. Good for you. I’m glad one of us is livin’ the dream.”

You know what? I really am living the dream—but it’s my dream. I’ve known since I was 13 years old that this was what I wanted to do with my life—write fiction, be a novelist—and I get to do this work every day, and I’m profoundly grateful for it. But when non-writers (or unfulfilled screenwriters, journalists, content writers, ad men, etc.) have made that comment, they’ve typically focused only on the pleasant aspects of my work and they either haven’t understood, or they’ve downplayed, the negatives—chiefly, how much time and labor the work requires.

What they don’t see or don’t visualize as a part of “the dream” are the endless 12-hour days required to finish a novel. They also don’t see the fact that novel-writing is an absolute time-sink (the other day, I glanced at the clock and it was noon; I wrote three paragraphs, looked up at the clock and it was three o’clock; goodbye to another gorgeous Saturday afternoon).

Because novel-writing is a solitary activity where the writer spends a good 80% of his time alone, he doesn’t have a lot of people (if anybody) with whom he can share his work or simply make a connection. And in order to create living, breathing characters, the novelist must live not only his own personal emotional life with all its ups and downs, but also the emotional lives of all of his characters, and he also must put everything that is in him into the work. In my case, on a daily basis I’m besieged by doubts and guilt and an overwhelming sense of emotional angst (or tinnitus), usually not about things that I, Chris Orcutt, have contemplated or done, but because of things that my characters have contemplated, done, and possibly felt guilty about.

This can lead to times when my emotional reserves (or “the well”) are absolutely depleted—something that has happened to me at least ten times over the past 20 years, and it happened to me again recently, during lunch with my best friend.

Seeing that I was distraught (I was considering drinking for the first time in 3½ years), he kindly suggested a dozen things he could do to help me. I truly appreciated his kindness, but I knew what I needed.

I needed a break. I needed a vacation. I needed to roam and explore and get the hell away from my cast of 20+ self-absorbed teenage characters. I needed to refill the well.

So that’s exactly what I did.

I’ve discovered that, for me, these breakdowns occur when there’s an imbalance between output and input. I have an emotional breakdown when I’ve had nothing but output for a long time, and my well of images, feelings, and inspiration has drained down to dregs. When this happens, I have to get input back into the system: I have to see new and different people and places, stop writing for output for a while (instead just take casual, random notes, a form of input), and simply enjoy myself. In short, I have to go have adventures.

I’ve written extensively elsewhere about some of my past modest adventures: in Paris and Normandy, on a two-week driving tour of Great Britain, in the wilds of Montana, etc. This time around, my well-refilling adventure was much more spontaneous, and broken into three parts: a week on Florida beaches and at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, a week’s “staycation” of seeing friends and going to movies, and a few days in my new wilderness getaway location—Adirondack Park.

[image error]The author in Fort Lauderdale, FL, ready to enjoy his hard-earned vacation.

I love to swim, so my wife booked us into a resort hotel in Fort Lauderdale, and I did nothing but work out, run on the beach, and swim in the ocean and the amazing resort pool. Something about the pleasant monotony of the ocean waves clears my head, and after an angry and disturbed 24 hours of not knowing what to do with myself, I became “vacation Chris”—a guy who makes friends with the locals and fellow vacationers. I conversed in Spanish with the pool maintenance guy, Jorge, before the sun had come up. I perfected making egg white vegetable omelets in our hotel room kitchenette. I threw a football around in the surf with a group of Austrian exchange students and explained the rules of American football. I read a couple pages (and only a couple) of a nonfiction book I’ve been savoring: Max Perkins, Editor of Genius. In no time—perhaps because the well had already begun to refill—random ideas for my novel-in-progress started coming to me, and I wrote them in a “007” Moleskine notebook I’d brought. And I also got a pretty sweet tan.

[image error]The author at Clearwater Beach, Florida, May 2022.

After a drive across the state through the Everglades (disappointing; we didn’t see a single alligator), my wife and I went to famed Clearwater Beach on the Gulf Coast. There, I played bocce with a group of 20-something American guys and swam a lot.

Then, the next day, we went to Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and I wore my safari jacket and a new hat I’d picked up in Florida. Consequently, my safari outfit was better than that worn by the park employees, and I was asked for directions (and complimented by staff about my outfit) at least a dozen times during the day. For the course of the day, in my mind I pretended to be a young version of a character I created in my story “The Last Great White Hunter”—Buck Remington. “What kind of a man was he? More than a man’s man, that’s for sure. He was a man’s man’s man.”

[image error]The author, Chris Orcutt, as one of his own fictional characters, Buck Remington.

As a guy who never got to experience any of the Disney parks as a kid, I was thoroughly blown away by my visit—most notably how the park operated like a Swiss watch: with total precision. I had gone into the experience girding my loins, expecting to have to wait for hours for certain rides and attractions, but I discovered that the rides are designed so that standing in line is part of the experience, and so the half-hour that we had to wait was never a hardship.

[image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error]The author as 7-year-old Chris Orcutt, a kid who wanted to be an explorer.

When I was waiting in line for my second ride on the Mt. Everest “thrill ride,” I perused photos on the wall of a 1982 expedition to Forbidden Mountain in the Himalayas to seek out the Yeti. Now, as someone who has read a couple dozen books about Bigfoot and the Yeti (or Abominable Snowman), I was intrigued; I’d never heard of this 1982 expedition, and some of the photos recovered from an expedition camera seemed to show a Yeti. As the line to get on the ride moved forward, I had to stop reading the display, but later on looked it up and learned it was 100% fictitious—created entirely by the Disney imagineers. Wow. These men and women are good.

I loved everything about Animal Kingdom, and when we got back from this vacation, I immediately bought 50 more shares of Disney stock. While there, I realized something: Nobody does it like Disney, and whatever they do in the future, I want to make sure I have a piece of it.

When we got home again, I took some more time off, getting together with friends, swimming, working out, and going to the movies.

Since I’m working on a novel that takes place in 1986-87, the original Top Gun makes an appearance in the novel, so ever since I found out about the sequel, I’ve been looking forward to the movie. Honestly, though, I thought the producers would screw it up, making some watered-down, politically correct movie, but they didn’t. Clearly, they used the original movie as a template, creating one of the best movies I’ve seen in years.

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What most pleased me about Top Gun: Maverick was that, unlike superhero movies made today, it wasn’t made for the new generation; it was made for my generation—those of us who saw the original movie in the theater half a dozen times during the summer of ’86. The makers of Maverick used the same story structure, and simply augmented and refined the original movie “thrill ride” with modern special effects, a videogame component, and a character (a few years older than me) who is now at the end of his career. All I can say is, my first words to my wife (during the movie) were, “I want the Blu-Ray of this movie for Christmas.” (A week after seeing Maverick in the theater the first time, I went back and saw it a second time—it’s that good.)

My most recent adventure in refilling the well was even more spontaneous than the Florida trip. For months, I’d been casting about for ideas on where to go in order to refill the well, and then I realized that a few important scenes in my epic novel take place in the Adirondacks in New York State, and in Burlington on Lake Champlain in Vermont. Back in my teens and early 20s, I spent a lot of time up there with Boy Scouts and visiting a friend’s house on one of the lakes, but with the exception of visiting Lake Placid every couple of years for XC-skiing, I hadn’t really explored up there in nearly 30 years.

[image error]The author, dangerously taking a selfie at 64 mph (while rockin’ his Van Halen T-shirt).[image error][image error][image error][image error][image error]Scenes of lakes and rivers inside Adirondack Park.

So, for four days I wended my way around Adirondack Park, visiting about a dozen lakes (hey, California: by the way, New York has all the water), hamlets surrounded by mountains, and locations that appear in the novel. I used the trip in part to relax, and in part to remind myself of several facts about these areas for the novel. Among the many things I was reminded of, following are a few truths I relearned:

1. The water in these lakes is extremely cold, even in mid-June. (In my late teens and early 20’s, I did a lot of waterskiing with a friend whose family had a house on one of the lakes up there, but I’d forgotten since then just how cold the waters are.)

2. The deer flies and blackflies are super-friendly up there, gathering excitedly around your car to greet you before you’ve even had a chance to park.

3. Adirondack Park is VAST—nothing but 6-million acres of mountains, lakes, rivers, bogs, ravines and true, dense, primordial wilderness. When seen in satellite view, the few roads and communities contained within the confines of the park look like gossamer-thin spider webs compared to the overwhelming green of the woods.

[image error][image error][image error][image error]Four of the Adirondack Park “Great Camps.”

While up there, I swam in several lakes, visited a couple of the “great camps” (family “getaway” lodges once owned by prominent industrialists like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller and Durant), and in general simply began “dreamsketching” (my term) the outline for the last episode of the novel. The climax of the final episode and million-word series takes place in the Adirondacks, so I want it to be riveting and accurate.

Driving around an area puts me into something of a meditative trance, allowing “dreamsketching” of the novel to happen spontaneously. (I have engaged in this activity for every novel I’ve written—most notably during a two-week driving and hiking tour of Montana and Yellowstone National Park that formed the basis for the second half of my Dakota mystery The Rich Are Different.) In this case, I drove hundreds of miles through Adirondack Park while listening to music that conjures scenes from the novel, and as the music washed over me, and these amazing images of the wilderness up there washed over me (steep and towering mountainsides; deep, shadowy ravines; rushing rivers; deep blue lakes; and impenetrable, dense, dark woods), the scenes played out for me in my mind, and I would pull the car over occasionally and make notes in the “007” Moleskine notebook.

[image error]Chef Darryl’s Mountain Diner in Blue Mountain Lake, NY.

As a sidebar, I have to mention that I had the best breakfast of my life at a charming little diner in Blue Mountain Lake, NY: Chef Darryl’s Mountain Diner. This place is truly a culinary oasis in a vast and forbidding wilderness (Adirondack Park). Chef Darryl himself greeted me when I walked in, and he made my scrambled eggs exactly how I like them—“fluffy.” My breakfast there was SO good that I went back a few hours later and bought lunch to go. I also bought a Chef Darryl’s Mountain Diner “regular’s” mug and wrote my name on the bottom (“Chris Orcutt, Novelist”), so the next time I go back, I’ll only have to pay $1.00 for my coffee—with unlimited refills. Thanks, Darryl! The food there was so good, the next day when I wanted breakfast, even though the diner was 40-some-odd miles away, I seriously considered backtracking an hour for Darryl’s magnificent cooking.

I’m not going to write about finding the train depot in the Adirondacks where Theodore Roosevelt learned he had become president after William McKinley’s assassination; nor about my adventure hiking around Sagamore Lake and borrowing somebody’s canoe; nor about my fly fishing adventure on the west branch of the Ausable River; nor about my afternoon hanging out with the attractive male and female lifeguards on Lake Champlain (a group of teens and 20-somethings whom I dubbed Baywatch: Burlington North Beach); nor about my quest to find the location of a 1976 bigfoot sighting outside of Whitehall, NY. I’m sorry, but those are just for me.

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Now, though, as I head into the homestretch with my behemoth epic novel, I’m determined to pace myself with this final episode. I realize that I need to take regular breaks to refill the well, so I don’t have the kind of breakdown I had this spring.

This August I will take a couple days to “do” Saratoga—hanging out with the trainers and handicappers by the fence rails watching the early-morning workouts, betting on the races during the day, and swimming and working out and playing billiards in the evenings. This fall I will take another trip to the Adirondacks, and said trip will include some more fly fishing. Early this winter (probably in December), I’m traveling alone to Lake Placid, NY and getting extensive lessons in skating style cross-country skiing from a professional at the Mount Van Hoevenberg Olympic training facility. And next March, Alexas and I will return to Florida for at least a week of sun and beaches, and to visit Disney’s Epcot or Hollywood.

Yup…I suppose that writer for Hung was right: I am livin’ the dream.

But now I realize that livin’ the dream encompasses more than the endless work of trying to create novels that will stand the test of time; livin’ the dream also means roaming and exploring and refilling the creative well—without having to answer to anybody along the way.

These breaks are an integral part of the dream, and from now on I’m going to make sure I take them.

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On December 7, 2015, I began writing my epic novel (my magnum opus), and while I’ve also worked on other projects on and off since then, the vast majority of my time and energy has gone into what I refer to as “the Big Book.” This means that I’ve been writing this book for six years, and I’ve just entered the seventh year.

[image error]This T-shirt has gotten a LOT of wear this year.

The thing that is somewhat disheartening for me is this: I’m still on the second draft of the book. Because the Big Book is so long (my prediction is that, when finished, it will weigh in at 800K to 1M words), it will actually be presented in 6 volumes, or episodes as I call them. And here’s the really disheartening fact: yesterday I just finished the second draft of Episode 2. Two out of a possible 6.

Actually, while I’ve only completed the second draft of two episodes, I did manage to finish half of Episode 3, so technically I’ve finished 2½ out of 6, which is a little better. Looking my writing productivity over the entire year, however, the numbers are staggering. To finish those 2½ episodes this year, I wrote or revised approximately 475,000 words (that’s a little more than 6 copies of my A Real Piece of Work), and wrote another approximately 30,000 words in the journal of the Big Book and on my blog.

That’s HALF A MILLION words written or rewritten. Not bad for a year’s work.

[image error]Rewriting command central. Note the new computer and the awesome vertically-oriented monitor. :)

You might be wondering why I’m prattling on about all of these numbers. Well, here’s the deal: writing novels is as much a numbers game as it is a words game. To finish a novel, any novel, the writer has to consistently write or rewrite a minimum number of words every day. The writer needs to do this for at least three drafts, and the writer needs to work a consistent number of hours each day. Numbers of words, numbers of drafts, numbers of hours.

Back in December, when I entered the seventh year of this project, I realized a couple things. First, if I wanted to meet my goal of finishing the entire book by 2024 or 2025, I had to let go of my desire for perfection in every draft. Instead, by any means—by any dodge, cheat, hack, or positive or negative reinforcement I could conceive—I had to simply finish the second draft of all 6 episodes. This second draft will never be seen by the reading public, I told myself, so in a sense it doesn’t matter. Second I realized that, while I might be the most self-disciplined and self-directed person I know, I still need to have ironclad deadlines; for me, if finish dates are left open-ended, that just gives the perfectionist in me more time to tinker, and f-ck tinkering at this stage.

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This stage, this draft, is all about get it the f-ck finished. Period. So, with these two realizations in mind, I have created a production schedule for myself for the rest of the year.

February and March: Finish the second draft of Episode 3.

April, May, June: Finish the second draft of Episode 4.

July, August, September: Finish the second draft of Episode 5.

October, November, December: Finish the second draft of Episode 6.

By December 31, 2022, I want to be finished with the second draft of the entire epic novel. It’s an incredibly daunting goal, but as Lao Tzu once wrote, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Over the course of 30 years of doing this stuff, I’ve become very good at continuing to make that next step. From one of my ancestors I inherited this ability to just keep putting one foot in front of the other, and to finish big projects by completing small task after small task.

Oh, and did I mention that my wife and I recently began hunting for a house again (stress), and that I diagnosed myself as having stupid GERD from my 30 years of coffee-drinking, so I recently had to give up coffee? (One definition of a writer: a machine that converts coffee into words.)

Yeah. It SUUHHHHHHCCCCCCKKKKKSSSS!

But in life, we can either adapt and live (maybe even thrive), or we can stay the same and die. I choose to adapt. It’s Redfin for the house hunt and green tea for the GERD.

Half a league, half a league, half a league onward!

[image error]The overwork and self-created STRESS has caused me to overeat a bit.

In a recent interview with my best friend Jason Scott (internet archivist, computer historian, filmmaker and now successful podcaster, the brilliant f-cker), Jason says that he has always admired my self-discipline and my “pretty impressive” routine of writing and fitness. Well, as I said in the interview, I’m hardly super-human. As I pointed out in one of my recent blog entries, when I am drawing near to a deadline, the stress (self-imposed stress, but stress nonetheless) usually causes me to overeat and exercise less. For the past month, I’ve only exercised three days a week instead of my usual six, and I’ve been self-soothing through junk food: Jelly Belly Sours, Mike & Ike, Popcorners (cheddar cheese), Newman’s pizzas, and Bread Alone bread. The result is, I’ve probably put on an extra 10 pounds. But, as Wyatt Earp says in the Kevin Costner movie (when he’s come back to Dodge City to clean up the lawlessness), “IT ALL ENDS NOW!”

[image error]Those of you from the 80s will get the reference.

As soon as I finish this blog entry, I’m going downstairs to my home gym and work out for two hours. Over the years, my wife has (somewhat enviously) pointed out to me that, once I start eating right, drinking a lot of water, and exercising daily, it only takes my body about two weeks to return to its toned, trim status quo. I guess that’s true, but I never noticed it until she started pointing it out. I think it comes from a lifetime of being active; my body just knows the drill by now.

Anyway, this is what the seventh year on the Big Book will look like: daily writing and rewriting; daily nutrition and fitness; daily sobriety and self-care.

Not a lot of drama, to be sure. But as Flaubert once said, “The novelist needs to be regular and orderly in his everyday life so that he can be violent and original on the page.”

And I’m doing that, my friends. By keeping my everyday life consistent and drama-free, I’ve been able to put nearly all of my life force into my writing. As a result, the Big Book is good. I mean really good. Sometimes when I read sections of it over again, I can’t believe I wrote it; it’s that good.

But today until Tuesday, no more Big Book. I’m giving myself a much-needed three-day vacation. A fitness and nutrition vacation (and some Red Dead Redemption 2; thanks for the XBONE, Jay!), with some self-care stuff thrown in there—maybe a massage and a haircut.

Before I go, I’d like to point out one last thing. If this blog entry wasn’t as smooth-reading as others I’ve written in the past, or if it rambles or it contains mistakes that you usually don’t see in my writing, that’s because I only wrote one draft of it. (In the past, revising blog entries three times was not uncommon for me.) In other words, this is me letting go of this need for perfection in all things. Sorry, folks, but it’s a f-cking blog entry; I’m not writing multiple drafts of these things anymore; as you can see from everything I’ve written here, I’ve got a LOT of other writing to do, and I need to save my energy for the Big Book.

Now, with that, it’s time to go exercise, and then, on Tuesday, February 1, it’s back to work.

You’ll hear from me again when I finish Episode 3, which has the apt working subtitle of Danger Zone.

[image error]The cover of my note cards. Readers who write to me sometimes receive one of these in reply.

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Last weekend, I attended a surprise party for my younger sister’s 50th birthday. The party, hosted by her husband and best friend, was a great success, mostly because she never had a clue about it. During the party, I found myself among some of my sister’s friends from high school. These women were a couple class years behind me, and most of them hadn’t seen me since then. One of her friends was chatting with me and other people from our school when, out of nowhere, she blurted out to the other women at the table, “Chris has not aged a year! Not a year! He looks exactly like he did in high school!” She said this in an awestruck tone, got up and walked away shaking her head.

After the party, I kept thinking about the woman’s compliment, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t deeply flattered. Of course I have aged since high school, but perhaps not as quickly or as severely as others. I’ve gained weight (I no longer have the 3% body fat I had back then); my hair is thinner and silver now, instead of the lush auburn brown it once was; and over the past 33 years I’ve struggled with excesses and addictions including marijuana and alcohol. (Thankfully, I’m now completely sober, and have been for almost three years.)

I continued to think about the woman’s compliment during the week, when I engaged in my fitness regimen, which includes some variety of the following: strength training, running, rowing, lap swimming, tennis, hiking, mountain climbing, golf, cross-country skiing (in season), and flexibility and pliability work. I also thought about my recent vacation alone to the seashore, where I—sun-kissed, muscular and dripping wet—had a walking-out-of-the-surf moment akin to Daniel Craig’s in the James Bond movie Casino Royale.

[image error]Okay, I didn’t look this good, but it was close.

As I relaxed at the seashore, engaged in my fitness regimen, and mused about the compliment that I haven’t aged, I realized that the life I’m living now is largely because of a book I read a long time ago.

When I was 14, I stumbled upon a book in my junior high school library that changed my life in innumerable ways. I can’t remember the book’s title or author, but it was basically an introduction to Ancient Greek philosophy, with emphasis on the teachings of Plato. One of Plato’s ideas (which I later learned was in his Republic) made a deep impression on me. Plato said that the Ideal Man (or citizen) developed both his intellect and his physical body to their highest potential, and that the two are balanced; he is as strong and physically capable as he is smart and intellectually well-rounded; he is a scholar-athlete. By exercising the body and cultivating the mind through study, the Ideal Man eventually brings the two elements—physical and intellectual—“into tune with one another by adjusting the tension of each to the right pitch.”

[image error]Doing some bicep curls on the “preacher” bench.

I can still remember exactly where I was when I read that. I was sitting alone on the school bus, riding through a neighboring development on my way home. It was an early summer afternoon, close to the end of the school year, and I laid the book on my lap and thought about this idea.

Plato, recalling the teachings of his teacher, Socrates, explained why it was critical that a person should develop both the physical and intellectual: “Excessive emphasis on athletics produces an excessively uncivilized type, while a purely literary training leaves men indecently soft.” He also said that while there were many men who were intellectually developed, and while there were many who were physically developed, there were very few men in the world equally developed in both areas. In other words, the Ideal Man was rare.

[image error]Enjoying the cross-country skiing in February 2021.

This idea was extremely attractive to me at the time. I liked the notion of distinguishing myself somehow, of being special, a rarity. While I was very smart and fairly athletic (baseball, tennis, swimming, horseback riding, Boy Scouts), I wasn’t the smartest person among my friends, and I wasn’t the most athletic or physically developed either. I had a friend (and still have) who was intellectually gifted and showed incredible aptitude for computers. I had another friend who was an avid weightlifter and bodybuilder (and still is, I believe). But—and this is why Plato’s notion of the Ideal Man was so attractive to me—I didn’t know anyone who was both.

That afternoon on that bus, I made a decision, a decision that I now see did more to positively influence my life than any other. I decided I was going to become an Ideal Man—one whose intellectual and physical assets and capabilities are balanced and reach their highest potential. As someone who was very good at coining new lingo at the time, I even came up with my own term for this: “rugged intellectualism.” I decided to make myself into a rugged intellectual.

[image error]Reading and editing on the back porch after my workout.

After school that day I set up a small “gym” in the unfinished basement of the raised ranch where we were living, and I started immediately with body weight exercises: pushups, sit-ups, pull-ups, etc. I filled two gallon milk jugs with stones and lashed the jug handles to a broomstick to create a temporary, makeshift barbell. Soon I got a weight set, bench and heavy bag and really started to make progress on my physique, so by the time I was 17, relatives who hadn’t seen me in a while didn’t even recognize me. I played tennis and baseball in high school, and I also did track.

When I got to college, I immersed myself in my studies as never before, starting as a forensic chemistry major and eventually switching to philosophy and history. I had loathed high school—endlessly being told what to do, when to do it, what to study, and the pointless hours of “homework”—but in college, where I was encouraged to be self-directed and self-disciplined—I positively bloomed. In addition to my required coursework, in my sophomore year (when I knew I was going to become a writer) I set out to read as many of the classics as I possibly could. I realized I would probably never again have as much time for leisure reading as I had in college, so I read the classics every chance I got.

Near my college in Boston, there was a bookstore (I think it was one of the now-defunct B. Dalton Booksellers), which had an amazing selection of quality, inexpensive Signet and Penguin paperback classics. Each Friday evening, I would take one of my girlfriends to dinner and the movie theater next door to the bookstore, but before going to the movie, I would buy myself 4-5 new classics. I set myself a goal of finishing one every two days, but some (like Candide and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) I tore through in an afternoon, while others like Anna Karenina, took me a solid two weeks to finish. I can still remember the way the steeplechase scene in Anna K. made my heart pound with anxiety for Anna and Vronsky, the pity I felt for Madame Bovary when (spoiler alert) she kills herself by poison, the nightmares I had while reading the first 100 pages of Dracula, the motivation I felt to write when I read Jack London’s Martin Eden, and the wave of admiration and envy that washed over me when I read Fitzgerald, Hemingway, or Steinbeck. I still have dozens of the 200-plus classics I bought back then.

[image error]My typical bedside library.

I went on to reach my highest potential intellectually in college, graduating summa cum laude (5th in my class of 750) and Phi Beta Kappa, but physically I fell down in a major way. Idolizing Jim Morrison and Axl Rose, I drank way too much (sometimes waking from blackouts in Boston alleys), smoked way too much marijuana, got involved with too many girls, and did very little athletically.

Unfortunately, this trend continued on and off through my twenties into my early thirties, when I was trying to get established and choose my career path. I was a newspaper reporter for a few years, then a high school teacher, then a software company co-founder, then a corporate communications manager, then a college instructor, then a speechwriter—and all the while I was developing my fiction-writing skills.

[image error]What a typical revised page looks like, after I attack it with the red pen.

Then, about 20 years ago, my wife encouraged me to quit my lucrative job with Merrill Lynch to focus full-time on my fiction. I had just returned from a friend’s wedding in Las Vegas and looked at pictures of myself at the Grand Canyon. I was fat. I mean fat—especially for a guy who, just 15 years earlier, had had 3% body fat and the build of a virtual decathlete. I was fat and didn’t like it at all. It simply didn’t fit with the vision I’d had at 14 of becoming an Ideal Man. Around this time, I also developed a herniated disc in my lower back from too much sitting and a sedentary lifestyle. So, I bought an expensive elliptical trainer and joined a gym. I started hiking, cross-country skiing and playing a little tennis again, and I weaned myself off the “comfort foods” of my youth.

Through my 30s and 40s I kept up my intellectual pursuits, although because I was also writing my own books, I didn’t have time to read a classic novel every other day like I had in college. Instead, I kept (and still keep) a pile of a dozen books at my bedside and finish one or two a week. In the last 20 years I’ve read probably 20 books that I consider game-changers or works whose ideas have directly benefited me. These include Mastery, Atomic Habits, War and Peace, The Odyssey, The Bible, Wishes Fulfilled, and Tom Brady’s The TB12 Method.

The truth is, living up to that decision I made at 14 years old, trying to achieve balance and my highest potential both intellectually and physically, has been a 37-year struggle. There have been a few occasions along the way when the two lines have intersected (in economics, this is called equilibrium)—when I’ve managed to bring the two “into tune with one another by adjusting the tension of each to the right pitch”—but usually achieving my peak intellectually has required me to sacrifice some on the physical scale, and vice-versa. For example, when I’ve been in the home stretch of the final draft of one of my novels, I’ve had to sacrifice sleep, workouts, food, companionship—heck, even sunlight—to get the work done. And when I’ve been working out intensely every day (say to train to climb a mountain or to prepare for X-C ski season), I’ve written fewer pages on those days and read fewer books in my leisure time.

[image error]Having just finished my 1/2-mile swimming workout.

Which brings me to recent days—completely sober; walking out of the surf, tanned, cut and dripping wet; receiving a compliment from a woman that I haven’t aged since high school; and receiving compliments from other women at my sister’s party about how much they’ve enjoyed my novels—and I’m taken back to that afternoon on the school bus when I decided to become an Ideal Man, and I see that much of my life today resulted from that one decision.

Today I look at my life, and I see that I’ve done it. The intellectual and physical sides of my life are balanced and in tune with each other. While many men my age are struggling with weight issues, heart problems, hypertension, back issues, joint problems, diabetes and/or addictions, I’m in the best shape of my life since I was 17. (True story: the last time I saw a doctor, while reading my chart and seeing my pulse and blood pressure stats, he said, “Excuse me, Mr. Orcutt…are you a triathlete?”) Having taken medication for my mental health for almost 20 years, I now take zero medications—only the occasional aspirin or ibuprofen.

[image error]While I don’t take any medications, I take a staggering number of daily supplements.

And while I know a few men in very good physical shape, their intellectual lives and achievements have languished. I, on the other hand, have been a lifelong learner, constantly seeking out new ideas and methods to improve my results, and constantly pushing myself intellectually to do more and achieve more.

Today, I view my body not merely as a sack of protoplasm that carries my brain around, but rather as the machine that makes good operation of the brain possible. I’ve learned that when I’m in great physical health—particularly cardiovascular health—I’m able to think more clearly, and I can write better and for longer stretches. I’ve learned that maintaining the physical machine is essential for writing well—especially for the endurance writing that I do of long novels.

I’m feeling a great deal of gratitude lately for finally achieving this balance, and I want to thank my 14-year-old self for it. Not only did my 14-year-old self have the curiosity to seek out, read and think about these ideas of Plato’s, be he also had the wisdom to recognize a great, life-changing idea, and the self-discipline and the resolve to decide to make himself in that image. That one decision has done more to positively influence my life ever since than anything else.

So, thank you, Plato, and thank you, 14-year-old Chris Orcutt.

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[image error]“Neither pandemics nor meteors nor aliens nor root canals stays these wordsmiths from the inevitable completion of their epic works.”

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Lately, more than ever, I’ve been thinking about a quote by the late, great playwright Sam Shepard: “Aloneness is a condition of writing. You look at all the writers that have come up with something worth its own salt, and they’re utterly alone.”

“Aloneness is a condition of writing.”

I’ve come not just to accept, but to fully embrace, this truth of the writing life.

Now, instead of being depressed by my feelings of being “utterly alone,” I view these feelings as my North Star: If I’m alone, I must be doing something right; I must be on my way to writing something great.

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I’ve also thought a lot about a sentence in Ernest Hemingway’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.”

Both of these quotes have resonated deeply with me a lot lately, during walks and workouts, during long hikes on the Appalachian Trail, and especially as I dig ever deeper writing the second draft of my epic novel. The manuscript now totals a staggering 802,000 words, and there are indications that, when the dust finally settles years from now, it could weigh in at a million words.

The other morning, during my post-prandial constitutional—a one-mile walk in my neighborhood when I, like a poet, mentally compose and say aloud sentences I’ll be writing later on—I passed a dog (I think it was a boxer) standing on its front stoop. As I walked along the shoulder towards the dog, his wagging tail told me he was a friendly one. I sensed that he wanted to run over and play with me, but he had been trained not to leave the stoop. We just looked at each other and knew each other’s aloneness. Just as I couldn’t help him with the job he had to do—guarding his owner’s house—he couldn’t help me with what I had to do: go back to work on my gargantuan novel.

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[image error]The bookcase outside my office door. Note the five framed photos.

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Beside the door outside my office is a bookcase of writing and language reference books, and on top of this bookcase are framed photos of five of my writing heroes: Ian Fleming, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Raymond Chandler.

In years past, as I’ve gone in to work they’ve given me small cheers of encouragement. But in recent years they’ve gone silent. Now, when I walk by them at five o’clock in the morning, it’s as if they’re saying, “Yeah, dude…we got nothin’. That crazy long teen novel thing you’re writing? Uh…good luck with that.”

Over the three decades that I’ve been writing professionally, during my long, long apprenticeship, I’ve always been able to look to my heroes’ work for examples of how to do something. When I was writing my first Dakota Stevens mystery (A Real Piece of Work), I had several literary touchstones: Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe novels; Robert B. Parker’s Spenser mysteries; and Ian Fleming’s James Bond thrillers. While writing the stories that eventually comprised The Man, The Myth, The Legend and One Hundred Miles from Manhattan, I had the short stories of Anton Chekhov, John Cheever and Raymond Carver to consult for guidance and encouragement.

But as I’ve forged ahead with my epic novel, I’ve truly gone out where no one (living or dead) can help me.

As much as I admire Fitzgerald and Nabokov for their elegant, pitch-perfect sentences, when it comes to writing a truly massive novel about a subject that has never been written about before in epic form (truly, I’m inventing a new genre over here), neither Fitzgerald nor Nabokov, nor any of the other novelists I’ve grown up admiring—like Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, John Irving, Charles Frazier and Jane Austen—can help me. (Allegedly, Hemingway wrote the first draft of a massive novel about WWII—which he termed “the Big Book”—split into three sections: Land, Sea and Air, but it was never finished and never published.)

No, among my favorite writers, the only one who did what I’m trying to do is the monumental novelist Leo Tolstoy, author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace—not just two of the longest novels written, but two of the best novels ever written.

But even with Tolstoy’s works, I’m all alone. Although I’ve learned a lot from them about what’s involved in sustaining a long, detailed, multifarious narrative, they’re about a period of time and subjects that are much different from the time and subject that I’m writing about. Besides, to try to find words of wisdom in Tolstoy’s diaries about writing a magnum opus is truly exhausting. Honestly, I’d prefer having to find a lost contact lens on a sandy beach.

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[image error]It probably doesn’t help that I have a penchant for film noir titles like “In A Lonely Place,” starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame.

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Bearing with the emotional ups and downs caused by the vicissitudes of real life, and then dealing with the emotions and conflicts of dozens of fictional characters (most of them teenagers), has been overwhelming at times—and another contributor to this feeling of aloneness.

Four or five years ago, while visiting my friend Brian Maloney in Concord, Massachusetts, I expressed to him how emotionally exhausted and alone I felt. We were eating lunch in a fish shop (with the best fried haddock and clam chowder anywhere), and when I voiced my feelings, Brian, who has known me since college (and was initially intrigued by me because he noticed I had a different classic novel with me every time I came to class), gave me a perplexed look across the table. He scoffed a little bit and said, “Yeah, Chris, but this emotional work and aloneness you’re talking about…isn’t that basically what you signed on for as a novelist?”

He didn’t have a microphone in his hand at the time, but afterwards I wished he had, because if ever a moment in my life was worthy of a mic drop, that was it.

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[image error]A view from the car while driving through the Isle of Skye in Scotland. Photo by Alexas Orcutt.

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Lately, because I’m now in territory where none of my writing heroes have been, and because none of my friends or family have attempted anything like what I’m doing, I’ve felt more alone than ever. For example, during lunch with my parents the other day, they asked me, “So…how’s the writing going?” They meant well, but how can I possibly communicate to them how physically and emotionally draining the work is, how alone I feel every day, the internal battles I fight with myself over the novel’s significance, the worries about whether all of my hard work will ever pay off?

The very attempt at bridging the divide of aloneness makes me feel more alone.

Another example: I used to enjoy reading new pages from the novel aloud to my wife, and getting her feedback, but recently I realized that not only can she not help me in this way anymore, I’m out past where anyone can help me. I’m so far out there that sometimes what I’m doing doesn’t even seem to resemble writing anymore; it’s more akin to exploring.

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As a young boy, before I decided I was going to become a novelist, I wanted to be an explorer. I wanted to be one of those courageous men who went where no person had gone before: Magellan, Columbus, Lewis and Clark, Peary, Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, Hillary and Norgay, Neil Armstrong. Well, a few weeks ago, forty some-odd years after I dreamed of being an explorer, I realized tearfully that I was an explorer at last.

I might not be stepping foot atop Mount Everest or on the planet Mars, but I am the first writer to venture into this particular vast and uncharted literary territory.

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[image error]An image of Mount Everest that I have on my office wall, my computer desktop, and my phone screen.

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Many, many days, I feel like those great explorers and adventurers, going well out beyond the map, past where anyone has been before, not knowing where the end or the summit is, not knowing if I’ll have the fortitude to finish, unsure if the over 10,000 hours I’ve invested in this work (so far) will ever “pay off,” concerned that I might die before I finish.

But you know what? I wouldn’t trade my writing life for anyone else’s.

Not for all of hack James Patterson’s international bestsellers and his wealth and any homes around the world he might have. Not for the gushing praise and accolades (often undeserved) heaped upon the latest enfant terrible.

The fact is, I’m going somewhere that 99 percent of other writers can’t go—not because they don’t have the talent (I fully admit there are many, many writers more talented than I), but because they don’t have the work ethic, the fortitude, the self-direction, the confidence, and the faith that venturing into the unknown requires. 

And when I’m finished, when I reach the end and finally put this novel into the world, regardless of how it is eventually received by readers or critics I will have accomplished something very few writers in the history of the world have accomplished, and I’ll know what it means to go out past where anyone can help me and to do something that has never been done before.

But…I have to do it alone.

[image error]This morning, to celebrate my birthday and the fact that I’m probably in the best shape of my life since I was 17, I went...