About this
time last year, I posted a piece about getting away from it all to do book
revisions. I had just returned from a week in Point Reyes, northwest of San
Francisco, where I had been editing my second mystery novel, Wash Her Guilt Away. The concentrated
effort, in an environment apart from the usual distractions, was highly
beneficial, I wrote at the time.
And I said
then that I’d do it again for the next book, which I’ve just done. My third
Quill Gordon mystery, Not Death, But
Love, is about to go to my editor, Lauren Wilkins, for a final look, but I
had to get the early-draft kinks out of it before she sees it. Ergo, another
week in Point Reyes.
For those
unfamiliar with the area, Point Reyes Station is a town of about 350 people
near the Point Reyes National Seashore. For my purposes, the town is just right
for this sort of working getaway. What makes it so? Well, there are several
factors.
What’s Your Environment?
Probably I
should begin by saying that’s a personal question. Different writers need
different work spaces for this sort of thing. Some would be quite happy in a
basement office in central Manhattan. Others would consider Point Reyes too
cosmopolitan and distracting.
Point Reyes
Station is just right for me as a working base. It has a grocery store and
hardware store where you can pick up just about anything you might have
forgotten to bring from home. It has an Auto Club-approved garage (more on that
later), three nice restaurants, a good coffee shop, and an excellent bakery. It
also has a number of boutiques with lovely merchandise (good for gifts to take
home) and a sweet little bookstore, where I bought three books.
In short,
just enough to provide a bit of a diversion when needed, but not so much as to
be a distraction. That works for me. I need to be able to get away from the
work a bit, and a short visit to town for a latte and a stroll-through in a
couple of shops is just the ticket.
At the Edge of the Marsh
Home for
the week was a little cottage behind a house about a mile out of town. It had a
small kitchen area, a living area with room to set up a folding table I brought
along, and a nook to the side that housed a queen bed and a bathroom with a
decent-sized shower. There was an enclosed outdoor patio, where I worked a
couple of sunny afternoons, and the main window looked out on a yard full of
sheep behind a fence.
The
property backs onto a marsh, which offers a great deal of solitude. Perhaps in
the summer it’s an insect factory, but in early February, that wasn’t an issue.
It was a good, quiet place to work, and I got a lot done.
But I
didn’t quite finish. The last morning, I was going to head into town for a
pastry, but the car wouldn’t start. The garage sent out a truck to get me
jumped, and I had to take the car to a Ford dealer in Petaluma, 35 miles away,
to have it looked at. It turned out a battery cell was shot, and a replacement
battery was installed under warranty. It took six and a half hours, and kept me
from making the final changes on the last chapter. No harm, no foul. I finished
the work when I got home, and the drive to Petaluma took me on a beautiful road
I probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Sounds like a win-win situation to me.
