How many of you get jet lag? Quite a few I imagine, and for me, it’s always been rough, but this time I had a trick up my sleeve and it was rather simple, no caffeine or sugar on the plane or when I arrive until I get some sleep. It worked well enough, allowing me to at least get some hours rest, though I still had jet lag for many days into the journey. Even as I was tired I knew there was work to be done, and that no easy rest could come until I had finished what I had set out to do over the past year, and that is completing the first draft of my third novel, The Capsule, which I had imagined on my trip inside the very Capsule hotel I was staying at, and, because of a mutual friend who connected us, I had met a movie producer in Sendai who liked the plot and offered to have a look once it was finished. This was one of those dream moments every writer hopes to have, and for me it was laid in my lap out of the blue.
Thus over the course of the last year I committed myself to writing every single day, waking up at 6 am while also having to do all my other tasks to survive in life. One might imagine this was a real pain for me but actually it was pure bliss, I enjoyed every moment, even the times when what I was writing didn’t seem to fit, it simply didn’t matter because I'm doing what I love, and more importantly, what loves me, and thats a phrase I’ve coined, it’s the title of this post and a lesson which has taken me 35 years to learn. When you do what loves you, its more than a selfish thing or ego sustaining pleasure, its something that when done from within your deepest and truest self, loves you back in all the best ways that nothing else can. For me, this is writing, the act of pure creation through my own limitless imagination.
This was easier said than done when it comes to writing The Capsule however, for even as I was engaged with it, I was still in the process of writing my second book, Big Sur Real, which isn’t truly finished yet either. So I was writing two books simultaneously, and once I had gotten a test print of Big Sur Real I committed myself fully to The Capsule, but this was only 4 months ago, thats how little time I had to truly flush out and make readable the first draft, and unlike the second book, the third actually had a deadline, and someone very important to read it and chose a destiny for it beyond what I have allowed for all the rest of my work which was never for sale. Now, I told the man about this, and how I run things, and the only reason I went ahead with it at all was because he said there are always ways to keep integrity, if you are willing to go the extra mile. Which he admitted almost no one in the movie industry was, but it does happen.
So, I went for it, and even broke my previous record of 10,000 words in a single day to 11,000, almost 30 pages! That was a looooonnnggg day. I think I worked from 6 am to 11pm or something insane like that, my eyes were bleeding, but it was well worth it. Every page I wrote created a new universe filled entirely with my own children. It sounds weird, but thats what it is. Even those I wrote about who exist in real life showed sides of themselves which exist only in my head, making them step children I suppose in some fashion. But as I heard in one of the movies I watched on the plane, “All writers are thieves.” I didn’t like that one bit, but it’s true in a way, how can I create anything without having interacted with the world and seen it there first? Even with every twist and turn of the mind, it first existed outside of me. Lets call it co-creation instead, much more apt.
Three days in and working continuously barely leaving the Capsule hotel to finish the Capsule book, I got a working First draft, and I left Tokyo for Sendai, where the producer lives. I emailed the work to him and he was only able to meet up with me for 30 minutes while walking his child in a stroller. We caught up and discussed the new movie he’s working on in Morocco, a Jesus film different than the others, where we get to see the abrasive and angry version of him instead of the calm, holier than anything version of him, and just as we shook hands to go on our ways, phones all across the park blared warnings, and a moment later the entire park shifted beneath our feet, street lights waived back and forth, and someone screamed off in the distance. The producer moved us to the center of the park away from the buildings until the shaking stopped.
“This happen often?” I asked.
“Once every month or so, but that was a pretty big one.”
He suddenly wanted to go check on his wife and I understood. He went his way, and me mine, back to another Capsule hotel, a far nicer one than I’ve been in before. I had never experienced such an earthquake before. My mom called me right after and said it was a 7.5, and wondered if I was okay. I told her dreams do really come true, and when they do, the very earth shakes beneath our feet…