What I Did On My Summer Vacation

A month without writing, a broken table, and a memory of a fallen tree.

I decided to stop writing during the month of June. No short stories would be edited, no novels updated, and no new projects started. Journaling was allowed, but that was it. June was the anti-November. June would be for not writing anything at all. June would be for other things, I thought. Like drawing.

In June, I didn’t draw much.

Seven years ago, this tree fell in our backyard.

I bought a new sketchbook and located some of my best pencils. I started sketching the backyard from a seat at our outdoor table. The paper brilliantly white and creamy smooth and the pencils neatly sharpened, I sketched. I made outlines of trees, vines, and the brick chimney on the white house behind us. I started filling in the details.

Then one morning, I woke up to see the outdoor table on its side. The navy umbrella was opened wide in the grass. It had pulled the table along with it with a gust of wind from the storm the night before. At first, I thought I saw a pile of cement on our back deck where the table used to be, and I wondered why it was there. I thought perhaps my husband had started a new project. Then I realized it was glass, not cement, and I knew the tabletop had shattered.

“Oh shit,” I said.

“What?” My husband was awake, too. He called to me from the top of the stairs as he did his morning stretches.

I told him. He’d thought another tree fell on our house, but it was just the table shattering to bits. (The tree that fell on our house fell mostly between our house and the neighbors’ and you can see it in the photo at the top of the post. The huge pine tree made our entire quarter acre smell like Christmas.)

Our broken table: a sight which confused me in the early morning.

I haven’t finished the drawing.

In June, I didn’t think about my pending lit mag submissions very much. The rejection sting wasn’t as harsh as usual, and I’m now at 18/50 for the year.

My urge to write returned in an unexpected way. The novel I started last November failed to call out to me, but the novel I’d decided not to start whispered in my ear. Reading various articles about current and near-future technology helped fix a mental block I had with that other novel, the one still made of vapor. Now I knew where I wanted to go with it. A new character started forming himself in my mind.

And so, as the July sun beats down and our air conditioner sputters and whirs, I’m working on my outline for my new, near-future science fiction novel. The urban fantasy novel has been put on the back burner to simmer. I might take it in a new direction. After the month-long break, writing feels fresh and new again.

Have you ever taken a purposeful, extended break from writing or another creative pursuit? What made you decided to do it, and how did it work for you?