Writing While Sick

by Linda Rodriguez

I'm a day late getting this blog posted. My apologies, but I'd been dealing with illness, which suddenly took a drastic turn for the worse. I spent yesterday and last night absolutely miserable with fever and chills and vomiting, and I just lost track of my blogging days. But better late than never.

Anyone who knows many professional writers (at least writers of novels) knows that writers are self-employed and don’t get holidays or vacation leave. That’s why, when everyone else is posting photos of their holiday fun at the pool and the park on Memorial Day or Labor Day, writers are posting their first-draft word counts or hours of revision/copy edits/page proofs .

But what about sick leave? Nope, none of that, either. When a writer is ill, s/he has to decide between going to bed like a normal person when sick or trying to soldier on to finish the current book. Still, it’s not the same as working on a holiday or during the time everyone else is on vacation. Whether we can actually work depends on the type of work we try to do and the type of illness we’re suffering.

If it’s just a cold, we can probably manage most of our writing tasks, though the creative flow for first-draft work can be very hard to achieve. If it’s been bad flu or some other more serious illness and we’re in that stage of the worst is over but we’re weak and spacy, it’s even a good fit for first-draft writing. We’re located much more in the right brain than we usually are. However, it’s not at all easy to gain the sharp focus required for revision, editing, dealing with copy edits, or proofreading. 

If our illness is something more debilitating, we may only be able to write a short blog post—or perhaps not even that. In those cases, we have no choice but to give up the work until our strength returns at least somewhat. Those times, though we can hardly afford them if our writing is paying the bills, can often hold a hidden benefit as we drift in fever or weakness and dream often bizarre new characters and stories.

It’s all grist for our little cottage industry of spinning the straw of daily existence into the gold of story. How does illness affect your writing? How does it affect your reading? I know when I’m super ill, I want to read Agatha Christie and other comfort novels that I’ve read many times before. What’s your favorite illness reading?

Pharmaceutical Dreaming

A few weeks ago, I had a bout of bronchitis, which ended up triggering my asthma. That meant coughing, lots of big, loud coughing spasms. I mean, coughing that rattles the windows in my house and those of my neighbors. (I have been known to break ribs from coughing before.) Antibiotics had the bronchitis under control quickly, but the asthma—and the coughing—was another matter. Consequently, I’m still inhaling and nebulizing as I try to shake the last of it, and in order to sleep at night without hacking my lungs out, I’m taking codeine cough medicine.

This means weird dreams. That phrase seems redundant. Dreams are, by nature, non-rational, of course. But these drugged dreams are something else. Much more vivid and bizarre. The dead walk and talk again in my dreams right now. My children, the youngest of whom is about to turn thirty, are babes in arms and toddlers again in these dreams, even as I’m still a child myself, a sibling to my own kids. Every morning I wake in wonder at the strange, technicolor movies I’ve just experienced.

Since I’m a writer, I write them down in my journal. Each morning I sit with my cup of tea and record another outlandish dream—a house suddenly filled with feral cats and I can’t figure out how they’re getting in or how to keep them out, a strange conference at an unknown university where I’m responsible for one of the programs when hundreds of ninjas attack, a ballroom dancing scene where I’m Ginger Rogers in chiffon and stilettos and only my unknown partner’s hand keeps me from floating off to join all the other people living on big multicolored clouds.

Last night, I had a dream in which an editor from Random House visited me in Kansas City to tell me that Random House had published a book in my Skeet Bannion series written by someone else, the first of many, and had sold it for a television series, leaving me protesting that they couldn’t do that since Random House is not my publisher and crying to my agent and my actual editor at my actual publisher, “What can we do? They’re stealing my books!”

I’m a writer, so you’d think some of these dreams would spark stories or books. I have had the germs of stories and books come to me in my dreams before, but not in medicated dreams like these. I know from sad experience that none of these will offer me anything more than a moment’s entertainment and wonder. I suppose that, if I wrote literary short fiction in the surreal school of writing, I might find them useful, but for someone who writes mystery novels and thrillers that must make sense to the average reader, these dreams are a waste of my unconscious’s creative skills.

What they do for me as a writer, however, is remind me that I have at my disposal an incredibly creative partner in that very unconscious. I simply have to find ways to guide its creativity and to ground it in the details of reality. That inventive part of my mind works constantly coming up with all kinds of stories, good, bad, bizarre, and humdrum. It’s up to me to harness and channel all that imaginative energy. Still, it would be nice if it could just toss up a nice, usable, Academy-Award-worthy story now and then.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my nightly excursion into the world of flying cars and dogs and Nazi storm troopers chasing me at a writers conference and other exciting adventures.

Confessions of a sort of ill, but totally in denial writer

By:  Joelle Charbonneau

I’m sick.  For those that follow my twitter feed or are Facebook friends for me, I doubt this comes as a newsflash.  In the last three months, I have managed to come down with a sinus infection, bronchitis, pneumonia and pleurisy.  (Who gets pleurisy???)   I’m now on my third course of antibiotics (this one is also used for anthrax) and my third inhaler. (Go steroids.)

Yep.  I’m sick.

The one thing I’ve learned over the course of this three-month odyssey is that I suck at being sick.   Not because I whine or cry or pout.  (Well, okay, the pouting thing might have happened when the steroids wore off this last time and my breathing stopped working so well.  Sue me!)  My problem is that I’m stubborn.  I don’t want to be sick so I try to pretend that I’m not.  I mean, there are still pages to be written, pages to be edited, books to be promoted, dinners to cook, an entire house to be moved, a five-year-old to run after and…

You get the point.

Perhaps my real problem is that I like work.  (Yes, I’m deranged.) And really, when you think about it, writing a book involves a lot of sitting.  That’s rest—right?  I mean, how much better would it be if I were to just sit in a chair and do nothing as opposed to typing away on my keyboard?

Okay, I know I have a problem.  But I can’t help it.   So many people that I know hate their jobs. 

When they’re home sick, they love the excuse to get away from their typical daily grind.  I LOVE my job.  Never in my wildest imaginations did I think that someone would ever pay me to make up stuff or that readers would want to spend time with the characters I’ve created.  So when someone suggest that I stop writing in order to rest….I can’t!  I just can’t. 

But I’m trying.  And if you have any suggestions as to how to best do that (without giving up the fun stuff like writing), I’m listening.  And I’m pretty sure my mother is, too!

Oh – and in case you missed it – END ME A TENOR came out last week!  Hurray.  Also, the trailer for my first young adult novel- THE TESTING – debuted on EW.com in case you want to check it out.  See…who has time to be sick when such fun stuff is happening?  (Sigh…back to resting….)