100 Words Per Mile: Recovery Plans

In which I muse the pros and cons of too much control.

September 3, 2020
3.02 miles
23:37

The first time I tried to write a novel, I settled on this premise about a couple who miscarried, and the general idea was to have a Camus’s The Stranger kind of tone and feel to it. I’d been enjoying the thing, but then our miscarriage happened, and I felt responsible—irrational, sure, but I couldn’t shake it. This wasn’t the first time my fiction seemed to manifest itself in my reality, but it was the first time the stakes were so high.

Around this time, I had started crafting what I call a Recovery Plan—a means for survival if I were to ever lose my wife. If the miscarriage had corroded me so badly, there would be absolutely no hope if I were to lose my wife, too. The plan included rules such as: Don’t run away. Don’t try any new drugs. Don’t burn down the house. I often wondered if this list would mean anything if the dreaded moment arrived, and imagining a poor widower trying to follow an arbitrary rulebook transformed itself into plotting a novel. This spark is what eventually became The Cadence of Doom, a novel I’ve begun shopping around.

I experienced a lot of anxiety while