Bornholm, where I worked on a novel

WE stayed in a cabin on the island of Bornholm for a few days in May, 2022. It had been my idea to visit the place again (it is part of the territory of Denmark, though closer to Sweden). I wanted to swim in the ocean, walk silently through a forest feeling springy moss beneath my feet, return to the fabled cliffs.

As it happened, I remained in the cabin most of that week while my husband and our friends went sightseeing, only going out in the evenings to walk the kilometer or so down to the sea. I'd brought the draft of a novel along, and I had a May 31 deadline. In my computer, the novel existed in bits and pieces, including most of the ending and nearly all of the beginning, but I needed to work on the middle to connect everything. The middle is always hardest to write. 

The day before we left, I sat down and listed all the incidents which I knew the story lacked.  Then I numbered them in the order I wanted them to occur, figuring out how one might lead to the other.

It helped that the novel was outlined in a program called Scrivener, which is very useful for organizing your ideas, although not conducive to organic or intuitive writing. I'd been thinking of this book for years -- years! And now that the project was in motion, I'd been in love with the main characters for six weeks, and they had taken a life of their own and were beginning to flirt with one another in my mind. It was a hot and yellow spring -- if you've been to Denmark in the month of April you will know what I mean -- and as I dreamed them, on those moments of solitude traversing Copenhagen's immaculate sidewalks, I felt I was going crazy. I was giddy with happiness. 

I was in the perfect frame of mind to finish a short book, and nothing -- not even Bornholm, not even the presence of dear friends -- would stop me. And I did complete it. I picked the episodes off one by one, and on our return, took a day's break to attend a birthday party and teach a class, and then charged into the home stretch and finished the book by the 31st of May, just as I had planned.

It was a first draft and not very good, but that is the reason why authors possess revision skills. 

Here are some pictures from that stay in Bornholm. I do not know to what extent the few days on that Scandinavian island influenced the novel. 

Text and photos copyright Lakambini Sitoy, 2022, 2023. 
Check out my Il Vespaio (Hornet's Nest, 1970) blog.