In late March of 2020 I sat with my mom on our back porch facing our willow tree and the prairie beyond. After six days of listening sessions my mom heard all 73 of my detailed daily journal entries from the craziest semester of my life. When I read the final sentence and closed my little brown leather book, my mom leaped from her seat, “YOU COULD WRITE A BOOK!”
Writing Seas the Day was like trying to solve eight different 10,000 piece puzzles with no photo reference and then trying to fit those puzzles together. For the average person, each piece represents one word, but for me it’s one character because I spell phonetically. So my puzzle felt more like 380,152 pieces, or characters. In total, it took 464,571 keyboard clicks (including the space bar) to complete the book…that is if I wrote the final draft without a single mistype from the first click. I’d estimate that I pressed a button on my keyboard somewhere around 10,000,000 times to complete Seas the Day which would be enough clicks to write the Revised Standard Version Second Catholic Edition of the Bible 12.5 times.
When I began writing Seas the Day at my dining room table in Geneva, IL on April 10, 2020, I dumped the largest puzzle I had ever attempted on the table. 10,000 pieces with no picture. I made incredible progress, some sessions lasted for more than NINE hours (I can sit still only if my mind is racing) and I would only break for food and bathroom, and sometimes just food. Within a week I finished the first puzzle and I was elated, you would’ve thought I just wrote a book!
The following week I confidently dumped another 10,000 piece puzzle out on the table. This one didn’t go so well. I found the edge pieces easily, but I still had no idea what image I was trying to create. The sessions were so difficult I would give up after about four hours of aggressively trying to shove a piece into the wrong place.
Somehow I stuck around long enough to see my second puzzle completed and I immediately emailed a mentor who responded, “You don’t have a book, you have an idea that might be cute for a blog.” Upon reading this I immediately ran outside to try and do a standing backflip in the grass because I needed to feel the dopamine rush of achieving something new and difficult but my mom spotted me and told me to “use our perfectly good trampoline!” I was 19 and still living under her roof, so I obeyed. When I ran out of energy to throw my legs over my head, I ran inside, put my hands over my head and sulked. I couldn’t do a standing backflip, I couldn’t see my Semester at Sea friends, I couldn’t get close to my mom without a mask and gloves, I couldn’t go to the gym, but at least I had a blog…