Miserably sick in Cancun, I wasn't thinking about writing.
I wasn't thinking much beyond dying of Montezuma's Revenge in a high-rise resort during what was supposed to be a fabulous Christmas getaway. While Lord of the Rings played incessantly in Spanish on TV, I hoped someone would take care of my (many) cats after my demise.
Our holiday had been terrific up until then. Great room, magnificent view, and wonderful food.
The food did us in. Or maybe it was the free lobby margaritas made with hotel ice.
Twenty-four hours before our return home, my traveling companion and I both fell ridiculously ill. With very little warning, every foul liquid inside us suddenly wanted to be outside.
I'm still a little ashamed of what happened in that lobby restroom. I liked that underwear.
A desperate lurch through the hotel gift shop turned up medicine that didn't help. A late-night visit from the hotel doctor resulted in a hypodermic needle to the butt and a bill for $200, but little relief.
Ah, the perils of travel. We were both miserable, far from home, and a biohazard to the staff. I'm surprised they didn't start wearing hazmat suits like Dustin Hoffman (my former boss) in the movie Outbreak. Heaven help the people who moved into the room after we vacated it.
Montezuma's Revenge is a euphemism for a very real illness that affects many international travelers each year. According to the Center for Disease Control, up to 10 million travelers each year might find themselves afflicted. My friend and I suffered through two days of misery, had to shell out extra money for the hotel and airplane change, and finally recovered enough to drag ourselves weakly to the airport and back to the United States.
Then I wrote a story about it.
Because for a writer, everything is fodder. If you can't draw on misery, what can you draw on?
The story didn't actually start with the misery, however. It started with a boy: young, severely handicapped, watching a movie on an iPad that his mother held up to his nose as we all waited in a jam-packed and overheated departure lounge for our onward connections.
That boy became my protagonist's son. The protagonist, not the most noble of men, is driven in part by the financial and emotional costs of having a child requiring extreme medical care. But the son has his own inner life; he has a narrative to call his own.
We all live by our narratives. Mine is: I got sick, I used the experience to write a story, and then I sold the story to Nightmare magazine.
But that's actually not true. It's more like this: I got sick, I wrote about it, and then I sat on the story for two years. I didn't send it to a single market.
I didn't want to re-experience the misery. Even though I'd dressed up the story with Hollywood screenwriting references, turned the cause to bioterrorism, and framed it around the question of what it means to be a hero, I was emotionally stuck in a Cancun hotel bathroom, ruining every towel and surface in sight.
Stories can provide catharsis. They can also re-open bad experiences.
Finally enough time passed that when I read the paragraphs, I didn't feel mortified. I fixed a few lines that seemed awkward and sent it off. Nightmare accepted it right away, and reader response has been very gratifying.
Still, I won't be going back to Cancun anytime soon.
If I do, I'll write about it.
But I won't drink those lobby margaritas again.
You can read Rules for Ordinary Heroes free this week at Nightmare magazine. They also have a free podcast. Thank you to E.C. Myers who did the Author Spotlight, which talks more about the screenwriting aspects, point of view, and how I lurched around Miami airport like a zombie.
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