How to Murder a Writer

I don’t know how writers survive honestly. I don’t mean the mental illness, though that does get some of us. I mean we’d be shockingly easy to murder. I realized that I was driving down a long dirt road in the middle of nowhere, or as close to the middle of nowhere you can get and still be 30 minutes from Austin. I was following a guy in a old Land Rover, a guy I’d met 20 minutes earlier, who’d sent me a message on instagram, inviting me to a writing residency that I’d never heard of but it had a website. So, sure. Yes. I will follow you down a dirt road that’s quickly turning to mud in the rain, a road I had no business being on in a Mazda 3, boasting a ground clearance only slightly better than a snail.

I didn’t realize at first that I could be easily driving to my murder. I was busy swearing at myself for not taking the van, while simultaneously congratulating myself for knowing to ride the center line and the edge when the ruts got deep so I didn’t scrape off the muffler or oil pan, all the while worried about what the grass was doing to my paint.

This is the road, for the record.

We ended up at a cabin. A much nicer cabin than I’d imagined, having recently overpaid for a shed in Oklahoma. Here’s a piece on that. Here’s another. There are more in the archives, somewhere around January or February.

This cabin had air conditioning and a record player, a couch and a door that latched. This place had endless trails for Woody to explore. But I’d take a shed.