When Life & Art Collide

The saddest thing in my life right now is how far away I live from my 10-month-old nephew. I crawl his pictures every day on Facebook and long for the next chance I get to pluck him into my arms and chat with him (me in English, him in Theo-syllables, which will no doubt soon turn into English).

This morning, I found that longing writing itself into my work in progress – a techno thriller where I needed to add a moral dilemma for the protagonist. Megan is thousands of miles from home, off on a mission to save the world from certain destruction (or something) when her enemy kidnaps her nephew and carries him off to an undisclosed location. Collateral – they’ll return her nephew to safety if Megan turns herself in. And if she turns herself in, they will kill her.

So does she save the world or save her nephew? It would be an easy call – her nephew is the most compelling answer – but if Megan doesn’t save the world first, she’s not leaving things in such good shape for her nephew’s future.

In the middle of writing the scene, I received an email from my sister with this photo attached:

Little Theo had pulled my first novel from the bookshelf and was chewing on it. (As my husband immediately quipped, “a book you can sink your teeth into.”)

If this email had come at any other time, I would have thought, Aww, that’s cute. He likes the bright yellow cover. How many other books has he pulled out and chewed on?

But it wasn’t any other time – this arrived in my inbox right when Theo was inspiring my writing.

I don’t want life to directly imitate art – especially not while writing a thriller – but these moments when life and art collide are fairly magical. They make up for the long hours of hair-pulling angst that is most of writing a novel. They make me think that even if I scrap this project (an important option to keep with any work in progress) it’s the right thing to be writing right now.

SPOILER ALERT: The nephew in the book is going to be just fine.