Adam Oster, Novelist

I have a weird, dirty, little secret to share with all of you. I’ve actually found time over the past few days to do a little bit of writing. Writing fiction even…

It’s a little something I like to call Vacation Fan-Fiction.

I’ve mentioned on here how I’ve been struggling a bit with the lack of sun in Wisconsin over the past few weeks. Tack onto that the fact that I absolutely love to travel and I haven’t gotten out of Wisconsin since last July (I *might* have made it to Minnesota once or twice, I guess) and, well, I’ve been finding myself in a really weird place, mentally speaking. A place where I have been daydreaming about traveling and sunshine and trying to find a place in the calendar to make that all happen right now. It has been taking over all of my thoughts of late. I can’t stop thinking about travel. It’s honestly moved beyond distracting to becoming simply overwhelming.

However, the truth of the matter is, it’s just not in the cards at the moment.

But, I had a spare moment or two yesterday, and I decided to simply write out a little story about me and the family going on a vacation, and, well, it’s actually the most I’ve smiled while writing in a long time. It wasn’t all peaches and cream in my little story. There was bickering and testiness. It was a fairly good representation of how our travels tend to go, with these periods of intense happiness and extreme grumpiness due to exhaustion.

But it worked.

I mean, I still want to travel as soon as I possibly can, and I still keep looking to see how far I have to drive to be able to find some legitimate sunshine, but, I feel better. Not quite, but almost as though I had actually managed to get out of Wisconsin briefly.

And that’s pretty great.

I’m now starting to understand why people enjoy escapism literature so much.

I’m also starting to wonder if there’s a market out there for bespoke vacation escapism stories…