I’ve had a hard couple of days, writing-wise. The details aren’t important. What is important is there’s a epigraph at the beginning of my novel —

“The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea.”
— Isak Dinesen

— and I’d tried the first two already, so it was time to go to the sea.

I went to this same beach on the day I received my first agent offer. On that day the sea gave me sun and foam and easy beauty.

Today, the sea gave me wind. It gave me rain so fine it was hard to tell if it fell from the sky or sprayed from the waves. It gave me cold and wet and grey.

It gave me wet rock cut deep by the encroaching sea.

A stormy sea. A plank of wood. A deserted beach.

It whipped my hair into wild tendrils, froze my fingers, smudged ink on the pages of my notebook. It grew wilder and ate up the beach, reaching for me, coming closer with each break. No part of me was dry. No part of me was warm. Even my tea grew cold.

And in the end, it gave me exactly what I needed.

The cure for anything. Sweat, tears, or the sea.