Analog Adventures and Other Earthly Delights

Happy Fogust… at least for those who live in San Francisco. I live in a neighborhood known as the Inner Sunset. Considering how infrequently we see the Golden Hour from our windows, living so close to the Pacific Ocean, the source of our wonderful, mysterious fog, I've always thought it was an ironic name.

Speaking of fog, I didn't post any content in June or July. Having a smartphone can be like drinking from a fire hose: too much news, too much opinion, and, well, too much of just about everything. My brain was overheating, so I took a break.

Come September 30, The Campaign, my final book in The Council Trilogy, will be released into the world. It also triggers the parallel arrivals of an intense PR push for the novel and the Litquake festival season. These two things are as intertwined as they can be when you're an author with a book coming out. I’m moderating a panel and participating in another at the San Francisco Main Library. In preparation for a compelling discussion, I always read the panelists’ books—in print if possible. At the moment, I’m digging into Charlie Jane Anders’s Lesson in Magic and Disasters and Sheri T. Josef's Edge of the Known World. This feels like the first time in years that none of my own characters are rattling around in my brain, and I can truly enjoy another author's fiction.

Few things are as pleasurable as immersing in a book. OK, there may be a few other experiences that rate, but books are in my top five. E-books are fun, but holding a printed book in your hands is marvelous and useful. If you’re like me, you may even jot down notes in the margins. Newspapers are also good to hold in your hands, although an actual paper is a rarity these days - almost as rare as sunshine in August in San Francisco.

During a layover at the Frankfurt airport on my way to Sardinia a few weeks ago, I noticed that Lufthansa had a free newsstand offering copies of newspapers. You have to tip your hat to the Europeans for resisting the call to divest themselves of tactile experiences in favor of living solely in the cloud.

Listening to a vinyl record is another good way to reset your brain. It’s an analog pleasure that's cool again, almost painfully so. I am dating myself to wax poetic about listening to one side of an album, but like a novel, these LPs were designed to tell a story. The songs were recorded in a specific order for a reason.

Released one year and three months before I was born, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band has one of the most recognizable openings ever recorded for an album, with its now iconic sounds of concert hall chatter and instruments tuning as the electric guitar abruptly begins. I enjoyed lying on the floor of my living room, listening to the album play, my mind focused on nothing but the songs. I love taking the arm of the turntable and watching as the needle hits the groove and the music begins to play, many decades after St. Pepper taught the band to play.

I spent a week in Sardinia in early July with my family, eating my way through the island’s cuisine and lying on the beach. (Admittedly, I carried all my books on my iPad for the trip.) My only responsibility was to catch a bus to a beach club. We spent long stretches saying very little to one another, enjoying the warmth and the quiet of the day. From there, we flew to Milan and hopped on trains to the Dolomite mountains, where I did something that my younger self couldn't have envisioned: I hiked my way across the mountains and stayed in “refugios,” or mountain huts, that are only accessible by foot or gondola.

Beyond the obvious pleasure of pushing myself physically, what I loved about the trip was the long stretches of quiet. When you’re climbing 1,000 vertical feet in less than a mile, at 6,000 feet above sea level, there isn't much oxygen for chatting. But even in more tame stretches, when the path unfolds with nothing but miles of peaks and wildflowers ahead of you, the compulsion to remain silent and take in the beauty without distraction is strong. It’s easy to put yourself into perspective against the jutting limestone peaks.

I don’t want to call it a cleanse because it's cliché and, in some ways, derogatory— I didn’t need to purge myself. I’m no Luddite. I use technology every day. I was a beta user of Waymo, and I have two IG accounts. But there are moments when the brain cries out for a break. My creativity depends on my ability to use imagination, and that needs to be recharged. Books, records, newspapers, and the mountains and wildflowers of Italy were my charging station this summer.

I’m ready to go again, launch my novel, and embark on a new writing project.

How do you recharge? Send me an email at evette.davis@gmail.com and share your story.