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Awhile back, Belfast-born author Adrian McKinty wrote a funny piece for the Guardian about retreating to a cabin in Australia with his work-in-progress, sure that the time away from family and other obligations would help him crush a deadline.

“The perils of writing in solitude,” he called it, and it was indeed perilous. The downpour began the first night. It turned cold. The cabin had no heat. The pub in town had closed and the only store sold baked beans and beer and nothing more in the way of food. The rain turned to snow. He lasted three nights, concluding:

“Solitude may be the school of genius but if you’re looking to cure writer’s block or meet a deadline, it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.”

I don’t know about that genius bit (unless you’re McKinty, and if you haven’t read his novels, you should), but solitude is seriously my cup of tea. In search of it, I applied for three separate artists’ residencies this year and got turned down by all three.

Upon hearing that, a family friend offered a cabin—one light years removed, thank God, from McKinty’s drafty, miserable retreat. (Note: Friends like this deserve pedestals, haloes, undying gratitude and a dandy bottle of whiskey.)

I signed up for whatever remained of my vacation time, left home on a below-zero day, and arrived at a warm and toasty hideaway. I’m all for writing before work (and after) and on weekends, but my WIP was in crisis stage, a fairly decent beginning and end, but the middle, oh, the dreaded middle. It was a wasteland.

For me, at least, that sort of thing takes concerted concentration, and it took several days to find my way out of the morass. Now, powered by the patented index-card method (outline each chapter on a card, then add, subtract and shuffle until the damn things are in the right order) and big pots of my grandmother’s pasta e fagioli recipe, there’s hope. All thanks to solitude.