Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve applied to a summer writer’s incubator! This is a special place where writers spend all of their time focused on writing a novel, a short story collection, or a poetry collection and they get feedback from the other writers in their session as well as attend workshops too.
Last summer, I was finally accepted to one of these special places! I live in an area where the weather conditions are hot.
This means that I’ve never been much of an outdoorsman, so if anything I was looking forward to spending a whole month in an air conditioned creative space with other writers (and not having to endure the Summer heat). I arrived at the incubator on my first afternoon, plus the first afternoon was spent in an introductory workshop! But, once we were all dismissed to our desks, it did not take long before we noticed that it was quite hot in the room. However, someone stuck their hand over one of the floor vents, and confirmed that it was blowing hot air! Any chance of productive creativity was ruined when we discovered this problem with the air conditioning system, then we called a heating and A/C business expert to diagnose the problem, and we had to wait for about an hour before he arrived. We tried our best to work by setting up fans around the room to keep the air circulating. We also exchanged our hot Dunkin Donuts Latte for ice-freezing water to stay cool. When the heating plus A/C business arrived, he examined all elements of the cooling system. A few of the writers followed him around to watch him work. When he examined the outside unit, he discovered a problem with the coolant level. Since it was an old system, he had to add recycled freon. But, he told us that the incubator would really have to substitute their air conditioning unit soon, since freon is being phased out in the heating plus A/C industry. But, he fixed the problem abruptly, we all got back to writing in the air conditioned space in no time!