Today will be an in-between day, I can tell – but it’s those that make a book. Days on which all you do is spellcheck, or search for words you know you have repeated too often (particularly, almost, thing, Nietzsche). Earlier on, you may change a character’s name, and again, then change it back to what it was the first time you changed it. Later, I re-read until a sentence is bad enough to stop me. Perhaps there’s an unwanted rhyme with the sentence above or perhaps, seeing it again, I realize it says the opposite of what it needs to say. Sometimes, at any stage, a paragraph is dead – you overdescribed, did too much research, or tried to reduce it to its most efficient form, and ended up sounding faux naïf. The worst comes when I begin to realize I wasn’t writing what I thought I was writing. Read in an obvious way, with today’s head on, it seems an appalling misjudgment, this whole book – a misjudgment that would appal anyone not themselves appalling. And yet, when you were writing it, during all those months, you thought people would be delighted. I seem to be doing this more and more often: three finished manuscripts to one published. But I need to write in orbit around the far side of the moon, in radio silence, info-shadow. If it’s written with permission, it’s trash – even before it’s written, it’s already trash. I tell my students there are no wasted hours, because that’s what all writers need to hear. There are no wasted hours, but there are wasted years. And then, in a sentence or another book, something comes to exist that would never have been sayable without that waste – and it almost feels like it, the shitness, has been redeemed. (I feel like I’m going to be sick.)
People are now starting to congratulate me on my beard. ‘Amazing.’ It gives my face a sense of occasion it’s always lacked (my too-thrusting nose, my underwhelming chin). I think I look like a sailor home from the sea, but already watching the tides and tasting the wind.