Have begun work in earnest on my second novel. Humbling to begin again—and quite the shock to my system to remember that the most effective way to write that I’ve found is…to try out idea after idea after idea, each bad, until you happen upon one glint of a good idea. You dig that out and feel good. You think, “Okay, now I’m on my way!” and keep digging where you found the good idea. But there are only bad ideas. Bad ideas everywhere.

You repeat this, night after night, ass-in-chair, until you start collecting enough good ideas to begin arranging them into pretty patterns. This works for a while to calm the limbic system. You’re on your way.

But one night you realize one of the good ideas doesn’t belong, and that disrupts the entire pretty arrangement. So now you need to find a beautiful arrangement with the ideas you have left or you need to start digging again for new ideas.

There is no genius behind it. Only a stubborn insistence to do the damned thing. Time, a writers time, is bled into the words of the work. That is what you feel when reading something remarkable: not only the beauty of the thing, the pain, frustration, the ecstasy and the exhaustion. The work is imbued with the labor that created it.