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Good morning, friends! Can you believe this is the ninety-ninth of these newsletters?

As I write this, it’s Sunday, and I’m a little behind on my own newsletter reading. I may have oversubscribed to these things over the course of the pandemic; now my email’s “newsletters” folder has nearly a thousand unread items in it. I’m slowly reading my way through them, but boy, is it ever a lot.

While catching up on a few, though, I found this post by Oliver Burkeman. He’s writing about that awful feeling of waking up in the morning and, before you’ve even had a chance to appreciate being alive one more day, feeling the tidal wave of things that must be done sweep in:

…I observed that many people (by which I meant me) seem to feel as if they start off each morning in a kind of “productivity debt”, which they must struggle to pay off through the day, in hopes of reaching a zero balance by the time evening comes. Few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than this vague sense that I’m falling behind, and need to claw my way back up to some minimum standard of output.

Hello, friends!

The Dark Age sometimes feels to me like several different kinds of novels in one. The largest part of the book reads like nonfiction, a historical assessment of a space mission, with logs and transcripts and footnotes. Another part is quiet, a deconstruction of memory by a woman, now grown, returned home.

But my favorite part comes early in the novel, when Philip, the most visible of the three main characters, has found himself inexplicably awake on a spaceship while the rest of the crew sleeps. This part of the book is a little dreamy, told in small glimpses and exhalations.

Today I thought I’d share a few of those little glimpses. All of these are extracted from different places in the story; they’re not necessarily chronological, or related.

Hello, friends!

It’s gorgeously foggy as I write this, a little past eight Monday morning. Down the slope from Hill House, roughly equidistant between our home and our neighbor’s, are a handful of fruit trees that the previous owner planted. I can hardly make out their branches in the mist.

A good morning for writing.

I haven’t written all that much in the last two weeks. It’s difficult to say why. Perhaps I haven’t wanted to. There’s so much guilt associated with that feeling. But you’re supposed to put your butt in the chair, produce some work on most days. I could, too, pin the blame on shifts in my morning routine. The sun comes up later; it’s raining more often than not now. Morning walks don’t happen; evening walks are looked forward to all day, and then forgotten about. But they’re all just easy scapegoats for my not feeling much like writing.

Hello, friends!

In the last update, I wrote about all of my projects in a state of waiting. As these things tend to do, one of them broke free a day later. My agent, having finished reading The Dark Age, had some valuable feedback.

A revision draft always feels pretty big until you manage to begin. The kind of feedback I got from my agent was a nice mix of small fixes and large. The small ones are easy: You rewrite a line here or there to make your point a little more clearly.

The large ones, though, require a bit more work. One note my agent delivered: “Miles needs to get his shit together. He ought to be doing absolutely anything he can to whip Philip into shape. The fate of humanity sort of depends on this.” (Philip: The extremely depressed astronaut who left his family behind. Miles: Philip’s extremely impatient mission director.)

Hello, friends!

I’ve been thinking a lot about deep work lately: About how difficult it can be to enter any kind of focused state when life and its many obligations keep pulling at your attention.

In 2014, Kazuo Ishiguro wrote an essay about his novel The Remains of the Day—specifically about his process for writing it. The state of Ishiguro’s life at the time was already different than the average artist, in that he’d abandoned his day job and was now making art full-time. Still, distractions found him:

Until that point, since giving up the day job five years earlier, I’d managed reasonably well to maintain a steady rhythm of work and productivity. But my first flurry of public success following my second novel had brought with it many distractions. Potentially career-enhancing proposals, dinner and party invitations, alluring foreign trips and mountains of mail had all but put an end to my “proper” work. I’d written an opening chapter to a new novel the previous summer, but now, almost a year later, I was no further forward.

Good morning, friends!

I find myself in an uneasy state. When I sit down at my writing desk, I am projectless, oddly adrift. It isn’t, of course, that I have no projects; instead, it’s that all of my projects are in a state of waiting.

• The Dark Age is with my agent, who is reading the latest draft. Aside from a brief missive—“I started reading, btw, and am really digging it”—I couldn’t tell you what he thinks of it. I anticipate some good notes, and at least one more revision before we consider doing something with the book. So: I’m waiting.
• The novel I ghostwrote earlier this year is in that uncomfortable limbo between done and published. It’s on the schedule: Late June, 2023. Sometime soon, I think, the book will officially be announced, its cover shared, preorders opened. Happily, it seems my name will be on this book after all, which means I’ll be able to share it with you once it’s made public. For now, I wait.
• A pitch for a new young adult novel is with my editors at Roaring Brook. The last YA book I delivered to them didn’t click; they passed, and I took some time to work on The Dark Age. Now, with Dark in a place of waiting, I’ve written up a new idea I’m excited about. Now I wait to hear if the editors are as interested in this idea as I am.
• The YA book that my editors passed on is still in development, however. It’s currently with a freelance editor I’ve hired; she’s reading the book currently and I anticipate some nice, juicy feedback that will help me whittle the book into shape. But for now: I’m waiting.

I never know what to do with the waiting. There are no concrete dates on the calendar, no sense of when the waiting will end. Could I manage a short story before one of those above projects wakes up again? A novella? Heck, a whole book? But what if I begin, and just as I settle into the pleasing rhythms of working on something new, one or more of those projects swings back around, demanding attention?

Good morning, friends!

I’m writing this on a Monday, the beginning of a new work week. I’ve been up for a few hours now. All summer I’ve had this reliable routine: I wake up around six, I go for a walk on a nearby trail, and then I come back home, have some breakfast, read a book, journal, work a bit on my novel—and then, after I’ve done all those things for myself, I start my workday. But the sun’s rising a bit later now, so I’ve changed up the order. I wrote a page or two in my journal before striking out. As I walked outside, I caught the sun coming up over the horizon. It illuminated a striped sky. Eight or nine sharp horizontal trails across the dawn light. Contrails, maybe? Precise clouds? I couldn’t quite tell, but it was a nice sight.

The trail was more or less empty this morning. Generally I walk while listening to podcasts or music, but today I began an audiobook. (Ruth Ware’s The Turn of the Key.) I caught myself walking without looking where I was going, just staring up at the stripes. While I did, a jet passed by at a very high altitude, and I noted that its contrail was wispy thin compared to the broader stripes already there, and that the trail dissipated quickly, thinning out before vanishing altogether. So the stripes couldn’t have been contrails; they’d been there for fifteen, twenty minutes by that point. I guess they were clouds. The sharpest, straightest clouds I’d ever seen, maybe. I wish I’d snapped a photo.

Of course, they were just clouds, and cloud-gazing isn’t what this newsletter is for, is it?

Hello, friends!

I’m sitting here in my study at the tail end of a week’s vacation. Our family’s still taking COVID precautions, so we didn’t travel anywhere (and anyway, Squish had school). Instead, I’ve spent the last week moving The Dark Age nearer a finished second draft.

And, happily, as of two days ago, that draft is done.

A second draft isn’t perfect. It’s not ready to send to editors just yet; there’s a lot more polishing and tightening and sharpening to be done. But it is a solid enough draft to start sharing with a few key people, who can read it and tell me where the narrative falters, or where my characters are clearly behaving according to plot gravity instead of their own emotional throughlines.

Hello, friends!

I’m off work this week, and spending that time bouncing between good books, three-hour naps, and revisions of my current work-in-progress, The Dark Age. So this’ll be a short one! I’ve got some Zs to pull.

Shortly after my last regular newsletter, Squish knocked on my study door. “Daddy,” she said, “what exactly do you know about supermassive black holes?” As it turns out, most of my black hole knowledge comes from movies, which, as Squish informed me, often get the whole black hole thing wrong.

We talked a while about astronomy, because that’s a big focus in her fifth-grade studies, and the conversation drifted to light pollution and the Bortle scale. (The Bortle scale is a way to measure the darkest places—and therefore best for stargazing—around the world.)

Hello, friends!

Recently Squish has taken a strong interest in astronomy. As a result, we’ve been watching a large number of science videos on YouTube. Squish’s favorite at the moment is the In a Nutshell series, by Kurzgesagt. If you haven’t seen the Kurzgesagt videos before, you’re in for a treat. Complex scientific concepts explained using gorgeous illustrations and a bit of humor.

We watched several videos about black holes, the Fermi paradox, and then we stumbled across this this one: What if Earth Got Kicked Out of the Solar System?

The video explains that while space is large and spread apart, everything is in motion, which means now and then, some objects come very close to other objects. In particular, stars:

Hello, friends!

I came across this quote, attributed to the playwright Arthur Miller, though I can’t seem to track it back to its source:

I’m a writer, and everything I write is both a confession and a struggle to understand things about myself and this world in which I live. This is what everyone’s work should be…whether you dance or paint or sing. It is a confession, a baring of your soul, your faults, those things you simply cannot or will not understand or accept. You stumble forward, confused, and you share. If you’re lucky, you learn something.

I like this quote. It gets to the heart of why art exists, doesn’t it? We create as a way to understand ourselves. It’s why, time and again, our deepest emotions insert themselves into the things we make. We might not always understand why; we might not even notice. But they’re often there, the scaffolding of every story or song or painting.

Hello, friends!

I’m happy to share an update with you:

The first draft of The Dark Age is complete!

Hello, friends!

Hayao Miyazaki is eighty-one years old, and legendary in the world of animation. There’s a good chance you’ve seen some of his movies, particularly if you have children. My Neighbor Totoro. Princess Mononoke. Spirited Away. There are lots and lots of them. (Ponyo is my personal favorite.)

Miyazaki’s movies are visually stunning, emotionally rich adventures. He’s recognized the world over as one of the greatest animated filmmakers in history.

But he can’t draw an airplane.

Hello, friends!

One of my favorite things to do when I like a piece of media—a book, a TV show, a movie, a song, etc.—is to go hunting for other things like that thing. For example, we all know I love the movie Contact, which tells the story of humankind’s first message from the stars; a great followup to that movie is Arrival, which delves more deeply into human-alien communication. Bonus points: Both have very strong parent-child relationship themes.

When I read a novel earlier this year about financial crimes, I enjoyed it so much I went looking for more.

When I finished The Office, I was glad to learn that shows like Parks & Recreation existed.

👋 Hi, friends!

This week I’m thinking about the expectations that writers feel they must meet. I had a conversation a week ago about writing, and someone said this to me: You finished Book X so fast, I’m wondering where Book Y is? It might be one of the most panic-inducing things a writer can hear. What do you mean you’re wondering where my project is? Are you saying it’s supposed to be done already? That I’m not writing quickly enough? I AM BEHIND?

Thankfully, I’ve spent the last few years gathering a pile of things that other artists have said, and a quick examination turns up so many things that are useful in resetting the balance of my world.

For instance, last November Ron Hogan, in his very good newsletter about writing, wrote:

Hello, friends!

I’ve had a very good weekend. Late last week I handed to my editor the copyedited ghostwritten manuscript, which means I’m more or less done with my work on that book, and can turn my focus again to The Dark Age. I wrote quite a lot on Saturday, nearly a full chapter, and Sunday more of the same. A productive weekend, one that included no fewer naps for my having written more words.

A reader emailed me recently to ask how long it’ll be before this novel’s in their hands. The answer, of course, is that I can’t answer that question. I might finish The Dark Age by summer’s end, as I’ve hoped to, but then there’s the matter of revising it, and following that, of finding a publisher for it, and, succeeding at that, then revising it some more, and waiting a year or more for a publication date… Publishing is a slow business, I tell you.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, in an interview about his book Several short sentences about writing, touched a bit on writing pace:

Hello, friends!

It’s been a busy couple of weeks over here. While squarely in the middle of working on The Dark Age, the copyedits for my ghostwritten novel arrived. Not much, just 3,000 or so notes that needed my approval, rejection, or correction. As with most things publishing-related, the deadline for such things is tight. (Two weeks, in this instance.) Happily, these revisions are nearly done.

One of my favorite things to read about is artists protecting their time from fanciful distractions. (To be sure, copyedits are not fanciful distractions.)

A classic example is this reply, written by E.B. White in response to an invitation to join a committee:

Hello, friends!

I’m once again juggling novels: A couple of days ago, the editor of my ghostwriting project returned the manuscript to me, glowing with copyedits that needed my attention. One of the first things I do when I receive a copyedited manuscript is look for the total number of edits that need my approval or revision.

Two thousand three hundred and change.

Publishing is just this way sometimes: Incredibly tedious, usually rushed. I have to return the next draft of the manuscript in less than two weeks. So: Juggling. So far successfully, though: I spend a little time on The Dark Age first, write a scene or a page or so, and then I turn my attention to the many editorial comments in my other book: Author, are you okay with this change? Author, you reused the word ‘singsongs’ six times in this book and that’s five more than a reader will tolerate; revisit? Author, you just had this character hug his mother but two sentences before he was carrying a platter piled with wriggling goldfish: Resolve the goldfish.

Good morning, my friends!

The past week has not been friendly to my writing. On the days I did write, nothing felt quite good enough; on other days, I sat at my desk and just couldn’t come up with even the most rudimentary strings of words. Some days I didn’t even attempt to write.

Once, this sort of thing would have stressed me out. It doesn’t so much these days. There’s no deadline governing my novel work; nobody’s waiting for this book. This book doesn’t need to exist; the world will spin right on without it. That’s extraordinarily freeing.

Jane Smiley understood this. In a piece for Atlantic, she wrote:

Hello, friends!

A few months ago I came across this tweet from Heidi Pitlor, who has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories for about 15 years:

Writers: you can almost always start later in your story or novel than you currently do.

In 2014, when I wrote “The Dark Age” in my Jeep in a library parking lot, I began like this:

Hello, friends!

I’m writing this Monday afternoon. Today marks the end of a short vacation. Ordinarily, at a time like this, I’d be feeling a bit of the “Sunday scaries” (I didn’t realize this feeling had a name until recently), but I’m feeling pretty good right now.

I began this vacation with just one expectation: I’d make serious progress on The Dark Age.

I did the exact opposite, I’m happy to report.

Hello, friends!

As I write this newsletter I’m entering a week-long vacation. “Vacation” doesn’t really mean all that much these days, since I’m not going anyplace. It’s a break from my daily work as a designer, which means I have more time to focus on writing.

An update, then, on the novel!

The Dark Age, if I include the prologue and epilogue, is an eight-part structure. As of this morning (Monday), I’ve completed Fran’s section of the story, meaning five of those eight parts are complete:

Hello, friends!

A couple of letters ago, I wrote about creativity and walking and the dastardly hill that lays outside our front door. I’d like to say I’ve been battling the hill since that letter, but other than a few jaunts down to check out mailbox (which is, evilly, stationed at the bottom of the steepest segment of the hill, rather than at our driveway’s end), that’s just not true.

But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about writing. There’s a little Post-It at my desk that says:

1. Move
2. Write
3. Repeat

Hello, friends!

I’ve just finished writing a new scene in Fran’s part of The Dark Age. Fran’s story is woven throughout the entire novel, but this part belongs entirely to her. It tells a braided story, pulling together three different stages of her life:

• Recent past: Fran is adrift. She’s middle-aged. Argus, the ship carrying her husband—the ship that she was supposed to pilot—launched thirty years before. Her daughter is gone, living far away and rarely in touch. Fran’s not only grounded from flying missions for her space agency, but she’s now been forced into retirement. Her purpose is gone.
• Childhood: Fran lives with her aunt, a kind and very religious woman. Every week she’s towed along while her aunt volunteers at the church. Fran finds no meaning in the church, but two events crystallize her purpose: She discovers a rural airfield near her home, and she hears Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” text read aloud. A calling has announced itself, and she is listening.
• Present: Fran has thoroughly lost her spark. She loses her way, tries to plug the void with new relationships. One night, a boyfriend serves up a double feature: Two very old movies about spaceflight. The movies light Fran’s wick again. She loses the boyfriend, and returns to that airfield of her youth, and feeds her soul by working with planes again.

I’ve delayed writing Fran’s part of the novel longest. Philip was always the clearest character to me. The idea of being separated from the people you love is easy to access. It’s one of my own biggest fears, so it’s not difficult to pull that thread, then write what it unearths. And Elle’s story is similar, because everyone can relate, in one way or another, to feeling second-best, particularly to your own family.

Hello, friends! Happy Memorial Day weekend.

This weekend, Top Gun: Maverick, was released. I grew up watching the original movie, and for the last few years have anticipated this sequel. When I learned they were making it, I cringed a bit; then I saw the first trailer, and I knew I’d see it opening weekend on the biggest screen I could find.

Except I didn’t see it this weekend, because our pandemic isn’t over, and I just don’t yet feel comfortable jamming myself into a crowded theater.

While reading a bit about the movie, I stumbled upon this interview with Jon Hamm, who plays a Vice Admiral in the movie. Hamm, of course, played Don Draper in one of my favorite television shows, Mad Men. He’s a good example of an actor disappearing into a role: When I watch Mad Men, I see Don Draper. Outside of Mad Men, I almost always see Jon Hamm, regardless of the role he’s playing; he’s never disappeared for me in the same way. Which doesn’t mean I haven’t enjoyed some of his other work.

Hello, friends!

Lately I feel like I’m either scrambling to keep up with all the things I need to do, or I’m opting out altogether, and doing puzzles or playing games instead. Remember in 2020, several months into the pandemic, when there were all those practical think-pieces with titles like How to Practice Self-Compassion or Tips for Being Kinder to Yourself During Trying Times? I think about all of those stories a lot. It was sort of like, for a moment, the whole world lifted its head and realized the grind couldn’t go on. Tragic that it took a pandemic to remind us that it’s okay to take breaks, to be unproductive, to ignore goals.

I handed in the first draft, then second, of my ghostwriting novel recently. It’s since been accepted by my editor, which means Yeah, okay, I can publish this. My immediate thought was Excellent, now I can turn my attention back to The Dark Age awhile. (I shit you not, minutes after I had that thought, my agent wrote with news of another ghostwriting project I might want to consider.)

The Dark Age marches on. I’m writing a part of the novel about Fran currently, exploring the last act of her life, when her husband is still hibernating somewhere beyond the solar system and her daughter is grown and moved away. She’s discovering that her dreams aren’t entirely dead after all. She’s finding a way to be herself even though she’s been forced into retirement from her space agency job, even though every doctor she sees has advised her to keep her fragile body on the ground, not among the clouds.

Hello, friends!

Last week, my daughter decided the internet was garbage, and old books were gold. “Don’t you just think books are a better place to find knowledge?” she asked me. “Instead of, I dunno, like, just looking at Google all the time? Google’s too easy. And it doesn’t smell like old books, either.”

She’s right. Google doesn’t smell like old books. What does it smell like?

After school one day, she began scouring my study for old books, but wasn’t quite sure where to start. “Where are the really old ones?” she asked. So we took a little tour, during which I explained the different islands of books:

Hi, friends!

Lately I’m thinking a lot about foreshadowing and echoes.

Recently I watched Ford v. Ferrari again. I love this movie. It shows up to do a job, it does its job in the most thrilling yet unflashy way imaginable, and then it goes home. Have you seen it? It’s the story of the Ford Motor Company’s efforts to defeat Ferrari at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans race. Ford, you see, has an image problem: Compared to Ferrari they’re dullards. The young folks, they all want flashy sports cars these days, see. To win that market, Ford has to make a statement, redefines itself. To do that, it hires car designer Carroll Shelby and driver Ken Miles to build a car that will beat Ferrari.

I want to talk about a particular scene in this movie, so if you haven’t seen it, feel free to skip this particular newsletter!

👋 Hello, friends!

One of my favorite things about where I live is this view:

Each morning I sit at our dining table and, over breakfast, do a little reading, a little writing, before I head downstairs to my windowless study to work on a book, then spend the day doing design work. It’s hard to look at that view and not recognize that we live on a planet. Can’t quite see the horizon curve, but it gives me pause now and then. Reminds me of how small we are, how big everything above that horizon really is.

Well, hello, friends!

I’ve set myself a goal. It would be irresponsible of me to share that goal here, so that’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to finish a draft of The Dark Age by the end of summer.

In a week I’ll be delivering a draft of my ghostwriting project to my editor. There’s no way to know how much revision lies ahead, but while I wait for his feedback, The Dark Age will get all of my writing attention. Feels good to realize that: If I’m writing, I’ll be writing that.

Is summer achievable? It absolutely is. From a purely technical perspective, this is going to be a short novel. Maybe half the length of something like Eleanor, give or take ten thousand words. If I continue to write daily, moving this book forward a little at a time, then yes, it can be done by summer’s end. Last month, as you might recall, I took a week away from work. I focused on writing the ending and the islands, and on drafting a fresh outline. That week answered so many questions I still had about this project. I understand it better now than I did before; when I sit and work on it, I know where every scene is leading. So long as I don’t screw up my routine, the book will be written by my self-appointed deadline.

Hello, friends!

Squish is reading her way through Madeleine L’Engle’s Time quintet presently. You know the books: A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, An Acceptable Time. It’s a real kick to watch your kiddo get lost in the same books you yourself got lost in. She’s midway through the third book in the series currently.

One of my favorite parts of these novels is the middle-of-the-night conferences that happen among the family members. Wrinkle opens with one such meeting: During a midnight storm, Meg ventures downstairs to find her little brother, Charles Wallace, already preparing cocoa for her; he knew she was coming. There’s a certain feeling on the air. Their mother joins them, and, soon after, the first of the book’s time-traveling witches arrives.

Years later, in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the whole family gathers and waits throughout the night for word of war. They do their best to cheer each other up with words or food, all of them in this little pocket of time, together.

Hello, friends!

There are times when, while working on a project, it feels like the world is echoing your themes right back to you. I don’t mean this in any sort of the universe is looking out for me mystical sort of way; instead, I think it’s that, as you think deeply about something, you begin to notice that thing where it already exists around you.

The Dark Age, as I’m sure you all know by now, revolves around the love between a parent and child, but it also contends with themes of loss, of distance, of loneliness, of regret.

Right now the writing is going very well. Every day I move both of my novel projects forward: I revise a stack of pages of the ghostwriting project, and then I write a scene, sometimes two or three, of The Dark Age. It’s easy when you’re not living in a project daily to forget what it’s like to do so: You feel so thoroughly immersed in the story that it goes everywhere you do.

Hello, friends!

What do you do when you’re between books? Yesterday I finished reading a mystery (I won’t name it, as it may be my least favorite book by an author whose work I usually enjoy), and on Tuesday, Emily St. John Mandel’s newest book, Sea of Tranquility is due to arrive.

Which leaves me with two whole days during which I can’t start something new, but I need something to fill those moments when I reach for a book.

My study is where I keep all of my books. Not my books, but books for reading. This is an imperfect solution, as the room is not particularly large, and it’s practically lined wall-to-wall with books. They’ve spilled into the hallway outside, which is where I stack all the books I’ve prioritized. The books I intend to read next. (Except that’s also no longer true; there are just a lot of books out there, and about half of them are books I’ll get around to when I get around to them.)

Hello, friends!

I’m writing this as a week-long break comes to a close. I think here at Hill House we’re all a little bummed to see it wind down. It’s been a wonderful week for us all. Squish had several virtual gaming playdates; Felicia broke out the roller skates; I got a lot of writing done.

As it ends I’m thinking about what’s next. On Monday, I’ll return to my ghostwriting project, and begin revising it into a draft suitable to deliver to my editor. But I’m also thinking about how to keep The Dark Age from going onto a shelf while I do that work. It’s impossible for me to properly juggle two novel projects with all of my other obligations. But what if there was a small way to keep The Dark Age warm?

By my count, over the last two years of exploratory work on The Dark Age, I’ve produced about 140,000 words of material. That’s a whole novel and then some. But the operative word here is exploratory. Across that sea of pages I’ve tinkered with point of view, structure, narrative arcs.

Hello, friends!

It’s my week off from work, and while I’m not traveling anywhere, I’ve got a lot on the docket. Though I haven’t taken one of my customary writing trips since the pandemic began, I’m still using these regular breaks as a way to cozy up to my projects again, and see what new things I can make happen.

This week in particular I have a plan. You see, The Dark Age has been riding the back burner for a little while, as I’ve been working on a ghostwriting project. This week, however, while the ghost book breathes, I’m swinging back around to my personal project.

The problem with novels is that they’re long-term activities. When you park one awhile, coming back to it can be challenging. The battery might have died. The tires released some air. There’s a family of mice in the engine compartment. It can be difficult to resurrect the novel; you might spend the whole week just performing basic maintenance to resuscitate it. Then, when you’ve got it at the starting line, the week’s over, and you’re back to your other work. And what did you accomplish? By the time you come back to it again, the mice will have returned.

Hello, friends!

About a week ago, I finished a draft of the novel I’ve been ghostwriting; in last week’s letter, I talked about letting that draft breathe before returning to it and revising it.

For a few days, I worked on a short story. It was a nice exercise, a way to cleanse the palate after working on the ghost book awhile, but it’s a frivolous little story, and I don’t feel any urgency to finish it.

All I can think about is returning to The Dark Age. During my time focusing on the other project, I found myself thinking constantly about my own novel. Would I forget all of the things I wanted to revise, to rewrite, to restructure or just do better? Would the time spent writing the ghost book destroy my momentum?

Hello, friends!

Felicia and I have just finished watching Station Eleven on HBO Max. Her first viewing, my second. The show rewards the attentive viewer, I think, and Felicia’s a more attentive viewer than I am. Things I discovered for the first time, she’d already acknowledged, understood, and catalogued.

I’m writing this on Sunday, March 6. Yesterday I finished the final touches of the first draft of my ghostwriting project. (If you subscribe to the Dark Age letters, I wrote about this project in last week’s letter: 🚀The Dark Age: TK CLEVER TITLE).

Finishing a first draft is always a strange thing. You’re excited, yes, naturally, but you’re also a little queasy about this thing you’ve made. Is it good? If it isn’t, can it become good? When you write The End (if you write The End; I don’t), you’re the worst person in the world to evaluate the draft. It’s too soon. You’re too close.

Good morning, friends!

I usually write these newsletters the weekend before they go out, or, if I’m particularly on my game, a few weeks ahead of time. Right now it’s Sunday, the 27th of February.

Yesterday, happily, I finished actively writing the first draft of the ghostwriting project I’ve mentioned in previous newsletters. The draft isn’t totally complete; I’ve got nearly ninety “TKs” to locate and replace.

From Wikipedia:

Hello, friends!

I’m writing this on Monday, President’s Day; it’s been a long weekend, and while I’ve spent most of it on necessary work (preparing taxes, argh) I’ve also spent some of it happily working on a book, taking notes, and just watching movies with my family.

On Friday night we watched Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which everyone enjoyed. I am not much of a Ghostbusters fan, if I’m honest, but I thought this latest movie was fun, and had a bigger heart than I anticipated. (Particularly through my grumpy lens of Stop making movies that pander to my childhood self! Since I didn’t grow up loving these movies, that grumpy Jason stayed on the shelf.)

This movie led us down a rabbit hole. On Saturday, while I scanned tax forms and did math, Felicia and Squish watched the original Ghostbusters movie. I caught the tail end. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed Bill Murray. So Sunday we rewatched Groundhog Day. Every time I watch this movie, it’s a little different. This time around, I’m a little more skeeved-out by the effort Phil puts into perfecting his seduction of Rita. It’s pretty icky, in fact. But it’s a great marker for how the character grows: He was a skeevy dude because he didn’t give a shit about other people. He only cared about his own wants. So when, by the end of the movie, he’s come to terms with his inescapable fate and shifted to making himself a better person, the transformation feels earned. For such a short movie (barely more than 90 minutes) it manages to pack quite a lot of the human experience in there. (Austin Kleon thinks Groundhog Day is a perfect movie for anyone who wants to be an artist.) Only when Phil transforms himself does he transform his situation. He turns the ordinary present into an extraordinary future; he stays on the bus.

Hi, friends!

It’s been such a pleasant weekend over here. The sun’s out, but it’s still nice and cool outdoors. Felicia and Squish strapped on their roller skates for the first time in a few months. And while Squish enjoys a virtual playdate with a friend, Felicia and I have been watching Station Eleven on HBO.

I’ve watched the show once already, and I’m rewatching it now as Felicia experiences it for the first time. We both read the novel six or seven years ago, and even traveled to Eugene to hear Emily St. John Mandel read from the book and give a little lecture about the research that went into the story.

By the way: If you haven’t read Station Eleven, go read it. It’s a wonderful novel. Makes the end of the world something quite lovely. But whether you’ve read it or not, watch the HBO show. It’s the best thing I’ve seen in the last year, more than worth your time. (The first episode will be uncomfortable and familiar; hang in there, not every episode will be that way.)

Hello, friends!

Today I’m thinking about where story ideas originate. Right now I’m working on two projects. One, The Dark Age, weaves together a few different stories, each of which connects to a larger tale. With the other book, a novel I’m adapting from a story told in another medium, I’m bringing some of my own story ideas to the work, and weaving them into the primary tale as a way to expand the story’s world for the novel format.

Recently I happened across this decade-old Gizmodo piece by short story expert Kelly Link. Link talks about where story ideas come from, and shares a few methods.

The first starts with a piece of advice:

Hello, friends!

A few years ago, Craig Mod wrote an essay for Wired about taking a long walk across Japan.

I’ve taken many walks in Japan, but this was a walk of a different scale. I left my house in a small town south of Tokyo shouldering a giant pack, walking poles, and wearing hiking boots. I wound my way up through Yokohama to the capital, and, from there, followed an old historic highway, snaking into valleys lush with spring blossoms and full-bloom cherry trees, abutted by the Central Japanese Alps of Nagano and Gifu prefectures, ending in Kyoto. In the end I walked a long way.

I’ve read several things that Mod has written over the years, but I particularly loved this piece, because he emphasizes the longness of the walk as key to its importance, then stretches that to cover any thing a person might do:

Hello, friends!

This new year has, so far, brought with it some interesting reads. I opened the year by reading Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass House and re-reading her Station Eleven, then enjoyed Danielle Evans’s first collection of stories, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self.

Right now I’m reading, and nearly finished with, Patricia Lockwood’s debut novel, No One is Talking About This, a curiously experimental thing that examines life from the POV of an “influencer,” lived almost completely online (in “the portal,” as Lockwood refers to it).

The first half of the novel is more or less plotless, filled with rumination about social media, the herd behaviors of humans who are addicted to it. Here’s an example:

Hello, friends!

We’re halfway through January now. Time seems to move at a rapid clip these days. I attribute this mostly to the pandemic. Our family hasn’t stopped isolating since the whole thing began in early 2020. Every time it seems the world might be emerging from this rampant season of virus and death, numbers begin to climb again, and it just makes sense to keep playing it very safe. My working from home makes this easier than it otherwise would be, and I’m grateful for that. We’ve chosen to homeschool Squish this year, which means she’s not wrapped up in the outbreaks and school closures that are sweeping through our county currently. As a result, every day’s shape resembles the shape of the day before. Whole weeks and months zip by. When I’m in a writing lull, it’s easy for that lull to extend itself without my noticing.

Recently I reactivated our family’s Hulu service, simply so we could watch Only Murders in the Building. Soon after, though, I discovered a little British series called Staged, which is told entirely through virtual meetings. In this show, two actors—David Tennant and Michael Sheen, each playing a version of themselves—join a series of Zoom calls hosted by a director; pre-pandemic, they’d been working on a play, and now, while they’re stuck at home, they decide to keep rehearsing, so that when the lockdown ends, they’re ready to offer entertainment to a hungry public. Except lockdown does a serious number on these two, and as a result, they hardly manage to rehearse a single page of the play without launching themselves at one another’s throats. The show has only the barest of plot structure: Ostensibly, these folks would like to successfully rehearse their play. That’s it. What happens instead is that the show is drowned with character, not plot. And I kept watching, even though nothing was happening, because I liked spending time with these characters.

It occurs to me that this is a thousand percent what The Dark Age ought to strive for. The plot, what little of it there may be, is just scaffolding on which I hope to stretch these characters. What’s supposed to happen in this book? A crew of astronauts is supposed to find a new home for the people of Earth. Okay, fine, dandy. It would be a mistake, though, to structure the book around this goal. What matters infinitely more are the characters connected to this goal: The father who doesn’t want to be on the journey, whose heart implodes when he thinks of the family he left behind; the mother, denied her dream and stranded on Earth with a child she didn’t ask for; the child, isolated from her parents emotionally and physically, who wonders why she exists.

Happy new year, friends!

I don’t know about you, but I have made and plan to make absolutely no resolutions this year. I’ve never been big on resolutions to begin with—I think that’s because I typically fail at them fairly quickly—but this year in particular there seems to be no point. This isn’t a new year. It’s the same year. It’s the beginning of the third same year in a row.

I closed out 2021 by taking a week off work, and just…being. That wasn’t exactly my plan. I’d planned to do a ferocious amount of writing during that time. And I did write. With the exception of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I wrote two thousand or more words each day, and really moved my ghostwriting project forward. While working on it, I even had a little breakthrough realization about The Dark Age, the other novel I’m writing. But the rest of the time I spent doing as much of absolute nothing as I could manage.

• I stayed up very late (and screwed up my sleep schedule)
• I slept in every day
• I watched a lot of movies (I’ve been catching Squish up on the previous Spider-Man and Amazing Spider-Man franchises, so she’s fully prepared for the newest movie in the current franchise, when it ever arrives on streaming)
• I watched a lot of television (I’ve finished Only Murders in the Building and Succession and Yellowstone and Curb Your Enthusiasm and Cobra Kai and am in the midst of Station Eleven)
• I played quite a lot of Halo Infinite (a masterclass of reminders that my reflexes are shot)
• I read a lot, too (Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass House, then a re-read of her Station Eleven, and now Danielle Evans’s Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self)
• Etc.

Happy new year, friends!

One of the most interesting aspects of writing books—and my least understood—is the way problems sometimes solve themselves as soon as you stop thinking about them.

I mentioned in a previous email that I’m working on a ghostwriting project. It’s got a tangible deadline, so it’s taken priority, for the moment, over The Dark Age. I’d thought, at first, I’d simply juggle the two projects. But I’m not so great at the juggling, as it turns out. Perhaps if I were a full-time writer, and this were the only job I had, it would be different? I am not, however, so writing fits into the spaces I can open up for it. And opening up those spaces for one book is often challenge enough.

In any case, I’ve had a few days off work, and have consistently worked on my ghostwriting project each day. I’m feeling good, at least at the moment, about the work I’m doing.

Hi, friends!

This is the last newsletter of 2021, can you believe it? It’s been a very newslettery year. I’ve sent forty-five total newsletters to your inboxes; nearly twenty of those, beginning in April, were The Dark Age letters. I want to thank you all for spending a little time with me this year. I’ve heard from some of you that these letters have been useful to your own projects, or just your own peace of mind during a fractured year. Well, hearing from you has been the same for me.

It’s time to look back at a year of reading. The pandemic has changed my reading habits in unanticipated ways. I’ve gone through stretches of time where I simply couldn’t handle books with serious subject matter, and other stretches where I couldn’t handle books at all, and just read comics. I’ve veered from nonfiction to novels, from novels to craft books, from craft books to memoirs. It’s been an all-over-the-place kind of year.

In 2021, I began reading 117 books. Surprisingly, I only abandoned 22 of these. That’s only .0003472%! (Don’t check my math.) Most of the books I quit reading fall into the “now’s not the right time” category, not the “this book is 100% not for me” category; I’ll circle back to them and give them another try, perhaps even in 2022.