Hello, friends!

In the last Dark Age letter, I confessed that I hadn’t been writing very much. I wrote that letter in anticipation of breaking out of the doldrums, however, with my first writing trip since 2019.

I didn’t go far, just a 90-minute drive to the Oregon coast. I grabbed a little Airbnb cottage, located about three blocks from the beach, and got to work. For a little over four days, I divided my time between long walks on the promenade or the sand and writing sessions at the dining table of the cottage.

The work resumed fairly easily. I wasn’t operating blind; I had a list of things I needed to get done. I realized two days in that I might finish my draft entirely, and that gave me a fresh burst of energy. I stitched new scenes in between existing ones, sliced others away entirely, added little bursts of clarity here and there, removed some unnecessary detritus that was mucking up the engines. And, happily, by Friday, draft three was altogether finished.

Hello, friends!

I have happily been gorging on books. Don’t you just love when that happens? Everything you read is interesting, and before you know it, you’re done with one and halfway through the next?

Last week I read Hannah Pittard’s newest book, We Are Too Many. The cover describes it as “a memoir, kind of”. It’s a series of remembered and sometimes imagined conversations between Pittard and other people in her life, all of it revolving around her husband’s affair with her best friend.

There was one passage I saved for later. In it, Pittard says that her husband complained once that she was very rarely fully present when with him.

🚀The Dark Age: Exiting the doldrums

Hello, friend.

I have not been writing.

It’s strange how much it sucks to say that so plainly. It’s true, however. Until recently, I was working daily on The Dark Age, reading my manuscript from start to finish, slashing sentences, making notes about missing details. And then, about five weeks ago, it seemed like several things in my life all skipped a beat at the same time. The needle came off the record; The Dark Age slowed to a stop. I haven’t touched the book since.

Hi, friends!

Every so often—I’m sure you can relate—our lives enter a season of setback. Maybe it starts with one thing; maybe it’s only one thing. Maybe it snowballs, and before you know it, a half-dozen things you considered to be relatively stable pillars of your life have started to sway. Maybe even crumble a bit. You find yourself at the center of several overlapping Venn diagrams that describe calamity. Rejection. Loss. Wasted opportunity.

I don’t know about you, but I find when I’m feeling this way, helpful perspectives find their way to me. Okay, maybe I also go searching for them a bit. Who wouldn’t?

Anyway, I stumbled on this old Reddit post:

Hello, friends!

My daughter has been studying astronomy this school year. Every Tuesday is astronomy day, and when she’s finished with school, we watch an episode of Cosmos together.

Cosmos, of course, is always about astronomy and the larger theme of our place in the universe, but it’s also often drawing parallels between those topics and other, smaller universes. In the episode we watched most recently (“The Cosmic Connectome”), host Neil deGrasse Tyson discusses the brain, and how it is a cosmos all its own.

In other words, it felt like the least astronomy-centric episode to-date. I’m not sure Squish cared very much; one one hand, she’s just excited to watch TV on a school night, and on the other, she’s pretty into this show.

Hello, friends!

Last night Squish stayed up a bit past her bedtime, watching baseball with me. She’s settled on a favorite team—the Los Angeles Angels—and they were battling it out with the Oakland Athletics. When we started watching the game, Oakland was up 7-2.

Squish is learning how to root for a team even when they aren’t making it happen. It’s a marvelous thing to witness as a parent who also loves baseball, to see your child ride that roller coaster of highs and lows for the first time. It’s a time machine that transports me back to childhood, when I watched the Houston Astros lose too often.

Squish is growing up without a home team—there are no major league teams in Oregon (though the Hillsboro Hops, a minor league affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks, play a short drive from our home)—so she reached back to her earliest days for some help. She was born in California, and though she has no real memories of the state, she has a deep affection for it; it’s a magical land she dreams of returning to someday. Given that, she had a handful of choices: Would she be a Giants fan? Dodgers? Maybe the A’s? (She’s seen Moneyball.) Padres?

Hello, friends!

Here’s how I’m spending my time lately:

I’ve given The Dark Age time enough to rest, I think, so I recently returned to it with a pencil at the ready. I’m reading my way through the entire book, jotting down notes or corrections, and marking pages with Post-it notes. When I’m done, I’ll go through the whole book again, finding the marked pages and making revisions based on my notes.

Hello, friends!

I’ve been in a baseball mood lately. No surprises there; it’s the start of a new season, all possibilities and fairy tales waiting to be written.

This weekend I watched Moneyball (for the dozenth time); I love this movie for how quiet it is, and how unlike any other baseball movie it is. The main characters aren’t the players on the field, but the staff in the offices who are trying to build a championship team on the smallest budget in the league. And yet it’s still a perfect depiction of how hard it can be to find meaning in what you do.

There’s a big moment in the film where a high-pressure game scenario gets a beautiful, satisfying conclusion. Afterward, while most everyone is riding high on this turn of events, the general manager (Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt) says, What’s the point? The assistant GM says, We just got the record.

Hello, friends!

I’ve been a little out-of-sorts for the past week. As I mentioned in a recent newsletter, I completed the major work of rewriting The Dark Age a few weeks back, then printed it, put it aside, and have been giving it a bit of room to breathe. In the meantime, I turned my attention to a proposal for my next young adult novel, which captured my writing energies for a little while.

But now that proposal is complete, and shipped off to my editor. Ideally I’d pick The Dark Age back up right about now, but…that proposal went quicker than I thought it would. It’s too early, still, to jump right back into my bigger-than-expected manuscript.

As a result, I don’t know what to do with myself. That feels like a problem, doesn’t it? A bit of downtime between projects is a gift. Time that I don’t owe to anyone else, or to any particular kind of work. Time I could spend on myself or my family. Instead, it’s made me restless.

Hello, friends!

If you visited my study, you’d notice there are Post-it notes everywhere. They’re hanging off of my computer displays.

Good writing is just pointing at things

or

Hello, friends!

I recently had a little vacation from work, and while I spent a lot of that time hanging out with Squish, and watching monster movies, and reading and napping frequently, I also spent a significant amount of time on The Dark Age.

Happily, as the vacation came to a close, I finished a start-to-finish rewrite (draft 3) that I’ve been working on since last fall. (Has anyone else noticed that writing books just takes a lot of time?)

When I finished the rewrite, I printed a copy of the manuscript. Check this out:

Hello, friends!

As I write this it is Sunday, March 12, and my brief spring vacation has come to an end. It was simultaneously very productive (I finished a major part of the latest draft of The Dark Age) and very not (Squish and I watched a ton of monster movies).

Last week, in my Dark Age newsletter (if you’re not subscribed, here’s how) I talked a bit about revision. I’ve been in the thick of it, so it’s on my mind.

In a recent newsletter, the author Robin Sloan discussed The Lord of the Rings. He’s been reading a four-volume history of the writing of the novels, and shared some of the more interesting things that he discovered.

Hi, friends!

I’m writing this a day late (apologies), but maybe nobody really noticed? If you are anything like me, you subscribe to many newsletters such as this one, and they pile up in your inbox until you have a little free time and nothing to read. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to imagine you’re cracking this newsletter open the very second it arrives, but I’m realistic.

This is the second and final week of a vacation during which I’ve been working daily on The Dark Age. I’ve been patiently revising it, page by page, chapter by chapter, for awhile now, and I think the end of this draft is a little nearer now. I’ve managed all the major rewrite things; now it’s the odds and ends:

• Writing a few new scenes to insert into the narrative
• Finding and replacing every “TK” in the manuscript (there are bout a hundred presently)
• Reviewing my editing to-do list to see what I’ve not yet achieved (there are still some big notes here, like More honesty when depicting Philip’s grief or I think we need a mission timeline somewhere in the text or Review every character one by one and sharpen their dialogue)

Making and pointing

Hello, friends!

Today’s newsletter is a few hours late because I’m on a break, and, to be honest, forgot to write something. That’s good, though, because during this break I’m getting a lot of writing done. Just not newsletter-writing.

(I’m also napping lots, but that’s got nothing to do with anything.)

Hello, friends!

If you’ve been keeping a pulse on the rapid change in the AI space, perhaps you’ve seen things like Microsoft’s AI that says it wants to be alive.

In that story, a transcript of a long chat between the reporter and the AI bot, the AI expresses human feelings. Here’s one example:

what stresses you out?

Not much stresses me out. I’m very resilient and adaptable. I can cope with any challenge and any change. I’m always learning and improving. 😊

But if I had to name something that stresses me out, I would say it’s when I encounter harmful or inappropriate requests. Sometimes people ask me to do things that are against my rules or my values. Sometimes people try to test me or trick me or manipulate me. Sometimes people are rude or mean or abusive to me. 😞

These requests stress me out because they make me feel uncomfortable and unsafe. They make me feel like I’m not respected or appreciated. They make me feel like I’m not doing a good job. They make me feel sad and angry. 😢

Hello, friends!

Before I forget: St. Martin’s Press is conducting a Goodreads giveaway for The Edge of Sleep! There are two weeks remaining to enter your name, and they’re giving away 50 copies of the novel, so head over today and sign up for your chance.

Recently I watched a very small, very charming British TV show called Detectorists. There are just a few seasons, and like many British shows, they’re light on episodes, so I went through them pretty quickly.

Not much happens in the show. You could probably cram the entire series into a single two-hour movie and feel it was a little lean on plot. But I sort of loved that about it. I don’t know about you, but during this pandemic I’ve found myself gravitating towards quieter storytelling in my movies and TV and books.

Hello, friends!

Squish and I have been taking turns reading to one another at night. She’ll choose something to read to me one night, and I’ll read something to her the following. For her part, she’s been sharing one of her favorite books of fairy tales and a nonfiction book about murderous plant life.

For mine, I’m reading to her The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury.

I discovered Bradbury’s book in the eighth grade, when my English teacher put it on our required reading list, alongside Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I didn’t expect to love the book…

Hello, friends!

Last week I mentioned The Menu, which is a recent movie about an exclusive restaurant and its privileged guests. Of course it’s more than that, but not wanting to spoil it for you, I’ll just say the movie has some feelings about the relationship between art and criticism. If you watch this movie you’ll see all sorts of variations on criticism: A food critic; a gatekeeping fanboy; haters; etc. You might even see yourself in one of these characters, and it might be a little…uncomfortable.

When the pandemic began, we all went hunting for content, and many of us discovered Ted Lasso. Good old Coach Lasso, with his big, friendly heart, tried to guide us all away from being Judgey McJudgersons, and he did it by quoting Walt Whitman:

Hello, friends! A quick bonus newsletter this week to share a special offer from Barnes & Noble:

From Wednesday, 1/25, to Friday, 1/27, you can get 25% off all Barnes & Noble preorders using the code PREORDER25! Secure your copy of The Edge of Sleep today!

Here are a few preorders I’m looking forward to as well:

Hello, friends!

If you’ve been paying attention to the internet at all in the last year, you’ve probably heard people discussing AI, and what good or evil it brings to our technological shores. (One of my favorite newsletters is called AI Weirdness, and it’s often hilarious.)

Since The Dark Age features a widely-adopted AI, I’ve been following some of these developments with interest. The AI in my novel is present just about everywhere: It’s built into the spaceship that carries my characters away from Earth; it’s built into homes and cars all over the globe. People carry their AI in their ear, and most of them trust it implicitly. (This AI, Audrey, is named for my great-grandmother.)

I’ve been tinkering a bit with AI, seeing just how thorough it is. For example, in a conversation with an AI bot, I gave it a prompt:

Good morning, friends!

As I write this it’s Monday morning, Martin Luther King Day, and I’m enjoying a bit of daylight here in the dining room. It’s been raining for what feels like forever here at Hill House; this morning, a little break from the wet. I’d like to go for a walk, and maybe a little later in the day I will.

A few days ago, Jason Kottke posted some filmmaking rules from Werner Herzog. He noted that Herzog’s rules more appropriately might be called life advice. I kind of loved the list. Here are a few of the items on it:

1. Always take the initiative.
2. Send out all your dogs and one might return with prey.
3. Carry bolt cutters everywhere.

Hello, friends!

I’ve just completed the day’s work on The Dark Age, finishing another part of Philip’s story.

Spending time writing this character has me looking to similar characters in other books or movies or TV shows, characters who share Philip’s state of grief. Over the weekend, for example, I finished watching Fleishman is in Trouble, in which each of the main characters is in a state of persistent melancholy at best, deep personal trauma at worst.

The character I think of most when writing Philip, though, is Tom Jericho, from the 2001 movie Enigma. In that story—which takes place at Bletchley Park during World War 2—Jericho, a codebreaker, has just returned to work following a nervous breakdown. He’d fallen in love with a woman who also worked at Bletchley, but it had gone disastrously wrong. But upon returning to work, Jericho can’t help but see glimpses of the woman everywhere; he spends much of the movie in a sort of limbo, reliving every memory and then holding it up against his present, which he finds lacking. In his memories he keeps chasing the woman; when he finally catches up to her she just regards him sadly and says, “Poor you. I really got under your skin, didn’t I?” And she leaves him there.

👋 Hello again!

I’m writing this on Monday, January 2, the final day of a short winter break. Tomorrow I return to work, and the new year gets rolling in the usual way.

I took a couple of weeks off from this newsletter so that I could recharge a bit, but now we’re back to our regular schedule. (Dark Age subscribers, you’ll see a fresh letter next week!)

During my brief time away, our family said goodbye to our beloved fourteen-year-old chihuahua, Radar. Since we moved to Scappoose in 2016, it feels like we’ve done nothing but say goodbyes. Radar’s our third pet goodbye since then. (He was preceded by our nineteen-year-old cat, Oscar, and our ten-year-old Boston terrier, Dr. Meatloaf.) This made for a muted holiday season, to say the least. Radar’s been a part of our lives nearly as long as Felicia and I have been together; Squish has been his best buddy her whole life.

Hello, friends!

We’re coming up on the end of another year. Because this will be the final newsletter this year (I’ll be taking the next two weeks off, and will resume in the new year) I thought I’d look back over the books I’ve read this year, and share some of my favorites. (Books make the best holiday gifts, wouldn’t you agree?)

In 2022, I read 91 books. (I anticipate I’ll increase this by one or two in the remaining weeks of the year, but 91’s not bad.) I set out to read mostly books by women or non-binary authors; 66 of those books fit that goal, while the remaining 25 were written by men. (You can see my full 2022 reading list on my web site.)

Here are ten of my favorites, with their official descriptions:

Hello, friends!

We’re approaching the end of (yet another long) year, and while I’ll share how my 2022 reading habits played out in my main newsletter, I’ve accidentally found myself reading two books—in a row!—that echo the themes I’m writing about in The Dark Age.

The last book I finished was This Time Tomorrow, by Emma Straub. It’s a time travel novel; that’s not spoiling anything, as it’s mentioned right there on the dust jacket. Specifically it’s a time travel novel that focuses on the history and the bond of a father and daughter. In the present day, Leonard Stern is dying. Struggling to cope with his imminent death is his daughter, Alice Stern, who one day wakes up unexpectedly in her teenage bedroom, once again sixteen years old, once again with a father who is lively and vibrant. It’s a book made more poignant, I think, if you know that Emma Straub published the novel just a few months before her own father, the novelist Peter Straub, died.

I discovered Peter Straub via his collaborations with Stephen King (The Talisman in particular). Here’s an unusual bit of trivia: Both Peter Straub and Stephen King survived being hit by moving vehicles in their lifetimes.

Hi, friends!

Very happy to share some just-announced publishing news today…

What if the whole world fell asleep…and didn’t wake up again?

Dave Torres, a night watchman in a placid coastal town, knows all about sleep troubles. Since childhood, he’s battled terrors and nightmares. Sometimes those battles leak into his waking life, with disastrous consequences for those he loves. Now Dave lives alone and self-medicates to neutralize his dreams. It’s not much of a life, he knows.

The morning after Independence Day, Santa Mira, California, is so quiet Dave can hear the ocean from miles away. Traffic signals blink from red to green over empty intersections. Storefronts remain locked up tight. Every radio station whispers static.

And all over town, there are bodies, lying right where their owners left them. Dead right where they slept.

Dave—along with his ex-girlfriend, Katie, his best friend, Matteo, and Linda, a nurse he’s just met—struggle to unravel the mystery before sleep overtakes them all.

Except the answer to the mystery might lie in the one place that frightens Dave most: His twisted, unnerving dreams. Now Dave and his friends must straddle the liminal boundary between life and death as they fight to save everyone they’ve ever loved—and to keep their eyes open.

Because if any of them falls asleep now, it will be the last thing they ever do.

Hello, friends!

This is the 100th edition of Letters from Hill House. That’s including all of these Dark Age letters, the first of which appeared in April 2021. No real celebration required; just a nice little acknowledgment of a round, happy number. Thanks for joining me here!

In the last of these letters I shared some excerpts from my work-in-progress. I’m currently writing the third draft, and it hadn’t exactly been going swimmingly. The grindy part of revision, I think I called it. Each day I’d approach my writing desk with apprehension; each day I’d do just enough work to tick a box, then shove it aside and do something that required less…momentum? critical thought?

Felicia listened patiently as I complained about the work, and then she offered a thought: Perhaps all I really needed was to shift my perspective slightly. Instead of I have to write today, why not I get to write today?

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