I'm writing a lot these days. It's not what I thought.

Kill your work. Nothing is new, featuring Arundhati Roy and Christopher Nolan.

The Slaying of the Suitors by Heinrich Dähling

I.

I’m not what you’d call a perfectionist. Half-done is good enough for me. I keep editing not because there’s a perfect version, because art is always in movement until it’s done. So it’s baffling the number of dead, finished drafts I have for this platform, that I could simply just publish. I have full essays, written for an editor or for myself, on The Phoenician Scheme, reading cookbooks as literature, on how I approach AI, and more. They simply sit there in a pile of work that I’d categorize as: non-growth-oriented drafted writing. I’m not upset if anyone reads them. But I like to do things new, even though I believe no writing is ever new.

Right now, what I’m seeing as new is writing a book (clarification: not sold a book). I have no idea what the road is, but I’m in a place where I have stories I feel I can only write in a long form context. I spent a day earlier this month writing 10,000 words over four hours. I hardly believe it. Instead, there it is — I’m lazy and I don’t work hard because I don’t produce. The reflection I see of my process in all of it, the feeling I have to resist.

It's just invisible, unpaid, idealistic. My hope with the book writing is that it will be something you will one day be able to hold in your hand. Again, it has not been sold. It is not any more real than previous attempts. But the drafts will not die. It will get published even if the publishing industry doesn’t buy it. That clearly feels like where my life is taking me next, despite its foolishness.

Occasionally, though, there is writing that is personal, but is not really going to work for that. Not for deadline, not for work, not for publishing. But for self to think on the page. Here is some.