The first chilly night. I stayed in the woods, switched off my devices, and reckoned with the fat neverending stack of index cards I’ve collected for the book I’ve been writing for five years. Scraps of local detail. Fragments of dialogue. Weird factoids about monks, radio static, and the interstate system. And impossible questions like what would it take for me to believe in god?
There’s that principle that we burn up all available time to complete a task—and this gets scary when measured in years. I also fall into the trap of thinking whatever I’m working on must be a bulletproof summation of a life, which leads to something like Theseus’s ship. But it’s just a story. There will be others. This morning I gave myself a deadline of sundown to decide what goes into this book and what gets killed, and I jotted it all into an outline. Tonight I lit a bonfire, and those index cards made excellent kindling.
