It’s been 4 months since I published my last substack post. Is that a long amount of time? It depends on how you see it. I think it’s a long time in-the-moment. It’s a long time to endure as a 32-year-old author who wishes he had something to show for all the work he’s been doing.

But it’s not-all-that-long looking backwards. A lot of good work happens after long periods of frustration and uncertainty. I know this to be true even for my own work in the past. I was hoping to finish Introspect in about 6 months, and it ended up taking me closer to 3 years. But I’m much, much happier with the book I published in 2022, than anything I could’ve published sooner. In fact, I’m still not as happy with the book as I know I could be, and I do intend to revise and update it. I’ve had some friends balk at that, saying “No, be done with it! Move on to something else!” And yeah, I’m working on a bunch of essays. This is my something else. 

I’ve written a lot of stuff over the years. I’m glad I wrote everything that I wrote, but I’m not equally proud of everything I’ve written. There are some pieces that endure, and some that were… just things that I maybe needed to get out.

George Orwell is one of the beacons that I turn to in times of creative frustration, and lately I was reinvigorated from re-reading his 1946 essay, Why I Write. The essay is worth reading and re-reading for multiple reasons, and this time the thing that was really striking for me was the bit where he talks about how he wrote Homage to Catalonia,

He goes on to say, “I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.” And then he goes on to publish Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, three more years later. That’s what it’s like when we talk about good novels.

I just looked up Fran Lebowitz, who has famously had writer’s block since the ‘90s. But of course, before she had that, she had…

someone shared something with me not too long ago.. about caro? Yeah – Robert Caro and Jim Flexner…

Louis CK saying “give it a minute”…