A little over a week ago I finished a first draft, which is to say that I wrote an ending to the novel and then went back to the very first page to start revising. But the term “first draft” feels too conclusive. There are entire chapters that are missing and entire chapters that need to be deleted. Many characters vanish without any sense of closure whatsoever. And everything is terribly, terribly out of order.

The fun days are the days that I get to create new material. The challenging days are the days that I have to decide on chapter sequencing, finish the plot line that I began on page fifteen and abandoned on page sixty, and figure out why a character’s name abruptly changes from Mark to Stewie halfway through the book. (What was wrong with “Mark”? I’ll never know). These are the difficult and highly consequential decisions that face me every morning.

Also, I’ve been writing poems. Some of them are funny.