The Florence novel reaches its halfway mark

When you write as I do—in between things and only after everything else is done—you begin to wonder if this percolating creature is any good, if you will want it (someday) to belong to you.  I have been working at the oddest hours of night on Florence, then putting the novel aside, then returning. I have not been able to hold the whole in my hands.  I have been frustrated by fragments.

Last night, in the sweetest chocolate fold of 4 AM, I returned to Florence, read these first 120 pages through.  It coheres, I think, and it interests me deeply.  It is the book that I want to keep writing.

And so I send the first 25,000 words to Tamra Tuller, now at Chronicle Books.  I want the conversation we will have as this story and its people take me deeper into their strange and (to me) beautiful and abiding mystery.