blurry on purpose: work on the new book begins

Yesterday afternoon, work on a book I've been nurturing in dream margins began. I wasn't sure I'd write again; I never am. I cannot say what three pages of blurry ink might add up to, a year from now. I don't know (I never do) precisely where I'm going.

But I know this: Take away the pressures of publishing, take away the late-night fears, take away the expectations we writers draw around ourselves, those fragile hopes—erase all that and there stands writing itself. The thing that I most like to do, in the afternoon, when the work is done, when it's just me and my horrid handwriting.