I'm working on what seems like it'll be a very long book. It's already ~115k words with no end in sight. That's already longer than three of my four previous. (War On Sound is something like 260k.) I don't know everything that's going to happen! At first that's thrilling, and as the past year has gone on, it's been progressively more frightening (a common experience for me). This book takes place in 2050 America, and as such I'm making up whole swaths of what life is like, and I forget what I've decided, and I have to go back and re-read, and that creates other worries because I find patches that aren't written very well and have to re-write, and basically: if there's a more anxiety-provoking thing to do while trapped inside my own head (and inside quarantine), I haven't found it. And would probably rather not!

However, upon a re-re-re-re-re-read here at the start of 2021, one thing that occurs to me is in several respects it's already been a high-wire act I feel I'm passing. When I started writing (very late 2019), understanding that this would be an adventure in "world-building" (as the kids say) unlike any I'd tried, I decided to allow myself to free-associate much more than usual. What the hell, I thought, just write it down. So for instance. There's a very early scene I remember writing at a coffee shop in Los Angeles -- I would like to have the choice to do that again someday, please -- in which people are standing on line to be considered as contestants on the 2050 version of the Price Is Right. A physical therapist is there with his elderly patient and the patient's middle-aged daughter, and the elderly patient has anxiety about being allowed to be a contestant on PiR even though he's in a wheelchair, and during his pre-show interview he tells an intern he was a boxer in the Soviet Union, and the scene is (hopefully) at least a little winsome. And then the middle-aged daughter goes to the bathroom but picks the wrong door and that door is cracked open and some people grab it before it closes and they enter the room and they've got guns and masks and frankly as I was writing it I wasn't particularly sure why they were there or what they wanted, but suddenly one of them is yelling, "We're here to express support for Linda Ramirez!"

But who is Linda Ramirez?

Well, hell, I didn't know. I just wrote it.

And in the early stages of writing this book, that happened so many times: describing some earthquake I made up or product someone's using, and then having to build the world around this random neural firing. Having just done that re(x5)-read, I can say: I know who Linda Ramirez is a little better (not much yet!), and generally speaking I'm finding it fun that the world in my brain has evolved to incorporate all these hinky details that I didn't know the meaning of when I wrote them down. I also, however, don't remember many of them, and have to retrofit, and edit, and edit, and edit...in a way I've never had to do before. And editing kind of sucks!

I finished reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and it's great in all the ways people said it would be, and probably in ways a writer can't get away with any longer, because the modernist technique of streaming consciousness and accordioning time and conflating the past and present has been done so many times and ways in the past century, that if someone presented you with the Mrs. Dalloway manuscript today you'd probably say, "Wow, you can really turn a phrase, but where's the *story*?" When, in fact, the story *is* partly the manner of its telling, which means in 1925 it was one of the freshest stories ever published and now, were we to remove it from context, I think it would seem less fresh. The first person to go up in space gets the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The hundredth gets a nice Wikipedia entry. But being first is important, and Mrs. Dalloway is brilliant and wonderful and harrowing and touching, and I'm not sure I'd want to read its exact equivalent written in 2021 but reading the 1925 version was delightful. I recommend it!

I also found this: Woolf's initial first paragraph in Mrs. Dalloway went like this:

"In Westminster, where temples, meeting houses, conventicles, & steeples of all kinds are congregated together, there is at all hours & halfhours, a round of bells, correcting each other, asseverating that time has come a little earlier, or stayed a little later, here or here."

...which is very good writing! And it got the axe. Here's the actual book's opening:

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach."

From a more conventional (and showoffy) open to something much more personal and metaphorical. The doors, over the course of the book, will be taken off their hinges, indeed. And in the second paragraph, we'll suddenly, disorientingly, get our first time jump in Clarissa's head, the squeak of a hinge reminds her of Bourton and her childhood home, which (we don't know it yet) sets the context for everything she feels and tries not to feel throughout the novel's single day.

I'm sure there have been times in my own writing when I've realized the nice thing I've written was wholly inappropriate for the overall thing I was trying to say, and scrapped it. But *this* level of clarity and knowing-thyself is something else. Now that's an edit!