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After two years of it, whirling through Colorado and Grand Rapids and Port Orchard and Renton and Seattle in a slow self-implosion that looks more like wrestling than whirling and is more wrestling than whirling, the third-round wrestling of collapsed muscles and bloody lungs yet with no end approaching, no declining timer, no sign of relief near or ever, I have begun to hate my book.
“Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a serious book in a year,” Stephen King writes. “Some people lift cars, too.”
No one believes it. I didn’t believe it, until I grabbed the bumper, tried to lift, and realized I didn’t even know how to grip the thing. I’m writing about an experience I still don’t fully understand, and the sharing of it is even more incomprehensible. A book is not a short story or an essay that I can stand above and see end to end, can bend down to examine the middle. When I crouch to study sentences here, the first chapters curve out of sight below the horizon, and the mythical, mystical end shimmers past land and sea and sky, in the realm of Ringbearers and Dawn Treaders and other whole, completed explorers who survived the doldrums of a writer’s desk.