Follow A Little Side Trail Today

You can always find your way back.

Hi friends.

Woke up the day after my birthday knowing I was going to leave town soon for my residency and just be able to write and read and sleep and do nothing else for three-and-a-half weeks and I saw my days open up before me and I felt a little hope blossom. I put an out-of-office response on my email and realized the last time I had done that was before the pandemic. I have been highly reachable for way too long.

Then I was sitting at my kitchen table having a little coffee and listening to an old daydreamy Japanese Breakfast album, trying to fill up the last few pages of the notebook so I could crack open a fresh new one for my time away.

I told myself: Write anything you like, right now, about the world of this book you are now beginning. You can fill these pages with utter nonsense or something that isn’t useful at all. Just make it fun. Just make it feel free.

If you could write anything in the world about the subject of your book without worrying what you would do with it, what would it be?