It is a burden that I am grateful for any opportunity, however fleeting, to lay down. I find disbelief causes me far more anxiety than influence. and without allowing myself to think too hard about what I was doing, I wrote the novel.Īs John Bunyan aptly puts it in his Apology for The Pilgrim’ s Progress : Then, in the waning days of quarantine, amidst the fugue of Zoom teaching and Zoom therapy and Zoom faculty meetings and Zoom cocktail hours, against my own better judgment.

I thought that putting my failure into print would confirm its truth and finality, thereby freeing me from ever again being tempted to throw more good energy after all that bad. I even wrote about abandoning it in my memoir, Riding with the Ghost, which was published in 2020. I mean that I spent seven years trying to make work something that would not work, that I felt increasingly certain could not work, and yet found myself revising and restarting time and again, always in a state of perfect hopelessness except for when I came to my senses and abandoned the project once and for all, which I did at least once a year. I don’t mean that I spent seven years trying to complete a draft. The second thing I did was fail for seven years. I started it on New Year’s Day 2014 and the first thing I did was write longhand for a week. Depending how you reckon, writing it either took me nine years or it took me a month. My new book, Reboot, is a fundamentally unserious novel that takes a few things far too seriously.

Abandoned middle school near me