"With this last book I got the gift of time, a full year and a half to
make it happen. And about halfway through the process, I realized that
time was making it possible for me to love what I was doing while I was
doing it, instead of just running toward a deadline as fast as I could.
The time let the book steep in me, so to speak, building strength, and
even now that I have been through several rounds of revisions I'm ready,
even excited, to read through it again. (It helps that this time it's
copyedits, my favorite things.)
I'm not here to discuss the book itself, or build it up, or dramatize
it-- it will be a creative failure in some ways and a creative success
in others and that's just the way books work. But what I'm talking
about, here, is the one area in which this work will never be a failure:
the process. In the process, I was open to criticism but I still knew
what was important to me; I worked at a steady pace and I stopped when I
needed some time to think; I let myself rest and I made myself work;
and I loved it, and I did it every day.
