It\u2019s been 4 months since I published my last substack post. Is that a long amount of time? It depends on how you see it. I think it\u2019s a long time in-the-moment. It\u2019s a long time to endure as a 32-year-old author who wishes he had something to show for all the work he\u2019s been doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it\u2019s not-all-that-long looking backwards. A lot of good work happens after long periods of frustration and uncertainty. I know this to be true even for my own work in the past. I was hoping to finish Introspect<\/a> in about 6 months, and it ended up taking me closer to 3 years. But I\u2019m much, much happier with the book I published in 2022, than anything I could\u2019ve published sooner. In fact, I\u2019m still<\/em> not as happy with the book as I know I could be, and I do intend to revise and update it. I\u2019ve had some friends balk at that, saying \u201cNo, be done with it! Move on to something else!\u201d And yeah, I\u2019m working on a bunch of essays. This is my something else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve written a lot of stuff over the years. I\u2019m glad I wrote everything that I wrote, but I\u2019m not equally proud of everything I\u2019ve written. There are some pieces that endure, and some that were\u2026 just things that I maybe needed to get out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n George Orwell is one of the beacons that I turn to in times of creative frustration, and lately I was reinvigorated from re-reading his 1946 essay, Why I Write<\/em><\/a>. <\/em>The essay is worth reading and re-reading for multiple reasons, and this time the thing that was really striking for me was the bit where he talks about how he wrote Homage to Catalonia<\/em>,<\/p>\n\n\n\n He goes on to say, \u201cI have not written a novel for seven years<\/strong>, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.\u201d And then he goes on to publish Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, three more years later. That\u2019s what it\u2019s like when we talk about good novels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I just looked up Fran Lebowitz, who has famously had writer\u2019s block since the \u201890s. But of course, before she had that, she had\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n