I feel like work on The Outer Country is slowing down. The feeling is of the fun involving part ending and the book becoming closed off to me. How can I keep my relationship with my book open after publication? How can I keep the book a living and changing thing? Maybe that’s an impossibility. Maybe there is something about the interrogation of the book as a means of writing the next one.

All this pent up energy must come to a point, and that point must be presented on the page.

I carried negativity with me all day and may have been tainted by it as I revised. Should one not revise when one is in a bad mood? It seemed like I should have avoided revision, but maybe the hypercritical lens is a good one. Let me be hypercritical! Do I actually believe I am? In one sense I am—I assume I will never be able to do anything great. But in another sense, I feel like I’m not critical enough, that I don’t adhere to accurate flows of logic, that I don’t hold a clear enough vision in my head.

Imposter Syndrome. Thinking that readers have either drunk the Kool-Aid or are offering fake compliments. In all likelihood, some people will like [my book] and other people won’t. This is the case for all books, and a lot of it is random. Good to use this anxious energy to push myself to become a better writer.

So often lately, I see each book as one occasion, one event on stage, and if it fails, there’s no repairing it. You simply go back to basics with a new book and try again.

I really should figure out the title of the book.

I suppose I don’t have a lot to affirm, except to think about this idea of word density in my prose. Whether I could improve—or really transform my writing by thinking through word density—the maybe object words versus other words. “Balloon” and “cake” and “cactus” and “garbage” versus a phrase like “covered the top of”—all the words between the objects. That’s an interesting distinction. There’s Rabbit’s sentence “Legs, shouts,” which captures it. But what about the importance of putting things in a place? What about the idea of spaces where scenes take place? What are the most immersive [literary] worlds I have been in? I think of Kawabata. I think of Hemingway. There is the world of the story, the physical world, then there is the mental world of the characters, the philosophical world/the world of ideas. There is the linguistic world. Language that pulls us out of the story but also language that creates the emotional world—but my brain doesn’t go there—or does it? Is that a place for the heart? Is that a different realm—it does seem different because it doesn’t transport the same way.

What are the books that are not about death or love? The unknowing seems like a meaningful exploration.

If a grandmaster should tell me over and over again that the book doesn’t work, I will try to make it better [with each new draft], but a fortune cookie could provide the same advice.

I didn’t go out last night, preferring to sit at home with my computer, trying to write a poem or a piece of prose, trying to find a sincere voice. I’m thinking of that sincere voice vs. one that is created and pushed but that still somehow becomes convincing. How is such a voice created? Is it an impressive artistic achievement to create a voice, or are writers always searching for their “true” voice? And, if it is a true voice, how does poetic language emerge, how does metaphor emerge? I’m thinking of K-Ming Chang describing how she casts a spell on every sentence to transform it. There is something in that that resonates with me. I can see the spells she cast, but do I cast my own spells, and is there a creative energy in what I do? Am I “creating”?

But what has been truly [structurally] innovative? Perhaps V. Woolf’s To The Lighthouse? Perhaps Philip Roth’s American Pastoral?

Lately my “dream” of publishing three novels doesn’t feel so much like a dream anymore. I have accepted that there are enough presses in the world to bring this within grasp.

Oh, there was some semblance of a title in my head last night—Daughter of Paper, Daughter of Flame. Maybe Children of Paper, Children of Flame. I do continue to see all [the characters] as children.

Trying to read [the “Following Sister” section of my book], I couldn’t silence the competing noise in my brain—much of it the Christmas music I was listening to so much—to be able to clarify the rhythms on the page…This morning I am listening to quieter music, more complex melodic lines in an attempt to clear my head of all the noise.

(I’m sitting here with Light in August beside me, feeling its energy, feeling the energy of all these books around me, not as quiet contained objects, but as…drawers on the verge of exploding.)

Read a random paragraph [from my book draft] and found it awkward and feel the weight of how much work still needs to be done and how incapable I am of writing it. I feel I have worked so hard. I feel like I should have developed my writing chops and yet so often I feel like the worst “published” writer in existence. Surely, surely, I must have some writing strength that is invisible to me. Surely the book must have some special element that perhaps doesn’t emerge on the sentence level or the paragraph level.