(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.