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.