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.