“I don’t want to grow up.” My granddaughter is excited about Christmas and eager to turn eleven, but this is what she’s thinking about right now. In the next hour, she will claim she is “very responsible,” despite piles of clothes on the floor in her room offering evidence to the contrary, then ask for a cellphone for Christmas. Or her birthday, which will come three days after Santa. “Santa’s not real,” she would tell you in a mostly-confident statement of fact. But she understands the role Santa plays in American culture. She also knows she can’t stop time. She is a reader. She knows lots of things. She starts…

I haven’t written a single word of my Next Novel*. Not one. I first had the idea a couple years ago and made all kinds of notes, littering my digital desktop with files bearing names I’ve long since forgotten and my literal desktop with scraps of paper that may have disappeared during a recent, apartment-wide clean-and-purge effort meant to stem the tide of a growing existential unease. It’s a good book idea. Maybe a great one. And for some inexplicable reason, I’m reminded of it every time I wash my hands in my bedroom sink. Yes, I have a bedroom sink. Two, actually. The master bedroom in my apartment is…

It took me two decades to find a modicum of confidence as a writer. (Or four if you count all the years when I was writing, but without a goal of someday becoming a published writer.) Hidden away on a hard drive somewhere are dozens of short stories, four novels and one sad screenplay – more than a million words – that have been retroactively classified as “practice” writing. They didn’t start out that way. I didn’t sit down to write a practice novel. I sat down to write a novel. Driven by hope and madness, I started putting one word after another. Some days I felt certain, most days…