Everything connects

For something like 25 years I have had a postcard (now tattered and brown-edged) taped near wherever I write:

One reason I became a writer is that I love the sensation of finding connections. It can stun me, make me laugh, or help me feel that I understand the universe just a little bit better.

I’ve spent the last few months researching my next book. I’m nowhere near done (and will continue!). I could conceivably, and profitably, devote whole additional years to further research.

But I’ve also reached a point in my labors that I now recognize from previous large writing projects. My brain feels like it’s overflowing. And everywhere I look, whatever I’m looking at seems to connect to what I’m writing about. Everything is hitched to everything else.

That means it’s time to start writing.

The exhilarating and painful work of trying to preserve that apprehension of interconnectedness on the page always involved some amount of disappointment, at least for me; where the apprehension is oceanic, the written end-product is finite.

But a completed book has one advantage over a vague sensation: it can be shared. So here goes!