I want to chase the waves. I really do. But on too many days, the water feels thick as tar, and the point of it all is harder to name. This many years in, I can’t help but dread finishing a novel because the humiliation rituals are so taxing and depleting. As soon as the manuscript is ready, the performance begins: I must query the agents with a pithy, purposeful logline. I must research the comps (the books I haven’t read because I have a job and a family and shows to watch with my wife with her feet on my lap). I must submit to the process (submit is the accurate word: it’s all vulnerability and exposure, lying prone, wrists and feet bound to the bedposts), and then the whole process almost always ends in silence. 

Write the book. Watch it wither.

The act of putting something in the world is a cleaving, and it's best to approach it like a Civil War surgeon and a Civil War patient. Bite down, ready yourself for the blade, and then get used to what your life is afterwards. 

What comes naturally, like a tumor in a spinal cord or a habit of thought, comes at a cost. But then I remember that there’s bravery inside of me, too, and triumph everywhere, and generosity and love and the rest.