I just read this in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and got hit so hard by my next novel. Or maybe novella. I think certainly a novella. It wants to be swift and lean. I’m fascinated by (and quite prone to) obsession. Drowning Practice (my first novel, which lives in my former agent’s drawer) was all about obsession. This new story that’s tugging at me draws from that, too. But differently. Very differently. Maybe because I’m older, but mostly because it is itself and not Drowning Practice.

Yep, already it is itself. It hit me almost in its entirety. I feel like I need to write it down fast before it gets away. Grab its tail as it goes past me and pull it back. (I read that somewhere, or heard it somewhere. I need to track that image down.)

Nightbirds of Oregon, my farm novel which has been waiting so patiently in first draft for many months as I revised The Revolution of Every Day for my editor at Tin House will have to wait just a bit longer. This is a revelation to me–the idea that I CAN make it wait longer, that I don’t have to write my books in order, that ideas don’t queue up to be addressed on a first-come, first-served basis.

And so here I go, back down the rabbit hole. This part, the very beginning, when it’s all possibility…this is the best bit.