🚀The Dark Age: Never quite good enough

Hello, friends!

I'm writing this on Sunday, the 12th. Yesterday, within twenty miles of Hill House, a thirty-acre fire was reported. The most recent update we've seen was around ten p.m. last night, with conflicting details: 1) The fire had grown to fifty acres, and 2) the fire was 75% contained. Oh, and it was spreading towards heavily forested Bureau of Land Management acreage. Very unnerving stuff.

In the last (public) edition of Letters From Hill House, I mentioned that the startup where I work had shut down. I'm happy to report that I've found a safe landing with another startup, but that I've negotiated an October start date. That leaves me several weeks to do little but rest, reset, and write. I did the math: If I managed to write a chapter per day of The Dark Age in that time period, I'd have about three-fourths of a finished draft by the end. That's an unrealistic pace! But it's always nice to understand the simple mathematics of it all. In any case, the last three days have produced a chapter apiece. They're just first draft-quality chapters, which means they'll all need many revisions/rewrites before they're good enough. But progress is progress. Progress always feels good.

I think a lot about "good enough" and how it relates to all of my work. My career as a designer cannot ever stagnate; technology races beneath my feet and I must keep up. I think the same about writing: While the practice of writing a novel has changed very little since the first person wrote the first book of fiction six billion years ago, I am capable of change. With a little effort, I can always improve.