A peek at how I'm building myself by writing a book on building ourselves by building

Hope that's "meta" enough for you

Me and The Reading Girl (Pietro Magni), National Gallery of Art, October 2018 (a loose metaphor for me inspecting my own book-writing process, obviously)

As my book draft deadline to Penguin approaches, I’m getting a lot of questions about how it’s going. The short answer is: it’s going fine, thanks. “Fine” spans a wide range of potential scenarios, though; as this is my first book, I’m trying to stay open to the full spectrum of ways it could plausibly play out, from “it’s in pretty good shape by June” to “it’ll need several massive re-writes that take another year or 2.”

That said, my sense of (largely false) urgency and impatience are not so easily quelled, as you can probably surmise from the journal excerpt I’m sharing with you below. My goal in sharing it is to offer you a kind of meta-preview of the book via this glimpse into a messy and emotionally fraught moment in my writing process, which itself instances (to an almost comical degree) some of the book’s core frameworks.

Warn…