Dreaming, getting words on the page, delving into a realm you are simultaneously creating (or recreating) is a trick that involves chaos, extreme disorder. Revising is messy, too. At present, I am patching half-comprehensible signals from my unconscious into a well-worked manuscript, creating ruptures, making lumpy what was smooth, and drafty (pun intended) what was sealed.

Making messes is a pleasure we try to outgrow, spending so much time as we must cleaning up after ourselves and others. But to get to something never before seen, to re-enter and re-invent, requires shredding and hacking and spinning around and around until you are dizzy, lost, up and down irretrievable, the ground a hard comfort but a place to land.

It would be easy to stop, to feel sure I am headed in the wrong direction, because I am surely headed away from the contained whole, logical and seeming complete. The path is a switchback, the terrain mountainous and treacherous and unpredictable. You don’t have the map–you have your best guess or a naive but wholehearted plan or fragments of stories of those who’ve come before. But the map? You are writing it. You are detailing its pitfalls, its unknown caverns, its unnamed species, its untraversed and wild ground. You are making it up as you go along. Every single draft. All you do is remind yourself that it should feel terrifying, exhilarating, utterly uncertain and a muddy, mucky mess. Smear it, splatter it, don’t let it stop you. Take the mess as the marker: you are on your way.