It’s a low state, a few days of drifting, taking notes, reading, entertaining self-doubts. I know now, though it is a temporary state and one that is perhaps even necessary.

I remember the bright light streaming in through the windows of the charming cottage we were staying in, how everything outside was washed golden.

Always after a rush of new pages, a sudden road block. Scattered doubts, questions I don’t yet know how to answer, decisions that I’ve put off, insistently returning. I sit, I read, I stare at the ceiling. I try to resist the big doubts, they don’t seem useful to me anymore, seem childish, indulgent. But still, as time passes, anxiety pulses beneath the surface of all my plans and ambitions.

We are the home for a tiny gray mouse and I am told, where there is one, there are likely more. I think I only ever see the same one, poking out from under the stove, or skittering across the hall. Sometimes after dinner, if we are very still, it will emerge and stand frozen in the middle of the kitchen floor for a moment before scurrying off.

This morning I am grateful for the dream state of writing. The quiet darkness in which I begin my day, these sacred hours. I have reached a point, I think, where I no longer doubt that I will finish this book. I make no predictions about what it will be, can be, but it is at least now something I know I will see through to its end. There is pleasure and relief in that knowing.