As I suggested on Twitter, I wrote the last line - so feel any kind of way about him that you didn't feel already. I knew exactly what he was talking about, because I have seen this be-bearded gentleman in all his guises - every finger of that extradimensional entity, pushed through the membrane of reality.

Indeed, now this universal allbeast is trying to manifest through me. And if you like turns of phrase like "universal allbeast," well, I am about to try to sell you a book. Two, even!

There are lots of books about writing books, and these books are full of useful advice that I could never incorporate into my "process," which is a word you see in these books a lot. I think that if I were learning to be a carpenter or something, starting from zero so I could develop an entire scheme for doing it, maybe I could start in the right place. When you think about it, a carpenter makes a kind of book called a "chair" out of "wood" - which is what they call their words. Possibly. I haven't read any of these chair books. Sometimes I wonder if advice books of this kind are similar to other grifts that offer entré into sacred realms. They can't all be this way, surely. But I'm not sure any of them would have worked for me just because the factory floor of my mind isn't laid out in any sort of rational way. For the longest time, I thought that this was a universal. The older I get, I feel like I was made with the instructions upside down.

My feeling was that the book had to be fun to write, because if it wasn't fun to write I feel like some element of that would bake into the cake. I really enjoy writing these posts, and have for literal decades; I enjoyed it so much that I didn't even archive them for a while when we started. I just… wrote them, and then replaced the text with the next one. It's not something you could possibly be aware of but sitting here in the cool dark, I always feel like I'm here in companionable silence with the reader.

It took a long time to get my head right, once John Scalzi was able to convince me that it was possible and that, indeed, I had already done something like it. Our Technomancer suggests that I'm well over two million words lifetime and maybe it took a while but that is true. For the books, eventually I realized that if I pictured everything, pictured it as well as I could, that it would start to move on its own. This was probably the strangest part of the whole process. It was as though actors would hit their cues as I invisibly lurked. They'd try different things. I could pick the best takes.

I had to move "cameras" and haunt the scenes, watching everything that was happening so that I could gossip to you about it later. I really think you're going to like them.

(CW)TB out.