"I start all my books on January eighth. Can you imagine January seventh?
It’s hell. Every year on January seventh, I prepare my physical space. I
clean up everything from my other books. I just leave my dictionaries,
and my first editions, and the research materials for the new one. And
then on January eighth I walk seventeen steps from the kitchen to the
little pool house that is my office. It’s like a journey to another
world. It’s winter, it’s raining usually. I go with my umbrella and the
dog following me. From those seventeen steps on, I am in another world
and I am another person. I go there scared. And excited. And
disappointed – because I have a sort of idea that isn’t really an idea.
The first two, three, four weeks are wasted. I just show up in front of
the computer. Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse
shows up, too. If she doesn’t show up invited, eventually she just shows
up." [...]
"My daughter, Paula, died on December 6, 1992. On January 7, 1993, my
mother said, 'Tomorrow is January eighth. If you don’t write, you’re
going to die.' She gave me the 180 letters I’d written to her while
Paula was in a coma, and then she went to Macy’s. When my mother came
back six hours later, I was in a pool of tears, but I’d written the
first pages of Paula. Writing is always giving some sort of order to the
chaos of life. It organizes life and memory. To this day, the responses
of the readers help me to feel my daughter alive."
http://www.brainpickings.org/
