think I write books the way I do puzzles. First, you get a big box with lots of pieces in it. Then you cover up the front of the box so that you can’t cheat. You bang your head against the wall a few times, invoke the Dog Biscuit Gods (that’s the subject of another post) and hope for the best.

Then you start sorting out puzzle pieces. First, you find all the edge pieces and put them in a pile. Inevitably, there aren’t enough of them and you start worrying that maybe you have a defective puzzle, missing vital pieces. Cursing at this stage is always appropriate. Then you sort out the pieces by type. This one, you say, is a mountain piece. This one is a cloud piece. This is the eagle’s beak. Maybe. Or the claws; it’s hard to tell with one puzzle piece, sometimes.
All the sky pieces are blue. Bright blue. Also, they are shaped like puzzle-pieces. They comprise nearly a quarter of the bits. You think, “I am never going to be able to do the sky.” So you ignore the sky. But you put together the wings and the claws and the tailfeathers and the mountains below. Pretty soon, you have a creditable bird and a creditable mountain and a metric ton of identical blue sky pieces that are supposed to connect the two.

I am at the point where I have about 50,000 words in the beginning, and close to 25,000 words near the end. And I have all these dinky little blue sky pieces that are supposed to connect the two . . . .