I know many friends who have four or five books open at a time. The book on the nightstand, the book in the office, the book on the coffee table, the audiobook in the car. They dip into and out of these worlds, able to pick up comfortably where they left off, never confusing the characters. The Victorian detective doesn't wander onto the bridge of the starship, the beautiful Cambodian farm daughter doesn't fall in love with the Russian mathematician. (Though any one of those would make an interesting story...)
Nora does that. She has a couple of books or more going at once, each of them always dense with quilted, patterned language; she reads the way Annie Hall dresses. I cannot. I spent the weekend reading Chad Harbach's 500-page novel The Art of Fielding in two enormous gulps, 200 pages the first day and 300 more the second. I did that last summer, too, reading Joe Coomer's A Pocketful of Names in a single run from nine in the morning until dinner.
So, given that habit, explain this. In the course of the last two days, I've started writing a second book. This new second book fits inside the first one, acts as a sort of reference volume to be used by the characters in the main book. For the readers in the real world, I'm hoping that this second, internal book acts as an emotional guide to the larger husk surrounding it, is the secret encryption device that allows you to see through the code in the ways that the characters themselves cannot fully know.
It's an odd sort of confidence that rarely comes, when you can't begin to imagine where a project will go next, where you give up control and yet feel fully sure that the end will be joyful. My life with Nora has been like that. We rarely know what the next couple of days will bring, and yet I know that joy is assured.
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