I spend a lot of time preparing. Cooking, obviously, involves plenty of prep work, but that’s only the most literal example.

Yesterday I cleaned a lot of the house. I washed and folded and ironed things. I put things away, emptied things out, purged some of the outgrown and unused. It seemed like a prerequisite. Once all those things were done and out of the way, I could get down to the real work.

Right. The real work. I wrote exactly zero words yesterday. In theory, I am going to do better today in some specific scheduled blocks of time. I have goals. I have deadlines and appropriate fear and trembling in the face of the fact that Christmas will come whether or not I have finished making a book for T. or not.

Here’s the thing: preparation isn’t really. It’s a trick, an illusion. There is so much preparation to do that I could never finish. I could very easily spend another entire day in cleaning and cooking and weeding and sweeping and God knows what else and it would all be useful and nice to have done, but it would not advance my real work one iota.

So I have to take a breath and just jump on in. Right after I do these last few things…