Maybe you feel bad because it is bad

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I didn't mean for this to turn into a newsletter about creativity. That's just what's been on my mind lately and some of you seem to like when I write about that. (Could I write a whole letter about, even unconsciously, turning my work toward the sun of your approval? Oh yes!) It's better than writing about the other things on my mind, like whether my kid needs more pairs of pants. If you've been here hoping for writing about aliens and space, outtakes and tangents diverted from my book, I'm sure there will be more of that soon. 

I'm in a weird place with the book where my beautifully orchestrated schedules have fallen apart. They've been falling apart all the time, four weeks for a chapter stretching to six and eight, and whole sections marked "TK," the promise that I'll research and write them sometime down the line. (Would love for that special journal issue on indigenous imaginings of contact to come out soon please!) But for some reason, these last two chapters have sort of shredded my process, like what happens when you fall into a black hole, experts I've reached out to for interviews being available only two or three weeks after the chapter was supposed to be done. So I interviewed a planetary scientist two weeks after I stopped working on the chapter on planets, and next week I allegedly move into revision... while also interviewing three researchers who study the origin of life, for a chapter that is sort of wrapping up this week. Minus the big section that depends on those interviews.

I sometimes encounter another book's bibliography and feel scared that mine is insufficient, but then I remember the billion and a half interviews I'm doing. And then I remember all the research trips I'd had sketched out for 2020. I took one in January, five days in California to talk to a bunch of SETI researchers, but of course that was it. RIP to the meetings at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, to the conference that was maybe going to be full of crackpots or maybe would be full of fascinating science—I could never tell and I never got to find out. RIP to the pizzas I'd have ordered to motel rooms, to the days away from my family, to the rental cars and weirdly many trips to Target. Instead I have a book built on one-hour zooms. So the fear I feel when I see other bibliographies also rears up when I read other science books and they're full of scenes in labs, researchers' hands in action. I don't think that's what my book would've ended up as, but now I don't get to make that choice. 

Books and zoom calls and journal articles and other people's journalism. I keep reminding myself of this tweet, like a talisman, which was written in response to a question about how writers handle writing anything when it's inevitably been written about before:
 

A more recent talisman, which I found surprisingly reassuring:

I'd just spent an afternoon writing 2,000 very bad words. I am devoted to the church of the shitty first draft, but this one felt especially bad. I hadn't been able to write for weeks, sticking to research through almost a month of childcare mayhem, but now I'd had these precious hours, and gotten all these words out, and... I felt bad about it! I didn't actually care whether the words were as bad as I felt they were—bad words really are part of the process—but where the hell was my good feeling of satisfaction? Where was the weight of 2,000 words that didn't exist at all that morning, the sense that even if the words were bad, they now gave me something to work with? (Maybe, I'm realizing now, part of the problem was that so many of those 2,000 words were quoted from one of my research sources. That was part of what I'd be fixing when I ended up spending my next writing session entirely rewriting a big chunk of it, unable to keep going until what I was working from made me want to keep going, at least.) 

But less than half an hour after I emerged from my office to rejoin my family, blinking and complaining, this tweet was sent. The man behind some of my favorite albums was saying he thought they were bad—not just in the muck of the process, but when they were done. And you know what? It didn't matter. Because I and plenty of other people in his replies think these albums are great. So if Carl Newman could feel bad about Mass Romantic, I could feel bad about my book. Someone reading it might feel otherwise.