This will look the same to you, but there’s a new method generating these words—actually an old method brought back, a desperate Hail Mary to see if I can return any joy to my writing. Prior to, oh, around 2011, any fiction I ever wrote started of the same way these words are—in a lined moleskin. The reason I started writing in the first place was because it was the only art form to which I had reliable access. If I had had my own bedroom in which I had privacy, access to musical instruments and encouragement to sing my heart out if that’s what I wanted to do, almost certainly that is what I would have chosen to do. But life doesn’t always go the way we want it to go. No one chooses the conditions or era of their existence. Any freedom any individual manages to create for themselves happens within already strictly delineated and unequally distributed conditions.