Notebook
The raw material, mostly unedited — small wrongnesses, overheard lines, and the false starts that never became anything, or became something else entirely.
This is the compost heap described in process and on writing: the running list of fragments a story sometimes grows out of, months or years later. Most of it goes nowhere on purpose. A few of these lines eventually found their way, in one form or another, into short fiction or the books.
Fragments
“I'm not lost, I'm early for a place that isn't ready yet.”
Every ghost story is a grief story wearing a coat it found in the hall closet.
A woman who repairs clocks that haven't stopped — only run backward, and only when she's not watching.
The tide doesn't return what you lost. It returns what it decided you meant to lose.
“He kept every ticket stub as if the evening might ask for proof.”
A restorer discovers that the varnish she's removing is the only thing keeping the painting the way it currently is.
A map is just a very slow, very patient kind of memory.
A man who can only apologize in languages he doesn't speak, which somehow makes the apologies land better.
Why this page exists
Partly craft transparency, partly a confession that very little in this work arrives whole. If one of these lines is doing more work in your head right now than it ever did on this page, that's the entire point of keeping a notebook in public — a story is just a fragment that finally found the rest of itself. New fragments get added whenever something worth keeping turns up; the finished results, eventually, get announced in the newsletter.