...Doris Egan's latest blog post, Potato Chips:

...I've seen other writers, just as excellent, back away because -- although they're clearly packed taut with talent -- they think there's some bar there, some Berlin Wall of the mind -- basically, a big sign at the end of a nowhere road that says, "Anything you try to write will be lifeless. Boring. A canteen of sand in the desert. Don't even try."

To them I say: potato chips.

When you're growing up you learn that all that deliciously crispy stuff fried in fatty oil is bad for you. Going through a bag of Halloween candy in a day is bad for you. Riding a Harley Davidson? Too dangerous, bad for you. Smoking, which looks cool as anything? Also bad. Iced doughnuts! Impulse sex without condoms! Blowing your paycheck on supremely cool black boots! Bad, bad, bad!

When we write, however, the laws of the universe do a one-eighty, and all these things are good. By which I mean that whatever pleases you, whatever excites you, whatever you obsess about, whatever glittery thing holds your interest...this is your lawful subject matter.

Read the whole entry. I read it today, twice in a row, and--not coincidentally--sat down to work on Congress of Shadows less than 5 minutes later. It turned out to be the best writing day I've had in a long, long time, and--miracles can happen after all!--I finally, finally have a new draft of the opening chapters.

Thank God.

Now I'm going to take some time out to be pleased about that before I get to work on figuring out what's still wrong with those chapters (and with the rest of the book)...

***
PS: I phoned Patrick after working on CoS for a while today, and made him read Doris Egan's blog entry. He read it and said: "Wow, she really wrote exactly to all your insecurities, didn't she?" And I said, "Yeah. It's so cool!" And it is.