The summer after my first year as a professor, I decided to write a novel. I wrote for up to 10 hours a day for four months to develop the first draft of An Untamed State. It was an exhilarating experience to have so much unencumbered time to immerse myself wholly in a world of my own making. It was some of the most fun I have ever had as a writer because everything was at stake but also nothing was at stake. I was writing for myself and was not at all concerned with what would happen to the work, not just yet.

Two very long years and two revisions later, I sold that novel and it came out in 2014. I assembled an essay collection and that sold too. My career blossomed. The dream had been to write a good book and sell it. I did not dare dream beyond that, so every moment since then has been thrilling in one way or another. Along the way I learned that the more you succeed as a writer, the less time you have to actually think or read or write. I learned there is the business of writing and writing itself and they are two very different things. Writing is an act of creation and the business of writing is doing everything in your power to ensure that you will have the opportunity to create again.