Over in the Boston Globe, I wrote about the surprising power of playing long games:
I love projects with multi-decade timelines. They defy the limiting logic of quarterly earnings, KPIs, conversion rates, and all the other metrics that blind us even as they bind us to the status quo in a society where data is so often used as an excuse instead of a guiding light. Long-term projects require a different way of thinking, the shrugging off of constraints embedded in so many human incentive systems.
“Writing is fucking hard. It doesn’t get easier. Each book demands to be written in its own way, on its timeline. Even after ten or twelve books, I still feel like a novice going into a new idea. And I have to be at peace with that. It’s supposed to be scary or you aren’t stretching.”
"My son loved the library. He loved putting books on hold online and having them waiting, bundled up with his name, when he came for them. He loved the benevolence that the stacks held out, their map of the known world. He loved the all-you-can-eat buffet of borrowing. He loved the lending histories stamped into the front of each book, the record of strangers who checked them out before him. The library was the best dungeon crawl imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.”
- I want to read a book.
- That particular book doesn’t exist.
- I write it.
Thankfully, most of the time I want to read a book, it already exists, so I read it.
Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus, Bandwidth, and, most recently, Veil. He publishes a blog, sends a monthly newsletter, and tweets more than he probably should.
