Beginnings are terrifying.

You lie in bed knowing what you want to do, but time keeps rolling by and you keep waiting for things to take shape.  Maybe they take shape, or maybe they won’t.  But the clock keeps ticking and you keep dying a bit with each day that passes.  Unless you jump in, overcome your fears and hesitation, and begin.

For me, this beginning will be different.  See, my previous major projects were carefully considered before work began.  My first book, Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating, for instance, came to me like a thunderbolt while I was fasting in a Costa Rican cloudforest.  I knew the vegan world needed a simple, well-researched, and current book on why veganism made sense.  And in a flash I knew I should write it.

There’s comfort in starting a project where you already understand its ultimate shape.  But this time around I have only the vaguest idea.  But I’m committed to beginning in a new kind of way; one where I am deliberately clueless about where I’ll end up.  It’s going to be like walking the tightrope without a net.  And if I fall, you get to watch.

All I know is I have book-like things to say, things I think are new and important, but this time around I want it to happen in real time, sloppy and unedited.  And with profanity.  I fucking love profanity, but not for its own sake.  More that it captures the the three things that keep my life revolving: terror, disgust, and compassion.  When I write books I always cut the filth out, which is as much fun as auto-castration.  I stopped cutting out the nasty bits at Vegan.com, and I won’t do it here either.

But anyway, I do have an overarching idea of where I’m going with all this, even if I have no idea about this project’s ultimate form.  I’ll explain in my next entry.