An Even Briefer (Personal) History Of Time
On hacking my gerbil brain, Hemingway, and trying to write.
Spring is here, the days are longer, and I have been doing this thing that, from the internet, I have learned is called The Pomodoro Method. It is a little productivity trick rooted in icky capitalist impulses to maximize working hours, but right now it’s helping me complete semi-tedious tasks like organizing my galley bookshelves or answering emails or collecting tax documents without derailing—picking up my phone to scroll through Instagram or Twitter, primarily—so what can you do.
Maybe you know this system. A lot of people were doing it in the early, isolating days of the pandemic. But in case you don’t: you get a fat little tomato timer (pomodoro meaning, you guessed it) and set it for an increment of 25 minutes, during which you complete or work toward the completion of a task. Then you set it for 5 minutes and take a little break. You do this four times and then you get a longer break. On a particularly difficult fiction writing day this past weekend I did a weird version of this, where my “task” was writing and my “break” was doing laundry. I gave myself 45-minute increments of writing and 20-minute increments of laundry, and I did get words onto the page. I wouldn’t and don’t do this every time I write, since I prefer to have as much uninterrupted time as I can wrangle, but something about racing against the clock and breaking up brain work with the extremely satisfying physical transformation of a dirty tangle of clothes into clean tidy squares tucked into a bureau knocked me out of a funk that might otherwise have turned into three hours of less writing and more looking through The Real Real.
I don’t have a little tomato timer, but as phonelessness is an important part of this productivity equation for me, I stuck my phone in The Phone Pot1 and used the kitchen timer on my stove. But I did order a little tomate, because I like the idea of a totally analogue timer. Over the last few years I have been replacing things my phone can do with the original thing—I got a proper bedside alarm clock and recently dug up my husband’s college-era digital camera, and though I charged it up I haven’t yet used it because, you know, I have an iPhone. That the phone contains so many of the things we need to get through the day has started to feel a little like combination shampoo and conditioner. It saves time and money and space, in theory, but in actuality, given its time-sucking vortex abilities? Though if you do have a great shampoo/conditioner that works on your (fine, oily) hair, do tell. I am always looking to save time, and all the rest.
As Hemingway once wrote to Lillian Ross, “Time is the least thing we have of.” (I am one hundred percent sure I have quoted this somewhere before, maybe multiple times, if not in this newsletter then in a book description or something. I think about it all the time. Which is, as you know, the thing we…)
It is though, right? Does anyone ever feel like they have too much time?2 It’s not why I quit drinking, but I do think it’s one of the reasons that’s kept me from starting again. I just lost so much time to it. Not in a time wasted sense, though I guess there was that, too—and it was literally time wasted, ha, ha. But because I was prone to blackouts, sometimes even after relatively small quantities of alcohol, I lost the actual feeling of time, or my place within it, and increasingly that has become one of my big fears, that slippage—a hypothetical future terror, as terrors so often are, of getting toward the end of my life and looking back and worrying that I lost too much time, or spent it doing the wrong things. Probably there is some of that for everyone, but I guess I just hope that particular regret doesn’t take up too much mental space, down the road.
Another thing Hemingway told Lillian Ross while she was interviewing him for that New Yorker profile was, “After you finish a book, you know, you’re dead…But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.” I’m not Hemingway so I’m not, um, quite there, but I am in what feels like a totally bizarre limbo period between having made the last, very last, promise-this-is-the-actual-last change to my book and having the book come out in 80-something days. I started writing The Mythmakers in 2014 and by 2017 was working on it around 300 days of the year, maybe more, certainly thinking about it on all of them, considering nudging a piece of dialogue into sharper focus, or flipping the emphasis on a chapter’s final line. I often woke up in the middle of the night with edits racing through my brain. (When I didn’t write these late night thoughts down, I recalled them as lost brilliance. When I did write them down, in the morning they typically revealed themselves to be along the lines of: “Must make clear love is so BIG!!!” or “M wears little hat, significant.”)
For so many hours on so many days I got to move sentences around. No more! Instead I am in this limbo, this purgatory (lol) in which I can no longer touch the book but the book has not yet made its way into the world. It turns out that when one can no longer worry about whether one landed on the optimal place for a comma (and for my sanity I have been working hard not to), new worries rush in: will the book get reviewed, will the reviews be okay, will people buy it, will I get to publish another one someday, and on and on.
One thing I’ve been doing to try to alleviate these anxieties, over which I have little control of the outcome, is to write another book. I started it in 2020 soon after the first book sold. I wrote 60,000 words, dumped that draft and started fresh, and have crept back up to just under 50,000. I’m hoping that the next iteration will be less of a full-on rewrite, but we’ll see. After I muscle out the rest of this draft (which in some ways is feeling easier than my first book, because I know I’ve written one before and assume I can do it again, but in other ways is more difficult because I’ve been toggling between it and edits on the first book and now promoting that first book) I want to take a couple of months to dwell in research without doing a lot of prose writing. In The Mythmakers, one of the characters, Moira, is a physicist and so I got to spend many hours reading books about astrophysics history and the study of black holes and theories of spacetime, 1/1000th of which made its way into the book and even less of which I have retained in my own brain, sadly.
From Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time:
Imaginary time is indistinguishable from directions in space…This means that there can be no important difference between the forward and backwards directions of imaginary time. On the other hand, when one looks at “real” time, there’s a very big difference between the forward and backward directions, as we all know. Where does this difference between the past and the future come from? Why do we remember the past but not the future?
Reading this and other nonfiction helped inspire and structure huge sections of the novel that had nothing to do with Moira’s work, and for this next project I’m excited to dip into geology and wave science, see what imaginative spaces they unlock.
But that almost-entirely-finished book, The Mythmakers—some updates.
The first is that I’ll be doing readings in a few places this summer, so if you’d like to stay in the loop with that and haven’t yet subscribed to this newsletter, now would be a good time to!
Goodreads is currently hosting a giveaway of 20 copies of the book. You can find it here, either right underneath the cover image or a little further down, under “Win A Copy Of This Book.” Who doesn’t love free things!
Some very intelligent, generous people have read the book and sent along blurbs vouching for it. I won’t club you over the head with all of them, but I might roll them out gently over the next couple months—if you haven’t yet been enticed to preorder, maybe this will convince you? Strong preorder sales are incredibly meaningful in the life of a book. They generate industry buzz and convince booksellers to stick the book front and center, both of which can generate more sales. Arts and commerce, baby!
Clare Beams, the brilliant and thoughtful author of The Illness Lesson, calls it:
“A novel about ambition—art-making, self-making—and the ways in which, when questions of gender and desire and love enter the scene, lies and truths can tangle as intricately as the links of a fine necklace. The Mythmakers glitters with suspense, and it held me rapt. Keziah Weir has arrived."
You can preorder it here, where it is currently slightly discounted!
That’s all for now, besides a few good things below. Thanks, as always, for coming along for the ride.
READ Jia Tolentino on the other side of the Ozempic debate.
MAKE a spring quiche!
BUY a timer: the tomato, a cute little hedgehog, the stripey colorful one, or one for minimalists.
You don’t know about The Phone Pot? Ask me about my Phone Pot!
Of course they do. While waiting for a response, having fired off an emotional text, one wishes the seconds would speed ahead. At the beginning of a meditation I sometimes wish I were at the end. Workdays, for some. And many more dire circumstances we don’t need to list here.
I really enjoyed this, and particularly related to the banality of your late night epiphanies--mine are similarly disappointing. I'd love to learn more about the phone pot.