Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living.

If you're going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?

The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it.

I like to travel and connect.

Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.

The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.

All the different ways we know the world all come from the brain, and they all depend on each other to make sense.