There’s a serial killer and he is coming to your home. You spend the few moments remaining with your family frantically attempting to plan some kind of defense. The idea is you’re going to lure him into a room, and there together overcome him by striking him with things in your house.

So it comes that you find yourselves in an upstairs room looking out over the city at night, and pointing to the places he has struck before.

“Didn’t he shoot someone from that tower behind the Payless?” you say.

“I don’t think so,” a second voice says.

A third voice adds, “I think I remember that. It was a man wasn’t it. Coming home late from a bar? It was just past where he strangled that lady.”

The second voice says, “I did hear about the shooting, but I remember the lady. Was that last week?”

“Two weeks ago,” you say.

And in this way you bide the time until you hear the glass in your back door break, and he walks into your house. Downstairs you hear him prowling, then he grabs some item of paper from the living room and angrily rips it to shreds, and you realize that the last-minute plans you had made of weaponizing the meager furniture in the upstairs room are not going to work against all his anger and his energy, that you’re going to have to face him with almost no weapon and no plan.

So you turn to your partner/significant other, and you say, “When was it we were going to bring him up here?”

***

This is what it is like to write a novel. This is what it is like to get married, or have a baby. This is what it is like to lose a loved one. This is the metaphor of the living. You move, you plan, you think you have a bead on things, and then suddenly you find yourself overwhelmed by forces more elemental and powerful than you ever could have dreamed or expected.

Everything you know and love is at risk, you are quite sure you are not up to this task, but you do it anyway because to do nothing is unthinkable.