The best epiphanies are the kind that come in the shower or over a bowl of cereal, so soon after you wake up that maybe it came to you while you were sleeping or something and you just now remembered. And then you dry off or rinse the bowl out (as the case may be) and sit down to start over on two or three weeks of work, and you get more done in the next eight hours than in days and days previously. You don’t really mind having thrown out so much, starting more or less from scratch, because you finally get to a point where it’s done or at least you can leave it for a while (whatever it may be) and you don’t have that fucking irritating little poke at the back of your head reminding you that you’re not happy with it. Because you are, finally. Happy with it.

The trouble of course being that when it’s polished and ready to go a day or two later, you’ve forgotten about all the work that never saw the light of day, all the starting over and revising and throwing out. “I made that in eight hours,” you tell people. (They are appropriately amazed.) And when you start on the next thing a day or a week or a month later, it seems incomprehensible that you’d actually have to wait for another epiphany, but you do.

That’s the best.