Nobody warns you about the specific loneliness that arrives the week after you finish a manuscript. Not the good, tired satisfaction everyone describes — that comes later, briefly, before the editing begins — but a quieter, stranger flatness, as though a companion you'd stopped noticing you relied on has suddenly left the room. The book has been the excuse for two years of thinking. Without it, the thinking has nowhere obvious to go, and neither, for a few days, do I.