Hello friends,

It's a sunny Saturday, and I'm trying to "unplug," I.E. stay off email + Twitter + the internet in general for 24 whole hours. I cut myself off at sundown last night, which means I just completed hour 16. Woohoo!

I'm writing the first draft of this letter on a yellow legal pad, so as to avoid temptation. This is a strategy I like to employ in the first draft stage for other stuff, too.

a) To avoid temptation, like I said. If I'm working on a new scene, it's so tempting to click over to Chrome and search, say, popular names for girls born in 1974, or U-Haul rental locations in Brooklyn, or "public lewdness class a misdemeanor new york state" (to name a few searches I've done recently, all related to the scene at hand, mind you). But then—oops—I left an email tab open and oh look there's a message and of course I have to check it and deal with the pressing issue of, say, Joy's badass wedding photo that Lauren alerted me to, and hmmm what else is happening on Instagram? Eight hours later, I have yet to finish the fucking scene and wow it's late I should really make some dinner and also do three loads of laundry. So. Legal pad. Phone on a shelf in the next room (sound off—always sound off).

b) If I'm writing longhand, it's harder to obsess and revise and overthink myself as I go. Although I do. This page already has seven different sets of square brackets, indicating phrases to consider omitting or replacing [like so]. But the goal is just to get the first draft down. The fun part is typing it up later. Which leads me to....

c) Later, when I type up my handwritten pages, I feel like such a baller. It's like FREE WORDS.