It is never easy to write books. I have less trouble with the...

Spindrift Point.


Evidence of actual work being done.


Sleeping quarters, end of room.

It is never easy to write books. I have less trouble with the actual writing than finding a quiet place to concentrate on the task at hand. Not being rich and usually being poor, there's also the whole working problem, and it is generally useless for me to try to write anything consequential after a day of typing newspaper pieces or political insults for a website. A long time ago, coming back from a (domestic) Balkan war zone and taking a breather in Budapest, I got in the habit of seizing some quiet place and writing in complete solitude for as long as I could stand, a couple of weeks or a month or whatever was possible.

Smarter people just build a shack behind their house and do the writing there, but I never live anyplace long enough to construct a hut. And so, when deadlines real or imagined make their appearance, I run off to a lair somewhere. A decade ago, I rented a beach house south of Ensenada in the off season, $450 for the whole month. The result was a ridiculous parody of the 1990s humorous detective thriller. But it got published (in Australia), and with the $5,000 I bought an old Jeep that lasted for many years and ended my novelty existence as a Los Angeles resident without a car.

And so I'm up in this one-room cabin on the cliffs near Muir Beach. It belonged to a sailor and writer named Charles Borden, author of many swashbuckling tales of the seas and a great lover of wild places. When he died in 1968, he willed the four-acre ragged point of rock and pine to a conservation group in San Francisco. It is absolutely quiet, except for the low roar of the waves far below, and the entire cabin is built of glass panels with redwood beams and planks. Inside is outside, as it should be, and it feels like a narrow sailboat was stranded on this rock fifty years ago and grew into a house of sorts. From the glass walls, I look down on the backs of pelicans and turkey buzzards drifting by on the air below. A big freighter appears on the horizon once or twice a day, and slowly moves through the Golden Gate.

The West Coast ports will be shut down by the Occupations next week; the Sunday paper had a full-page ad from the Port of Oakland arguing against this, using the language of Occupy Wall Street. ("We are the 99%," etc.)

Right now I'm working on a non-fiction book that should've been finished long ago, but it's better that there's a two-year gap between the events and the writing. It is almost always better to think about things for a couple of years. There are so many books, and so many are unnecessary.

Weirdly enough, the only book I've written that I've been satisfied with is Dignity, and I wrote that in spare hours here and there over about six months. But I could only write when my house was empty, when there was a rare day off work, when everyone else was gone, and some of my favorite chapters were written in my car on windy winter days in the desert, after a hike with the dog.

(It is time to sleep now, after a couple thousand words today. That's why I am allowed to post nonsense on my own website. Also, as seen in the picture, there's a history book to read before bed, because it's always good to have a brain-clearing non-fiction book to look at after a long day of trying to be smart.)