With thanks to my first completed journal

The first journal I filled is two-thirds disjointed mess. I started it in late 2011 as a notebook for my story/novel ideas, and for the first 200 pages that’s more or less what it is, with ideas and passages that ended up in The Imaginary Revolution or the Myke Phoenix novelettes I dashed off in 2014.

Then, on April 15, 2015, like turning on a light switch, I started filling the rest of the pages with what I dubbed “fragments of thought and bursts of creativity,” nearly every day, and now...