Yesterday I was thinking about Stephen King, who had a car accident that crushed all the bones in his body, and when he was convalescing got his wife to prop him up in a tiny alcove by his hospital bed so that he could start writing again, even though he was in excruciating pain. I wondered. Was it something that he loved that much?

Telling stories is hard for me, hard enough that I avoid it when I can, doing other things instead, like cleaning the kitchen, or cooking, or breaking my computer so I can fix it. Which is why it seemed fitting, not even ironic, when my computer helpfully broke itself so that I wouldn’t have to start this morning.

You finish, Maeve Binchy says, because it would be too humiliating not to. So that when people say, “did you ever finish that novel?” you can say, “of course I finished.”

Spend the morning reading Philip Pullman. He says storytelling is the School of Morals in our world. Any theocracy, particularly any monotheism, is not democratic enough to let truth emerge. In the shifting metaphors of story we invite the debate, the ambiguity, the struggle for meaning that helps us answer really important questions: what are we to make of the lives we have been given? Not why are we here, because really, who can answer that, but what is the best way to take advantage of the fact that we are here? How should we go about the business of being human?

Jesse is working on a comic book called Dr. Doodle’s Imagination, about a guy who creates an imaginary world. In that imaginary world, a little tribe of bad bots keeps trying to turn the imaginary world into a real world. He’s onto something, that boy.