i was in a fog

I worked like a dog and at the same time—what shall I say?—I was in a fog. I didn’t know what I was doing. I couldn’t see what I was getting at. I was supposed to be working on a novel, writing this great novel, but actually I wasn’t getting anywhere. Sometimes I’d not write more than three or four lines a day. My wife would come home late at night and ask, “Well, how is it going?” (I never let her see what was in the machine.) I’d say, “Oh, it’s going along marvelously.” “Well, where are you right now?” Now, mind you, maybe of all the pages I was supposed to have written maybe I had written only three or four, but I would talk as though I’d written a hundred or a hundred and fifty pages. I would go on talking about what I had done, composing the novel as I talked to her. And she would listen and encourage me, knowing damned well that I was lying. Next day she’d come back and say, “What about that part you spoke of the other day, how is that going?” And it was all a lie, you see, a fabrication between the two of us. Wonderful, wonderful . . . Henry Miller, Paris Review