Apart from the exhilaration (along with the potential terrors) that comes with beginning a new story, I love how those initial stages of creation become something that dominates my thoughts instead of the usual petty concerns, worries, and gripes that tend to take front and centre. The same can be said, I’ve discovered, when it comes to reading Nietzsche (which, admittedly, I’ve become weirdly obsessed about over the last half year or so), as I find myself devoting a lot of those in-between moments to ruminating over his ideas, making connections to our present historical moment, and trying to find the answers to the numerous questions that come to mind. As Michael Tanner very aptly puts it in his excellent book Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction: “All good aphoristic writing is tiring to read, because one has to do so much of the writer’s work for him. [Nietzsche] supplies a sentence, the reader turns it into a paragraph.”