> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.cristianmihai.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Anyway - URL: https://www.cristianmihai.com/blog/anyway/ - Published: 2026-09-20T20:32:33.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-20T20:32:32.000Z - Author: Cristian Mihai - Tags: Blog In June I signed a law on this site, and I spent the summer breaking it. The law sits in an essay called [Passio](https://www.cristianmihai.com/blog/passio/), and it took me half a life to reach. For years I had kept my desk like a shrine, and in one of those years I finished four pages. Then a ridiculous story dragged me across a morning so fast that my coffee went cold at my elbow, and I walked out of that morning with a rule: "If it does not bring me alive, it does not count." I called it my law. It fit, I said, better than the one it replaced. I meant every word. Then the summer did what working summers do. I wrote and I edited and I wrote and I edited. A story goes up here every week, because the [About page](https://www.cristianmihai.com/about/) says so, and a promise on an About page holds a man tighter than any law he writes in a good mood. I can't match those titles to their mornings. Somewhere in that stretch the days lost their seams. I sat down, I opened the file, and I fixed [the sentence I had fixed the day before](https://www.cristianmihai.com/blog/everything-looks-like-a-book/), or its twin, and then I did it again the next morning, and the next, until my hands ran the route without me and the whole act carried the stale taste of a thing already done. The French call it déjà vu, already seen, and they make it sound more charming than a man retyping a paragraph on a Thursday that could pass for any other Thursday. If you make anything on a schedule, you have stood in that same Thursday. Truth be told, the joy left. It gave no notice. It walked out during some week I can't name, and it took the laughing alone at the desk with it, and will stayed on to cover every shift. From the outside, sheer will looks like a man punching keys. From the inside it looks like that too. By the law I signed in June, every one of those pages arrived dead. And the stories went up anyway. In the summer of 1938, in Los Gatos, California, John Steinbeck kept two books going at once. In a ledger he wrote *The Grapes of Wrath* by hand, two thousand words a day, and in a journal, each morning before the ledger, he warmed up by writing about the man who had to fill it. That journal stayed private until 1989, when Robert DeMott edited it as *Working Days*, and it reads like a complaint log. "I'm not a writer," one entry says. "I've been fooling myself and other people." Elsewhere he called the novel "just a run-of-the-mill book" and added that it was the best he could do. He wrote and he complained and he wrote and he complained. On August 16 he set down the one instruction he kept obeying: "Just a stint every day does it." He finished on October 26\. The novel came out the next April and won the Pulitzer in 1940, and the Nobel followed in 1962. Here's the thing about those two books. The only evidence of Steinbeck's bad mornings sits in the second one, the book he kept to hold them. The novel carries no trace. Open *The Grapes of Wrath*, any edition, and hunt for the chapter he wrote on the day he told his journal he was no writer. You will come back with nothing. The misery went into the journal, the work went into the ledger, and only the ledger reached the printer. The printer set his good days and his bad days in the same type. In June I wrote that the feeling travels. A story came out alive, I said, "because I had been alive while making it." Steinbeck's two books say the feeling stays home. The morning stays with the writer, and the sentence ships to the reader. It gets worse for my law. In 2004 *The Paris Review* asked Haruki Murakami how he works when a novel is underway, and he described a day built to pass for the day before it. He gets up at four. He writes for five or six hours, then runs ten kilometers or swims, and he goes to bed at nine. "I keep to this routine every day without variation," he said. "The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it's a form of mesmerism." I had filed the blur as a symptom, the kind of lump a man gets looked at. Murakami builds it on purpose. He sands the seams off his days, because the trance takes him deeper into the book. You have your own version of this. It might be a manuscript, or the fortieth week of a business you ran toward in week one. If you are waiting, as I waited for years at my shrine of a desk, for the feeling to come back before you trust the work again, look at your own reading life first. You have read books for decades, and you have never once caught a writer on a bad day. Somebody wrote your favorite page on a Thursday like mine. Joy is optional. Typing that sentence costs me, three months after I published its opposite. Joy still visits, and the mornings it visits are the best mornings I get, and I will take every one of them. It stayed two weeks once, a long fever, and I came out of it holding [*Jazz*](https://www.cristianmihai.com/jazz/). But joy keeps no schedule, and the story is due Saturday. The thing is, the professional writer's curse comes down to one plain fact: the work collects the pages and never asks how the man slept. That indifference runs in both directions. The work ignores my good mornings, and it ignores my dead ones, and the dead ones never reach you. Next Saturday a new title goes on top of "[**Heavy**](https://www.cristianmihai.com/heavy/)." I can't tell you yet how the week will go. I will write and edit and write and edit, and the column will grow by one line, a title and a date. An invoice never says how the money was made.