Hello, beautiful people,

I spent several hours this weekend searching through my hard drive for an image that would match what I want to say. The dates of this weekend have enormous importance for the characters in my novel Once Again, and I can say, without divulging any spoilers, that the protagonist, Erin, is acutely driven to mark the time’s significance.

A linked effort of mine was to finish listening to the audiobook of Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time. I’m putting the finishing touches on my story’s final draft, and I wanted to refresh some of the early research I did. Rovelli’s book is thorny and difficult and also exquisitely beautiful. It requires that you walk slantwise over unfamiliar terrain and trust the author to guide you. I will grant you serious nerd cred if you can make your way through all of the physicist’s chapters to the end of the book. But if you do make the disorienting and lyrical trip to reach that final chapter, entitled “The Sister of Sleep,” it will be your reward. It is a thing of beauty. A great pleasure for me in the return to this research was the audiobook narration by Benedict Cumberbatch. He did such a fine job of bringing clarity to the ideas with his interpretation in that resonant voice of his. It was a joy to the last syllable.

After I finished listening and started searching for an image, I came across the one above. I had a different one in mind, but I couldn’t find it. When this one appeared, I stopped. Wow, I thought, what’s up with this? I only vaguely remember taking the series this photo belongs to. The way it looks above is the way it shows up as a download. I didn’t alter it to have that slip in the center of the frame. I have no idea how it happened, but it is perfect. That photo just so happens to illustrate beautifully something the character in my novel experiences on that significant day, a concept Rovelli delves into so deeply in The Order of Time. It feels to me like another stroke of luck in a string of lucky happenstances for which I am so grateful.

Let me know what you think.

—cwh