Now, That’s an Excuse I Can Understand

As someone who has been working on a book of his own for a long time, I thought this excerpt from a recent Publishers Weekly interview said it all:

An interview with George Dawes Green, whose new novel, Ravens, will be published by Grand Central on July 15.

PW: It’s been 14 years since your last novel; what took
you so long?!

GDG: I got distracted. I went diving in the Galapagos Islands and spotted a frail momentary seahorse; I read Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees; Larry Gwynn bluffed me off a full house with a jack-high (in Wanda’s house, under live oaks, in the presence of witnesses); I founded The Moth; I wrote the scripts for a few movies; a bruja gave me the evil eye in Santiago Atitlan and I was nearly murdered a few hours later; Skye Sullivan and I, on the coldest night of the year, squeezed into Romulus’s coat together, and shuffled home through the dark streets of Manhattan.

You tell them, George.