Six years of this

Six years ago I began this blog without a clear charter, only a wish to think in public at the pace of a person who also buys dill at the bazaar and keeps Saturdays for the banya. I expected craft notes. I did not expect how much the habit would steady the days when the novel felt like a room without doors. Looking back, the posts are less a shop window than a workshop bench: tools left out, questions half-sanded, the radio on low.

Six years is also a small lie of continuity. The first stretch of this lived somewhere else, on a friends-locked ЖЖ read by about eleven people, and it has moved house twice since, the dates intact both times, the Russian turned into English on the first move. That is why the early entries sound like the person writing this sentence. They did not, at the time.