All the little blinking lights

Lev Grossman's new blog is addictively good. From a two-parter on anti-depressants and the writing life:

But then a strange thing happened. In February of 2006 I pitched Time on a profile of James Patterson, partly because it would involve my traveling to Palm Beach, FL in February, but mostly because I think he’s an interesting guy. (While I was there Patterson told me the incredible fact that when he was an undergraduate he worked nights at a mental hospital, and one of his assignments was to stand suicide watch over Robert Lowell, who if he could have seen the future would surely have attempted to strangle Patterson as a service to American letters. But anyway.) While I was there I realized I was out of Serzone.

Eh, I thought lazily. I’ll just pick some up when I get back.

But then I noticed two things. One, I was having the worst headache of my life. I don’t get migraines, but seriously, I was seeing spots. That I could chalk up to the side-effects of interviewing James Patterson.

But number two I couldn’t. Number two was that I felt like a fricking genius. My brain was having ideas and making connections and generally hyperfunctioning. It was like I had the WOPR up there. All the little blinking lights were on. I don’t think they’d been on in a while.

And here Lev posts the backstory to his epic Leonard Woolf/modernism-v.-fantasy piece, in this month's Believer.