“Absolutely. I’d say the incremental work is the most important thing. We'd have to halter break the steers in order to show them, which took seven hours a day. You’d get knocked down, you’d get your ass kicked, and you’d have to get back up again. Knowing that I could get back up again was such an enormous thrill. I’ve never felt that experience quite so similarly as I do with writing. You take something that is such an astronomically large task for an individual that it’s almost laughable to think about — one person writing an entire book, in charge of this entire world. Whether it’s through rejections or plot struggle, you become thrilled at the idea of how many times you can get back up again.”