Writing, however, is not life. It's not even very much fun. It's like standing in a dark cave with an entire colony of Mexican fruit bats and trying to catch them with a butterfly net. They're zooming here and swooping there; they're smacking you with their wings. They're getting tangled in your hair, they probably have rabies, and they want to suck your blood, but you just keep swinging the net over and over and over, and yet the net remains empty. If, wonder of wonders, you do catch a bat, you will bask blissfully in the knowledge that you have netted the most perfect specimen of Chiroptera ever known. You'll bask for exactly five minutes. Then you'll start worrying that you'll have no one to admire your bat, your perfect, perfect bat. Or, if you do, that people will think it's a sucky bat, or that it should have been bigger, or furrier. Or that Jonathan Franzen's bat was better, even though you know your bat was every bit as squeaky and fuzzy and crinkly-nosed as any other bat. So then you realize that the world just isn't fair. But then you realize your bat does, in fact, suck. Then you realize your bat is actually a fine, fine bat but the problem is that the world doesn't actually need any more bats, so maybe you should just put down the net and take up needlepoint.

-Rachel Proctor May

Change 'writing' to 'photography' and 'Jonathan Franzen' to 'Walker Evans' and you've got a pretty good description of my daily process.