Clouds Out Of Control Decoct Anticipation. What

Fiction -- At Least For Me -- Requires Long, Relatively Uninterrupted Time Stretches In Which To Bring It To Fruition. I've Never Been A Two-hour-in-the-morning Writer, Who Could Put In Another Six Hours On Sunday Afternoon. For Me, A Novel Requires Weeks Of Living In A Largely Mental And Wholly Internal Landscape. Everything Else Has To Be Relegated To The Odd Hour Here, The Bit Of Time There. Sadly, However, Uninterrupted Time Blocks Are Not What Life Doles Out Today To Any Of Us With Regularity.

Historically, I Guess That's How Science Fiction Works: You Start By Using Aliens To Think The Unthinkable — And Then, Eventually, Another Writer, Having Grown A Little More Comfortable With The Earlier Notion, Brings It Into The Human.

Apocalypse Has Come And Gone. We're Just Grubbing In The Ashes.

In A Very Real Way, One Writes A Story To Find Out What Happens In It. Before It Is Written It Sits In The Mind Like A Piece Of Overheard Gossip Or A Bit Of Intriguing Tattle. The Story Process Is Like Taking Up Such A Piece Of Gossip, Hunting Down The People Actually Involved, Questioning Them, Finding Out What Really Occurred, And Visiting Pertinent Locations. As With Gossip, You Can't Be Too Surprised If Important Things Turn Up That Were Left Out Of The First-heard Version Entirely; Or If Points Initially Made Much Of Turn Out To Have Been Distorted, Or Simply Not To Have Happened At All.

Now For Me, You're The Irreplaceable One: I've Never See You Up So Close Before, And I Do Not Understand You At All. You Say Sometimes I Act Like I Don't See You? I Don't Even Know Where To Look! Living With You Around Is Like Is Like Living With A Permanent Dazzle. The Fact That You Even Like Me, Or Look At Me, Or Brush By Me, Or Hug Me, Or Hold Me, Is So Surprising That After It's Over I Have To Go Back Through It A Dozen Times In My Head To Savor It And Try And Figure Out What It Was Like Because I Was Too Busy Being Astounded While It Was Happening.