Rueful, Bittersweet, Funny, Written With Tenderness And

The Midnight Disease Is A Kind Of Emotional Insomnia; At Ever Conscious Moment Its Victim—even If He Or She Writes At Dawn, Or In The Middle Of The Afternoon—feels Like A Person Lying In A Sweltering Bedroom, With The Window Thrown Open, Looking Up At A Sky Filled With Stars And Airplanes, Listening To The Narrative Of A Rattling Blind, An Ambulance, A Fly Trapped In A Coke Bottle, While All Around Him The Neighbours Soundly Sleep.

Nothing That Had Ever Happened To Him, Not The Shooting Of Oyster, Or The Piteous Muttering Expiration Of John Wesley Shannenhouse, Or The Death Of His Father, Or Internment Of His Mother And Grandfather, Not Even The Drowning Of His Beloved Brother, Had Ever Broken His Heart Quite As Terribly As The Realization, When He Was Halfway To The Rimed Zinc Hatch Of The German Station, That He Was Hauling A Corpse Behind Him

A Story Begins With This Nebulous Feeling That’s Hard To Get A Hold Of And You’re Testing Your Feelings And Assumptions, Testing What You Believe. They End Up Turning Into Keepsakes And Mementos –like Amber In Which A Memory Gets Trapped.

I Suppose There Is Something Appealing About A Word That Everyone Uses With Absolute Confidence But On Whose Exact Meaning No Two People Can Agree. The Word That I'm Thinking Of Right Now Is Genre, One Of Those French Words, Like Crêpe, That No One Can Pronounce Both Correctly And Without Sounding Pretentious.

I Was Surprised That My Wife Thought It Was A Good Idea, Then Again With My Agent, Another Woman, Then My Editor, Another Woman - In Spite Of The Fact That All Three Of Them Reacted Positively I Still Have This Fear.