The Next Phase Has Begun

I can't tell you much about what happened over the last week. Let me put it this way.

Best. Sean. Story. So far. An amazingly fictional, mythological experience just choking with extremes and intensity. Ask me in person. It's mind-bending. James Herriot meets Rupert Pupkin.

But to cut to the chase.

I am as a phoenix risen from the flame. I am able. I am employed as an apprentice in a fascinating and lucrative profession, and I'm getting in through a side door. I have begun training to shape my body into a beautiful weapon. I have finally begun my course of instruction at Man School. I am being prepared to take a place in the one percent.

I know what I am now. There aren't any words for it these days, but there is a class of people like me. I have a fellowship, a guild, a history. Our core values are intellectualism, aesthetism, valor, honor, and excellence. I had the first two and the last, but without valor and honor I was part of a man. Now I am whole.

I have started taking steps toward real, actual adulthood. I will be engaging with the world on its own terms instead of dictating my own and grinning as the world flays me in response. My purity is over. I will have to contend with my core values as obstacles as well as virtues.

And I will need to access pleasures previously too -- sinful? degraded? -- for my previous self. Pride, vanity, competition, desire, all have to be embraced if I am going to be able to move in the circles into which I am being pulled. I'm going to be swimming with sharks, so this gator needs to smooth his moves and sharpen his teeth.

I'll be starting a new blog with a different title. Self-deprecation isn't appropriate for my current path. And I'll be going over this blog and reducing it to a 'best-of' collection, with all references to my personal frailties excised. I no longer approach life from the perspective of a victim, and wish to distance myself from that stance. No insult to anyone else; my attitude toward others is unchanged. But I've let fear govern my life to too great a degree for too long, and now things are different.

My life as an artist will continue unabated, and can only benefit from this new direction. Most of my independence has been left to me; what has been taken is the opportunity and desire for indolence.

Aspects of my character that have previously been unbending laws will now have to be guidelines and preferences. The fierce purity I have maintained through my life is no longer compatible with a course of honor.

And so.

Don't worry about me any more. I thrive. Don't think I'm going away. I will be more in touch than I was before. I'm thrashing with my new computer set-up, but I should be fully back on-line in short order. There will be a phone, and a mailing list, and business cards, and all the happy paraphernalia of a professional approach to life.

Now I'm going to go walk around and feel something strange thrum through my body as I absorb the fact that I don't hurt and I'm not doomed and tomorrow will see me stronger than today. See y'all around, and give my best to your family.

My Computer's Dead

Hey, all.

My computer has died. The missus has graciously decided to get me a low-end Mac with eight gigs of RAM, which will be a little better than the seven-year old machine it's replacing. This isn't going to happen immediately, and it does represent a financial hardship. But I'm not going away, and I will be back to work in the near future, and when I come back, I'll be able to comment on blogs and open .docx documents and so on.

I will be checking my email on the missus's machine. I will be available by phone. I am not vanishing.

That will be all for now.

How I Learned To Tell A Story

Right now the Taos Toolbox writer's workshop is actively seeking applicants. In addition to their coverage of issues specifically relating to genre fiction, they provide the finest education in the practical techniques of fiction I know of, and excellent advice and support regarding the writer's life.

But the most useful thing I took from Taos was from Walter's casual discussion of his martial arts practice. "Most of it is about maintaining a heroic stance," he said. Ever since then, I've had the heroic stance at the back of my mind. I mean, you can't say, 'I want to be heroic,' but you can take a stance.

And I can't tell you how grateful I am for the friends and colleagues I met there, and I suspect that some of us will be in communication for life. Hey, sometimes you get lucky.

I made my first attempt at writing when I was in elementary school, another in junior high, another two in high school, and three more times in colleges during my twenties. My last teacher summed it up when she said, "You've got everything but a story, and without that, you have nothing."

I responded by writing a Jim Thompson-influenced version of the Three Little Pigs. It was my first real story, and the only one I was able to pull off for another ten years.

Story is hard, story is a bitch, story breaks more wannabe-fiction writers than anything but laziness. I spent my life bouncing off the problem of story. It felt as if there was something wrong with me that was keeping some essential secret hidden from me.

This turned out to be true.

Some people say storytelling is used-up, played-out, every story has been told and what's the point? Since I'm not seeing the great storytellers addressing the issues of the day, and I see lots of people reading stories, this sounds like goony talk to me. And other people say that there is nothing without story, and I think of how non-fiction outsells fiction ten-to-one, and that sounds like goony talk as well.

But if you're a writer and you can't tell a story, it hampers you.

In my late thirties, after I got out of rehab for my back injury, I fell into a job writing cartoon scripts for Mondo Media. I was initially hired to write and direct my own show, but my weak storytelling skills screwed that up for me. But by the time my hypothetical series had died, my story editor, Megan McDonald (who is currently a rising poet), had taught me enough basic storytelling so that I was brought on to work on a number of different shows, mainly Thugs On Film. (Incidentally, this was directed by Kamau Bell. Y'all seen Kamau recently? TV show and everything.)

This was fun, and it gave me a chance to work in a format that was sufficiently limited to understand. Three and a half minutes, a movie review, one smart guy, one stupid guy, both dopes and criminals, an adventure playing off the movie, go!

Creativity thrives on rules and limitations. This is important. The greatest gift I got from scriptwriting was the habit of working almost entirely in dialog and sensory information.

I came out of that, and after reading an interview with Megan, I did as she did and joined a writer's group. This was when I started getting some traction. My fictional models were Saki, John Collier, Shirley Jackson, Roald Dahl's adult fiction, Fredric Brown, and so-on -- cruelly amusing moralistic entertainments, possibly featuring an element of the fantastic.

But while I was working on those reasonably-successful short works, I was thrashing around with my novel like it was a fucking anaconda in the mud. I read everyone from Freytag to Frey, even that old Robert McKee and Morphology of the Fairy Tale and everything, and it was all like reading poorly-translated stereo instructions. It seemed as though it ought to make sense, but I didn't get it.

So I went to the Viable Paradise writers workshop. It was swell. They more-or-less welcomed me into the human race, and it stuck. Also, Elizabeth Bear suggested that I read Writing Fiction That Sells and study joke structure.

That was very useful, but it didn't solve the real problem. The deep problem.

So I went to Taos Toolbox, mentioned above. Walter Jon Williams is, for my money, the strongest long-form plotter working today. And while much of the talk of plot was over my head, there was a specific exercise that was given to us that gave me my first real clue. I'm not going to give you the specifics of the exercise, but it involves breaking a story down into scenes and examining the way they connect to one another, the way one scene leads into the next.

We were told to use a short story or an episode of a television show. I used the short novel Clockwork, by Philip Pullman, a work whose plot shows great intricacy and craft. I spent all night on it, and when I was done, I'd installed a whole new structure in my brain.

When Walter used my novel as the example when he taught us plot-blocking, to my excitement I could understand what was going on, I could see the big shape of the work. And when I got back home, the next draft of the novel was closer than ever to working.

But there were still gaps in my storytelling skill set. And they weren't going to be addressed in a writer's workshop.

The winter after I got back from Taos, I had a minor breakdown. The nausea that had given me trouble at Taos continued, and got worse. I ripped a hole in my stomach through persistent vomiting, was hospitalized, told it was a stress reaction, was sent to a mental health clinic, was given bad pills, was dropped from the system to go cold turkey. Whew.

Still struggling with the novel, I signed up for a class with Nick Mamatas. He found the perfect question to ask me -- "Who is the protagonist telling the story to?" It busted everything, and the final draft came within months.

The missus found me a counselor, and I started to get serious about my memoir work. While researching the conditions with which I had been diagnosed, I ran across the statement that post-traumatic stress syndrome causes a disorganized personal story. I mentioned this in one of my memoir pieces, and a reader said, "Well, that's just what this reads like. It reads like a disorganized personal story."

And a big light went on.

In counseling, I was told -- to my great shock and surprise -- that I was motivated by principle rather than desire. I asked the missus, my dad, my friends, and they confirmed this appallingly vast and alienating statement.

Desire and need are central to almost all theories of story. No wonder they didn't make any sense to me.

So my personal confusion and lack of motivation were at the heart of my difficulties with storytelling. Once I had located the problems, I could figure out a means of addressing them.

In the case of my PTSD, once I recognized the nature of the problem, the real issue rose up. I was not just writing down my experiences. I was transforming them into a unified personal story of the sort that a healthy person has. The sense of shattering, of confusion, of multiple viewpoints being brought to bear on every situation -- it's always Rashomon for me -- had to be eliminated in favor of something that could be understood. One singular perspective. My perspective.

And as for motivation, the need-and-greed that acts as the engine in most stories? I use it when it rises naturally from my stories, but I don't regard it as a basic force in my narratives.

This is my current personal theory of story. It may not work for you; it's doing fine for me.

A story consists of a beginning and an end, which share a meaningful relationship, connected by an unbroken chain of consequence.

That's it. But it took me years and years of study, thousands of dollars of expense, a trip to the mountain, and buckets of blood for me to get to the point where that sentence makes enough sense to be useful to me. The simple sentence above represents a solid object in my mind, a spinal column of gleaming black metal. The spine of a story. Each vertebra a scene. All the other advice on storytelling I've read becomes useful inside the context of this concept.

Really understanding the obvious is hard. You can quote me on that.

A St. Patrick's Day In San Francisco

The neighborhood we were in was so punk the pigeons had mohawks.

Photo courtesy of Justine Clifford. Thanks, Justine!

So I had an interesting time on Sunday. Actually, I had a great time, but in a very odd way. Joe Clifford's got a new book on the way. It's the one he wrote first, a memoir called Junkie Love, and he wanted to shoot a promotional video for it. Last week he put out a call for thuggish types, and I decided to see if he could use me. I like Joe, I like seeing myself on video, I've always thought I'd make a good movie heavy, what the hell. I figured I'd put off my haircut for a few days to keep my looks as seedy as possible, and volunteered on that basis.

A year or so ago, maybe even as recently as six or eight months ago, I wouldn't have done it. But these days, I like socializing and meeting new people. My decision to really join the human race has paid off in unexpected fun. It used to be that going to any kind of real social occasion was painful for me, worse than physical violence, but things changed. Part of it is getting to be more comfortable with people, part of it is getting to be more comfortable with myself, part of it is realizing that when I feel miserably fearful and intimidated and on the verge of tearful flight, I probably come across as a stuck-up jerk, possible side-order of macho, and I'd rather be thought of as a nice guy.

I'm still figuring out how to present myself in public -- for instance, I have NO FUCKING IDEA what to say when someone asks me, "So, what do you do?" My compulsion to honesty makes this one a stone bitch. No matter what I say, I'll feel as though I'm either aggrandizing myself or poor-mouthing, and either way I'm trying to draw attention to myself, which is also the impression I give when I try and dodge the question. You know what? Next time I think I'll just say 'starving artist type,' and if they need any details, they can fucking ask.

So on St. Patrick's Day I took BART out, and went to look for an Alkane Hotel in the neighborhood of Sixth and Mission in San Francisco.

This was a bad neighborhood. Needles underfoot if you stepped off the main street. You could see people dying as they walked by; a substantial portion of the community was visibly malnourished, most of them older people. And among the obvious poor was a sprinkling of rock-and-roll types. As the man said, a cheap holiday in other people's misery. I found a place called the Keane Hotel, and hoped this was the place. I pulled out my book, and started to wait. And then after seeing four or five tiny, emaciated, elderly black people enter and leave, a lovely young blonde woman in her late teens or early twenties swept through the door.

Tall, clear skin, radiant with physical vigor, she did not belong here. She wore a punk uniform, brand new, leather and chrome and Docs. I used to have a lot of attitude about this kind of thing, but Establishment Punk serves a purpose for a lot of people, and it's actually part of my history and world, and they're nice kids. Sometimes they can tell I used to be the Only Mohawk in Town, and it's really adorable and how can you not like that? But the combination of the affluence necessary to assemble an outfit like that, to get the right tattoos, with the environment...

Her T-shirt screwed with my head. It was a Gits shirt. My old buddy Anthony introduced me to the Gits way back when. If you want real details, look it up, but here's the story I keep in my head for ready reference. The Gits were a band from Portland or Seattle, someplace up North, and they were pretty good. Their lead singer was murdered, it was ugly, and the investigation left people unsatisfied. Joan Jett took the lead for the band when they did a benefit concert to raise money for the investigation. I think the crime is still unsolved, but right now I'd rather eat a cockroach than check a fact.

So this young woman was wearing a brand-new-still-smells-like-silkscreening-T-shirt. A Gits T-shirt. And I was all, What the fuck does that mean? If it's deliberate, she's either actually cool or so cool she's horrible, and if it's an accident, that is one fucked-up omen.

Here's one of my life concepts; the transit book. I keep a paperback in my coat and another in my knapsack, to be read only when in transit or in waiting rooms or other such situations. So a book that might take three, four hours for me to plow right through might last me a couple of months, depending on the nature of my journeys.

As I loitered outside the Keane turning the yellow pages of the book from my jacket pocket, an old woman approached me and asked in a voice freighted with sad hope, "Is that the Bible?"

I said, "No," with a little more intensity than I'd intended. The book I'd found in my pocket was Naked Lunch, and I intuitively felt that there was nothing I could say or do at this point that wasn't going to be bad for that poor woman's equilibrium.

Since I wasn't sure I was in the right place, I got nervous, I got the jimmies, and I jumped and went looking for a payphone. On my way, I met Joe and the rest of the crew coming up the street toward me. Among others, Zarina Zabrisky showed up. I figured I'd finally get a chance to introduce myself, but no luck -- her shot was first, and she left when it was done. We passed like ships in broad daylight. This was typical of the afternoon. The shoot went with the startling smoothness and ease you get when people don't fuck up or fuck around, a rare and beautiful thing.

My role is dead minimal -- lead character tries to hassle me on the street and I shine him on -- and was done almost immediately, but when I went to leave, Joe asked me to stick around, so I did. I'm glad; we immediately adjourned to a dark alley, where I felt right at home. There was an older gentleman crouched in a nook formed by a wall and a rolling trash can. He was covered in coats, and his white beard hid his face, and he was eating something crunchy. Every once in a while, he'd try to say something. If it had just been me, I'd have tried to talk to him, but I didn't want to be his point of contact with the group.

The scene was making people nervous. I have to admit, I wish we'd brought a broom to sweep off the ground where the actor playing Joe lay while being faux-stomped. I'm a callous bastard, but by the end of the day, I was feeling a little concerned about people's emotional conditions. The people in the crew, I mean, not the sad folks around us. I didn't have room on the boat for them.

So it lightened the mood when the cops came up to us. It seems that the fake beating being lensed in the alley was disturbing some of the neighbors. Nobody said anything to us -- it seems they were standing out of sight, watching it happen, not getting involved. Our own little Kitty Genovese moment.

When I noticed the crunching, mumbling guy with the beard was gone, I went to check and see if he'd left anything behind for us. He did not disappoint. Behold.

Photo, again, courtesy of Justine Clifford.

I am a wrong, bad man, because as soon as I saw this I really, truly hoped he'd picked Lucky Charms because it was St. Patrick's day, and then I tried to figure out whether I'd rather try and eat Lucky Charms on heroin or speed. ('Neither' is the correct answer. Those ain't eating drugs. Dude must have been hungry, or maybe those weren't his needles.)

Afterward, gentleman Joe treated us to Vietnamese food, and I heard the line of the day from the maitre 'd. This guy had a flamboyant, entertaining manner that strongly suggested he spent some of his leisure time in women's clothes, seating us with a "Young gentlemen, sit here, and over here the young lady," hands fluttering, and he was caught up in a drama. As best as I could decipher -- I have a hard time listening in restaurants, and his accent was heavy -- there was another customer in a wheelchair who had dined and dashed on him twice before. The maitre 'd showed me the bills -- he was very excited, and wanted an audience. It seems the delinquent  client's caretaker was embarrassed by the situation, and had wheeled him into a section of the restaurant far away from the door, where he wasn't going to be able to make a getaway.

I take particular pleasure in English as spoken by people who are eloquent in their own language and refuse to let anything get in the way of their ability to cleverly express themselves. We were elbow-deep in our meal when the maitre 'd approached me and told me, "No trouble, no trouble," he said and smiled. "I just show him the bill and he say sorry and he pay, see?" He showed me a folded bundle of bills, then set one hand on my arm and batted his eyes at me. "He was a young lady."

Luck of the Irish, people!

Pursuing Disability Income

Read my latest piece, Easy Off, at the online noir magazine The Big Click. For the record, the accompanying image is perfect. Writing and performing this was real therapy for me -- by the time I was done, I'd lost my fear of myself.

Not everyone has that reaction.

So, I've been forced to make a very difficult decision. For those unfamiliar with the story, a couple of years back, I was hospitalized after vomiting blood for three days. I was told that my problem was stress, and was sent to a public mental health clinic, where I was diagnosed with PTSD, OCD, a particularly intricate mixed-state bipolar condition, fetal alcohol syndrome, and a debated and hypothetical big brain injury of some kind. There was one point when the shrink interviewing me put her hand on my arm and gently asked, "So, can you go out at all, or do  you have to stay inside?" The word 'unemployable' was repeated over and over, like a mantra.

I have a back condition, and the accompanying chronic pain that I've dealt with revealed itself in the wake of this situation. I'd allowed my stomach to get into such bad shape because at its very worst, the pain in my stomach was about two-thirds of my chronic sciatica. I've been reporting that pain as threes and fours on a scale of one to ten, and it easily beats hot stomach acid on an open wound.

And sometimes the pain in my back is serious. If I make bad decisions, sometimes all I can do is lay down and hurt.

I have done everything I can to try and find a way to make a living that allows me to generate an income while living with the constant possibility that I might lose my ability to function at any time, and in some cases I might be out of it for months. It hasn't been wasted effort. Even with my down-time, I produce a reasonable amount of work in a year. There is a very real chance that I will make it as an artist and writer at some point. I've sold to the big-money end of the market, and have been made to feel welcome there. But while things are happening for me, money isn't a big part of it yet. And I'm the kind of artist where going after the dollar hard might screw me up.

So for a while now, friends and family have been encouraging me to apply for disability.

I have resisted, but things are looking a little grim around here. This week my dad flat-out told me it was time, and when I spoke to my counselor, she agreed, and told me to contact the doctor for my back and the mental health facility where I was 'treated.' (The medication they gave me screwed with my bipolar, and for a few months we were worried that I might have to be institutionalized. Their handling of the situation was thoroughly irresponsible.)

This is one of the reasons I haven't been posting much lately. On one hand, my career is swell. I have exciting projects, full control over my creative life, and what seems to be a growing reputation; you would not believe the crap people say about me. It would make you vomit. That people are proud to introduce me to their friends and so on and so forth is delightful. It is bringing me to life. I'm a new man, and much happier. My counselor says she's never seen anyone make the kind of progress in therapy that I have.

So I feel whiplashed between the conditions that I regard -- emotionally, not intellectually -- as the very top and bottom of the social ladder. That I actually am on a first name basis with a certain number of people in the top and bottom one per-cent, that I actually see what life is like for the very poor and the fairly rich, is a source of tension.

I see two potentially serious issues with applying for disability, once you disallow the possibility that I might not qualify.

First is stress. I am someone who can be reduced to a helpless, weeping ball by a tax or student-loan form. I have a very difficult time coping with adversarial institutions. Waiting rooms are physically painful, and provide a too-easy opportunity to obsessively worry. Ambiguity and uncertainty strongly affect my ambient stress levels, and once they get to a certain stage, I get sick. Maybe I vomit, maybe my skin comes off, maybe my body invents some new means of tearing itself apart.

It sounds silly, but I have to take stress seriously. I do not have the luxury of 'being strong,' or 'toughing it out.' That's how I wound up in the hospital. I had to puke blood for three days before I weakened enough for a woman from Queens to be able to push me around, don't talk to me about tough. What I need is to find out how to be gentle with myself, how to take it easy. Believe me, I would not be taking that path if there wasn't blood on the line.

My other worry is that by getting a disability check, I will acquire a disabled persona.

Right now, people who meet me casually would never imagine that I'm facing these issues. I have discovered that rather than reading as a miserable, tortured wretch, I project a somewhat-deceptive quality of vigor, presence, and competence. (I figured this out last year when I saw myself on video. Life makes a hell of a lot more sense if I think of myself as an attractive person. Thank you for more therapy, performance.)

This affects the way people view me. I have screwy boundaries, and I take on the identity people project on me. So if people see me as a heroic figure, life is great fun. If people see me as a hopeless sad-sack, behold! Thusly am I transformed. (I'm working on this.)

So when I go into this disability thing, how is contact with this system going to affect the way I look at myself?

Or to put another slant on it, if I am drawing a paycheck for being a crazy cripple, am I going to do what I do at every other job, and try and earn more than I'm paid:? Am I going to wind up putting effort into being really crazy and really crippled? Because I have done some really dumb shit in my life, and that would be typical.

All I know for sure right now, is that I don't like the situation, and I'm in it. Oh, well.

Plotting, Pantsing, and the Old Cut-Up Gimmick

Well, I guess I'm going to go back in and change the shape of the highlight in the Colonel's eye to make him seem more friendly, and then the coloring of the lettering on my name should probably be a nice medium-dark blue, and...

So after years of study and contemplation, after consulting with experts at the highest levels of achievement, I seem to have developed the most complicated and arduous method of long-form storytelling possible. I'm writing it down so I don't forget it again -- I could have saved myself a month of mopey obsession if I'd remembered one of the basic rules.

The traditional rift in approaching plot and story in fiction has been between those who like to sit down and write and see what comes, and those who figure it all out ahead of time and then go in and fill in the blanks. Those who fly by the seat of their pants are called 'pantsers' and those who plan in advance are called 'plotters.'

(These are the kinds of things writers call themselves, so you shouldn't be surprised at what they call you.)

The virtues associated with pantsing are originality, an inspirational connection between language and story, and the excitement delivered by an ongoing sense of discovery on the part of the writer. Pantsing fails when it fails to deliver a story, or when the story it delivers is a half-baked cliche unconsciously stolen by the writer from TV or the movies. And so on.

The virtues associated with plotting are coherence, narrative drive, and a sense of control. The failings of plotted fiction are predictability and mundanity, and so on.

The division between the two might be regarded as the difference between art and craft, but my critical perspective holds that there is no great art without great craft, and that craft pursued with sufficient diligence can transform itself to art. So of course I have to combine the most laborious parts of both methods. Because that is the kind of lever monkey the world has made me.

I wrote my first novel this way, swore I would never work in that fashion again, and immediately fell backwards into the same fucking trap with Helping Henry. So here is my magic recipe for instant storytelling.

1. Write a stand-alone story that doesn't quite satisfy.

2. Extend it. Add crap. See how events lead into one another, find out what the characters are doing, where they're going. Get them there. Think in terms of consequences, of thought to action to reaction to response.

3. Look at the pile with dismay. Realize that you're dealing with a novelistic structure, and that you have an obligation to bring it to proper fruition.

4. Panic.

5. Inspect the manuscript until you find a beginning and an end that have a meaningful relationship with one another.

6. At this point, the manuscript is comparable to the block of marble in the old joke about the sculptor. "How do you do it?" "I just knock off everything that doesn't look like a donkey."

At this step, you're looking for the donkey. You cannot regard the current manuscript as anything but raw material. Everything is disposable.

Look at your beginning, and look at your ending. If you are trying to write conventional dramatic narrative -- by which I mean a story where things happen that people can understand, a story that may be read by someone who is not a fiction specialist of some kind -- the beginning and the end have to be connected by an UNBROKEN CHAIN OF CONSEQUENCE, where each event leads to the next.

7. This is the hard part. This hurts. It is also the most important part. This is where the creature lives or dies.

Knock off everything that doesn't look like a donkey.

This is what makes this a terrible method. I wrote easily five or six times as much manuscript as I used for my first novel, and a lot of it I rewrote repeatedly. In Helping Henry, this is less painful, since it's constructed of stories that stand alone to some degree. But I had forgotten I could do this, and I devoted a lot of thought to keeping material I'd written in place. Because it was good material.

This is a dead end. That is how you kill your story.

So take your manuscript, and write down a brief description of each scene on a file card or Post-It note. Get yourself some wall space or a corkboard or  something, and start laying the cards out in order. Put your beginning at one end, your ending at the other, and connect the two. Don't put a scene in unless it fills a specific, necessary function. Ask yourself if any scenes -- or characters -- can be combined to save space. If there is a gap in the chain of consequence, fill it in.

And if there is a string of cards to  one side, and they are full of terrific material, and the plot just doesn't seem to CONNECT? Those cards get left out.

This isn't actually like working with marble, folks. It's more like a lost-wax process, and you're working with wax at this point. It is infinitely malleable, but it will be cast in bronze later.

Then take your cards or Post-It notes, and gather them together in order. I use file cards, and I punch holes in them and bind them with a ring.

The thing is? You'll probably have some file cards left over. And some of those file cards will represent the very best writing you've ever done.

Just grin and cut, my friend. Grin and cut. Going to great labor to keep something that could easily go is fool's work.

8. And then go back over your manuscript, and make it conform to your outline. This is where I am with Helping Henry. Moving conversations around, adding points of connection between sub-plots, all that good stuff. To me, this doesn't feel so much like revision as like the real first draft.

9.  And then you're down to line edits. I'm aiming for next week on this.

I swear, though, next time I'm starting with an outline.

The Little Friend of My Little Friend...

This is the bed in our guest room. This is our dog -- my dog -- Laszlo.

And that is Laszlo's little friend.

When I say Laszlo is my dog, I don't mean I went out and selected him. Other way round. Here's what happened. When our Australian shepherd Amanda died, we said it would be a while before we replaced her. But our terrier (rat and Jack Russell mix) Roxxie started getting the crazies within weeks of Amanda's passing. Roxxie is one of those high-pitched individuals who doesn't get along in the world in general, and the loss of her friend really got to her.

So the missus got in touch with some animal rescue people, and Laszlo was the first dog they suggested for us. We drove out to the valley one day and met the rescue worker who was handling Laszlo (unnamed at that juncture) at a park.

According to what she said, Laszlo had been abandoned on the street and then rescued. "He's a dog person, not a people person," we were told, which, given the circumstances, sounded good. When we met him, he wouldn't approach me, wouldn't respond to me when I called him. I am an animal person -- not all animals love me, but if they don't, I wonder what the hell has gone wrong with the world. When this little guy wouldn't meet my gaze or let me near him, I figured something was wrong. Really wrong. This animal had been abused, and as much as I wanted to help, I didn't want a dog who didn't want me. So I started to harden myself to say we wouldn't be going home with the little mooch.

I fell into conversation with the woman who was caring for Laszlo, and while we were talking, she looked past me and smiled. "He sure likes you," she said.

 I followed her gaze, and looked down to my right rear. The young Laszlo was sitting directly behind me. He wasn't touching me, but he was as close as he could get without making contact. His body was curved around my right calf, and he was gazing up at me with an expression on his face that said, "Please. I want this. Please, please, please..."

We took him home.

For the first couple of weeks, he wouldn't approach me from the front or respond to my calls, but he stayed as close to me as he could, and if I let him sneak up behind me, he'd let me pet him. The combination of love and fear was heartbreaking -- but he got over it.

Roxxie the terrier has always slept in our bed. The missus uses her as a sort of hairy hot-water bottle. I'm an insomniac. If I get more than five hours of sleep a night, I'm okay. If I get less, I'm a miserable neurotic wretch. And due to my back pain, there's a limit to how long I can lay down comfortably. So I usually get up for a couple of hours in the early morning. One night after Laszlo had been with us a couple of weeks, I came back to bed and saw him curled up all by himself on our couch. I thought of the missus and Roxxie and myself warm and cozy, and I scooped the little guy up and took him back to bed with me.

It was purely an act of affection influenced by pity, but it was one of the best decisions I've ever made.

When I'm laying in bed in the dark, I am at the mercy of my mind. I usually go through three or four fairly serious stress reactions a night in response to compulsive fantasies of violence or other misfortunes. The missus is a lovely person, but I have made it a practice not to roll over and clutch at her, shuddering and hyperventilating, more than three or four times a year. It is not my intention to establish a hostile work environment.

But get this. These days, when it's time to go to bed? Laszlo dances around me as if we're going for a walk or it's time to be fed. So far as he's concerned, keeping me company in bed is his job. Having him next to me is a constant reminder that I am in bed to rest, not to torture myself. And when I start feeling crazy? I get ahold of him, and pet him until I calm down. He likes it, and it helps me, and it is an all-around good thing.

There has been a recent development.

Laszlo is, as the rescue worker said, an animal person. He loves other dogs and shows a keen interest in  birds and other critters. But the missus and I were taken aback a few weeks ago when he started carrying a stuffed toy around. It is a chickadee, one of those disturbingly life-like stuffed animals one runs across from time to time. Laszlo doesn't use it as a chew-toy. Rather, he treats it as though it's a...

Well, a pet. My dog has a pet.

He sets it down and stares at it lovingly. He cuddles with it, and sometimes rests his head on it. And up until the last couple of days, if the missus or I set a finger on it, he'd take on an entirely out-of-character air of grievance, and take the chickadee away into the yard where we couldn't see it.

But a couple of days ago, when it was time for bed? Laszlo was sitting with the chickadee, and when I approached him, he picked up the toy bird and gazed at me winsomely, then set the bird down and looked away, abashed. He then repeated the gesture. It was as if he was saying, "Please, come on.. Oh, man, I'm sorry, I know it's too much, but... Please?"

So I put the goddamned bird on the bed, and Laszlo spent the first half of the night staring at it in rapture. The next night was the same. And last night, the bird showed up in bed without me.

This is fascinating to me. The suggestion of a much richer, more involved inner life makes a lot of sense to me, but what the hell is going on here? If he was a bitch (rather than a bastard, which is what I think we should call male dogs), I'd be able to tell myself it was a pseudo-puppy. What's really weird is the way it brings out a new emotional spectrum in Laszlo; the damned dog is serious about his bird. My best guess at this point is that he's emulating the relationships he knows, the relationships between the missus and I and Laszlo and Roxxie. I suspect he's decided he wants a pet. If that's the case, the genuine tenderness he shows reflects well on our relationship with him. His desire to keep that relationship independent of his relationship with the other organisms in the house, his growing acceptance of my interactions with his 'friend....'

Let's get this straight. I don't sleep with a stuffed animal.

But I sleep with a dog who does. There is no dignity in life, you know?