Excision

I quote Don Paterson at length: "Sleeping with your own muse is an unpardonable breach of literary protocol. But to sleep with a friend's, and tell him about it, is to do him the greatest favor as an artist. I would think."

This aphorism is an origami crane made from the revelatory page of a psychological thriller. Everything you need is there. Except the superstructure of realia to convince the reader of the plot actually occurring in a specific time and place. I love that excision. Millions do not.

I am a cultural abstainer. I am outside every culture I visit, even the one I was born in. But I feel at home everywhere.

If men do not like my brain, I do not have sufficiently alluring physical attributes to make them look twice. At twenty, this felt criminally unfair. At my present age, it's finally begun to seem like money in the bank.

Everything I write is both true and unbelievable, has happened and sounds implausible.

Visited my son's high school and relived that niche horror: being saddled at fifteen with the thighs of forty-two.

I chatter on about my introversion. I brood about how no one listens to me. Who came up with this fiction that our character is fixed?