“There's this thing that writers talk about--where the characters take on a life of their own and they run away with the story, taking it off to places the author never intended to go. That's what happened here.

Except, that's not what really happens. That's one of the stories that writers tell about storytelling.

What really happened was that I sat and wrote and had a conversation with myself--a conversation that wasn't possible, unless I let part of myself pretend it was someone else--a disembodied voice in the typewriter. And so I typed. I typed everything I felt and feared and worried about, everything I thought I knew, and everything else as well, the much larger domain of what I didn't know and didn't know how to figure out.

Because this, at last, was a place where I could talk to somebody about it all--and if that somebody was really me, that was okay too, because I was the guy who had to figure it out anyway. So I had all these conversations with myself--and these different parts of me talked into the keyboard. And talked and talked and talked.”