Take one, and you cannot take the other. But neither path is safe. Which way would you walk — the way of hard truths or the way of fine lies?

Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.

It is neither fair nor unfair, Nobody Owens. It simply is

I toyed briefly with an image someone once mentioned to me, of a village in the shadow of a twin-peaked mountain. In the morning the sun rises. At lunch it sets behind the mountain. In the early afternoon it rises once more. The cocks crow for the second time, and later the sun sets again. No. One peak. Metaphors should not be belaboured.

There are a number of paths that lead to this place. I have been avoiding them for some small time, now.

A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people's heads. Books are good that way.

I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who I was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn't me, and I knew it wasn't, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what was me? And what was watching?