The bottom half of the page had descended into a doodle of a tiny man giving the middle finger to a giant, angry eagle with razor-sharp talons. Beneath it, the caption: To Mock a Killing Bird.

I decided that it was more important to laugh than to eat.

I feel like the luckiest guy on the planet. But, I literally work all day, every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and that's not an exaggeration.

But there are others of my kind...those who see themselves as lions among sheep. As kings--superior to man in every way. Why, then, should they be confined to darkness? Why should they fear man?

Your quarrel is with God. I merely wish to offer Him the opportunity to judge you.

It was a sort of peace I have rarely enjoyed since. As if we were the only two souls on earth—all of nature ours to enjoy. I wondered why a creator who had dreamt such beauty would have slandered it with such evil. Such grief. Why He had not been content to leave it unspoilt. I still wonder.

I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.