What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common.

We have once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create.

I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.

Terror. When you come home and notice everything you own has been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you-you hear it-you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around there’s nothing there.

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

We're news junkies in my house.

What I'd show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that the first impulse will be to laugh. That's all right. Laugh if you must. Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature who can do you damage.