Friday's A Free Day. A Woman's Day.

Richard Began To Understand Darkness: Darkness As Something Solid And Real, So Much More Than A Simple Absence Of Light. He Felt It Touch His Skin, Questing, Moving, Exploring: Gliding Through His Mind. It Slipped Into His Lungs, Behind His Eyes, Into His Mouth.

When I Was A Kid And A Young Man I Read Everything. When I Was About 23, I Was Incredibly Lucky In That I Wound Up With Several Book Review Columns, Which Meant That I Had To Read Huge Amounts Of Stuff That Was Outside My Experience And Outside My Comfort Zone. I Think Every Young Writer Should Be Forced To Read The Kind Of Stuff They Would Not Normally Read For Pleasure.

Note For Americans And Other Aliens: Milton Keynes Is A New City Approximately Halfway Between London And Birmingham. It Was Built To Be Modern, Efficient, Healthy, And, All In All, A Pleasant Place To Live. Many Britons Find This Amusing.

There Are Some Dogs Which, When You Meet Them, Remind You That, Despite Thousands Of Years Of Manmade Evolution, Every Dog Is Still Only Two Meals Away From Being A Wolf.

You Wouldn't Die In Here, Nothing Ever Dies In Here, But If You Stayed Here For Too Long, After A While Just A Little Of You Would Exist Everywhere, All Spread Out. And That's Not A Good Thing. Never Enough Of You All Together In One Place, So T Here Wouldn't Be Anything Left That Would Think Of Itself As An 'i.' No Point Of View Any Longer, Because You'd Be An Infinite Sequence Of Views And Of Points.