It Had Occurred To Him That If

There Is Your Car And The Open Road, The Fabled Lure Of Random Adventure. You Stand At The Verge, And You Could Become Anything.

I Knew I Wanted To Play Around With Genre-esque Imagery, And The Identity Theft Stuff Came In The Middle, When I Was Figuring Out How The Characters Were Connected To Those Images.

It Doesn't Matter What You Do. In The End, You Are Going To Be Judged, And All The Times That You're Not At Your Most Dignified Are The Ones That Will Be Recalled In All Their Vivid, Heartbreaking Detail. And Then Of Course These Things Will Be Distorted And Exaggerated And Replayed Over And Over, Until Eventually They Turn Into The Essence Of You: Your Cartoon.

It's Not Like It Ruined My Life, I Was Going To Say, But Then I Didn't. Because It Occurred To Me That Maybe It Had Ruined My Life, In A Kind Of Quiet Way--a Little Lie, Probably Not So Vital, Insidiously Separating Me From Everyone I Loved.

A Novel Requires A Certain Kind Of World Building And Also A Certain Kind Of Closure, Ultimately. Whereas With A Short Story You Have This Sense That There Are Hinges That The Reader Doesn't See. I Would Say That All Short Stories Have Mystery Naturally Built Into Them.