There's Nothing More Embarrassing Than To Have

All Literature, Highbrow Or Low, From The Aeneid Onward, Is Fan Fiction....through Parody And Pastiche, Allusion And Homage, Retelling And Reimagining The Stories That Were Told Before Us And That We Have Come Of Age Loving--amateurs--we Proceed, Seeking Out The Blank Places In The Map That Our Favorite Writers, In Their Greatness And Negligence, Have Left For Us, Hoping To Pass On To Our Own Readers--should We Be Lucky Enough To Find Any--some Of The Pleasure That We Ourselves Have Taken In The Stuff That We Love: To Get In On The Game. All Novels Are Sequels; Influence Is Bliss.

I Might Spend 100 Pages Trying To Get To Know The World I'm Writing About: Its Contours, Who Are My Main Characters, What Are Their Relationships To Each Other, And Just Trying To Get A Sense Of What And Who This Book Is About. Usually Around That Point Of 100 Pages, I Start To Feel Like I'm Lost, I Have Too Much Material, It's Time To Start Making Some Choices. It's Typically At That Point That I Sit Down And Try To Make A Formal Outline And Winnow Out What's Not Working And What I'm Most Interested In, Where The Story Seems To Be Going.

Every Universe, Our Own Included, Begins In Conversation. Every Golem In The History Of The World, From Rabbi Hanina's Delectable Goat To The River-clay Frankenstein Of Rabbi Judah Loew Ben Bezalel, Was Summoned Into Existence Through Language, Through Murmuring, Recital, And Kabbalistic Chitchat -- Was, Literally, Talked Into Life.

Do What You Gotta Do And Stay Fly

All The Preparation In The World Doesn't Avail You If You Can't Make That Imaginative Leap And Put Yourself In The Position Of The Characters You've Created, To Imagine What It's Like To Be Somebody Else.