I Begin By Assembling Notes On Characters.

America Was Never Innocent. We Popped Our Cherry On The Boat Over And Looked Back With No Regrets. You Can't Ascribe Our Fall From Grace To Any Single Event Or Set Of Circumstances. You Can't Lose What You Lacked At Conception.

L.a. Ispolluted. It's Overpopulated. But It Is Very Much Home. It Was Inevitable For Me, The Moving Back. I Was Living In San Francisco, And Joan Broke It Off With Me, And I Needed A Place To Live. I'd Been Divorced. And I Needed To Write Movies And Tv Shows To Earn A Living. Alimony. All That. So I Figured What The Hell, I'll Go Back To L.a.

I'm Trying To Be Less Bombastic. I Love My Books. I Think I've Done Things Nobody Else Has Done.

As A Kid, I Sensed History Going On All Around Me, But The Basic Thrust Of It Didn't Move Me.

History Is A State Of Yearning. I Yearn For Kay Lake Throughout This Entire Thing. There's An Essay I've Written Where I Talked About Living In The Past. There's A Whole Motif In The Book Of Then And Now. And I Lived There.