My Rule Has Always Been, Write The

What Strange Places Our Lives Can Carry Us To, What Dark Passages.

It Was Possible, He Understood, For A Person's Life To Become Just A Long Series Of Mistakes, And That The End, When It Came, Was Just One More Mistake In A Chain Of Bad Choices. The Thing Was, Most Of These Mistakes Were Actually Borrowed From Other People. You Took Their Bad Ideas, And For Whatever Reason, Made Them Your Own.

One Of The Traps Or The Pitfalls Of Writing A Trilogy - Or A Triptych, Or Whatever Term You Want To Use - Is That The Second Book Can Be A Long Second Act To Get You From Book One To Book Three, Which Borrows All Of Its Energy From The First Book.

There Was Something In The Pages Of These Books That Had The Power To Make Him Feel Better About Things, A Life Raft To Cling To Before The Dark Currents Of Memory Washed Him Downstream Again, And On Brighter Days, He Could Even See Himself Going On This Way For Some Time. A Small But Passable Life. And Then, Of Course, The End Of The World Happened.

It Was What You Did, Wolgast Understood; You Started To Tell A Story About Who You Were, And Soon Enough The Lies Were All You Had And You Became That Person.