I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
— Flannery O’Connor
At two o’clock in the afternoon on March 18, 1998, while typing up a story on a snowy gray day in Room 8 of the Sunset Motel in Hays, Kansas, I heard the crackle of tires in fresh snow out front. I had recently quit the radio-antenna factory, having saved enough to write for three months before I would have to go back. Though I was forty-two and had given up woman, dog, and comfy job for this writing “career,” my life was not taking any significant shape. If I’d been earmarked for success, I believed, it should’ve happened long ago.
