I feel like I’ve lost my vocabulary. I can’t remember words. I have a glimmer of an idea of the word I’m looking for, and I search frantically through the thesaurus trying to jar my memory. I’m shocked at how many words I’ve come across in my casual reading that I don’t recognize. Granted, my casual reading frequently includes some of the most verbose authors in the English language, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

I wrote a query letter to a Canadian publisher yesterday and took the opportunity to revise my summary of the book. I found myself making things up that I haven’t written, that aren’t in the book, at least not yet. This always happens, every time I try to explain the book to somebody, I end up making up things that I later go back and put into the book.

Perhaps they are acquaintances. They’re people you see on the street and don’t want to talk to, but they talk to you, and you come away a little fascinated. They’re people you work with and once in a while lunch with, but you know they are hiding something from you. They sometimes tell you creepy things about themselves that you didn’t really want to know.

The fictional characters I’ve invented over the years, particularly ones in “the book,” are like strange shadows that I see in a moment of near hallucination from alcohol or lack of sleep. Then in more manic moments, after too much coffee, I start to think I understand something about them. I have visions of them when I shower or when I am drifting off to sleep. They are more than complex puppets, although they are that also.

Perhaps one goal of the story is to combine these ephemera in such a way as to create the illusion of some kind of whole.

Every hero is a villain and vice versa. This phrase popped into my head randomly last night. I think it probably would not stand up to strict scrutiny, but it speaks to the complexity I think modern literary audiences should expect from a strong literary character. Certainly if you look at anyone in a position of great power in the real world, from presidents to dictators to policemen to rich business men, they are seen as heroes by some and villains by others.

About three years ago, I happened across an obituary article in the Gainesville Sun. The girl who died was in her early 20s, a music student. She lived in a neighborhood close to where I lived and within a block of where my aunt Melissa lives. Her only surviving family members were three brothers and a mother who all lived in Italy. There was no indication of how she died, and so I thought it was fairly likely that it was a suicide.

The article included a picture, which showed her as a very pretty young lady with dark cropped hair. She had the cow-eyed tragedy of an Isabella Rosellini about her. I recall that I showed the article to E, with whom I was living at the time. E reached out and touched the picture as if to stroke the girl’s cheek and said, “Life is such a mystery.”

I was struck by the fact that this tragedy, whatever its details, struck someone I didn’t know, but that I could have easily met her at some point either through some musical event, or just walking down the street. Furthermore, I felt as if I wished I’d known her, and the fact that I hadn’t known her added to the tragic sense.