Letter from 3 a.m.

That's not some sort of metaphor; it's really just after three in the morning. Unless a zoologist came along with one of those hypo guns and darted me like a rhino, I wasn't going to sleep, and I knew it, so I got up to do some writing.

I haven't been terribly content for the last few years, which is no secret, and lately I've been striving to shove my life back on track. At such junctures you ask yourself a lot of questions. And the questions come not just from yourself, but from your demons. At 3 a.m. they're holding court, it's the middle of their working day. My particular demon is a civilized little fellow, overly so, really, like one of those waspish little people in a Noel Coward play whose role in life is to belittle their dearest friends. My demon fixes me with a sarcastic little sidelong grin, runs a thumb along his lower lip, and asks me what I ought to have done, and exactly what I think I'm going to do now.

An old, familiar question, and one I'm coming to know the answer to more and more. So I ignored the demon for a while, and just mused. I thought of a novel I'm working on, about a family of old stock in a county very much like the one I've lived in all my life. Their roots go back centuries. And like most of these families, their ancestral home is made of stone culled from the fields. I thought of one of my characters musing on that stone, running a hand over it, thinking how it shed the snows of three hundred winters and the soft afternoon rains of three hundred summers. But porous, too, the stone—it somehow absorbed the life lived around it. People went in and out of the house every day for all those years, old people and babies, adolescents and the middle-aged. Some days glad, others sorrowing. They would go to a funeral, and come home, and their shoes would sound on the floorboards, and they would think about how the person buried would never be in the house again.

There would have been parties, with people laughing and drinking on the lawn, surely. Young couples by the wall, talking to each other, fascinated with the magic of their attraction. And middle-aged couples, too, smiling at each other, and a young girl wondering if her beau would smile at her that way, decades from this warm summer night.

The solidity of stone, and the evanescence of human life, somehow interfused over the centuries. I got to thinking about that, at 3 a.m., and wanted to jot down some notes about it. Now I have. And as to your questions, demon, I have an answer. What should I have done? I should have compromised less, over the years. I was wrong to split the difference, to try to give the world what I thought it wanted. I was wrong to be a reporter, to write magazine articles about trends in lawn furniture, to write and edit in a way that furthered the goals of international nonprofit associations and so forth. I should have been a damn writer, demon. What will I do? I'll be a damn writer. I'll write the most beautiful things I can think of. I'll give it my all, while I still can, win or lose.

See, even with civilized demons, you can't fight on their terms. You put a thumb right in their damned eye and let them shriek. Then you wipe your thumb on your pants and dust yourself off generally. I should have been a writer, you sorry-ass little shrieking pathetic demon. And from now on, that's what I'll be, if you really want to know. It's 3:58 a.m., and I have to get some sleep. If you have demons of your own, I recommend a thumb in the eye. Wipes the smirk right off their faces, I assure you.