I get erratic when I’m near the end of my novels. Maybe it’s a normal writerly thing to have happen—I’m not really sure. It astounds me every time that I don’t end up rocking around in a straight jacket, muttering about hummingbirds and shiny daisies. At the end of the day I’m so exhausted. When I’m driving to work, I imagine bedraggled men on the side of the road and wonder about the wilted bouquets that sometimes rest along the guardrail as though to mark the spot somebody died.

I analyze music, and only listen to things that make me think. I have vivid nightmares in which my agent calls to say “Good news, I’ve sold your manuscript for fifty-three cents!” and for some reason my friends and I celebrate this with mimosas at Outback (does outback have mimosas?)

Also, the sound of the vacuum becomes especially irritating. The cats paw at me for food. Stacks of books accumulate on the nightstand and tumble to the floor, get lost in piles of clothes that have needed to be sorted since sometime in 2008. Even during the inaugural address, I was thinking, “Should I incorporate this presidency into the plot? Is there room?” and then, “Would these girls I’m writing about even care about something for which they aren’t old enough to vote?”

And, above all else, I become a terrible, terrible receptionist. My boss is starting to wonder why it’s taken me over a week just to enter some statistics into an Excel document. Starry-eyed, I drive to and from the office while my gas tank pings The Song of the Empty Tank. And there’s a piece of paper, thrice folded, taped to my steering wheel covered in notes. I’ve almost gotten into a few fender benders. I look forward to dead-stopped traffic so I can flick on the overhead light and get some WORK done on the commute. I conjure up memories of how the subway feels, because that’s where my girls are at the moment.

It’s my favorite time about writing a manuscript: drawing to the conclusion, feeling the intensity of a world about to end. It could be today, or tomorrow, or any day this week and the next.

I think I would do it for fifty-three cents if I really had to

(If any publisher is reading, please ignore that last bit).

I’m posting, here, a short story I wrote earlier on this summer. The first line was snagged (with permission) from The First Line, which is an excellent magazine. Every few months they provide a first sentence, and the objective is to write a short story using that first sentence. It’s a really great way to overcome writer’s block, and I had a lot of fun trying my hand at it. I wrote this while I was wrapping up my latest manuscript, because I needed a bit of a breather. I suppose it really says something about how addicted to writing I am that I write one thing to take a break from writing another thing.

Roy owned the only drive-thru funeral business in Maine. Nobody ever said thank you.

As a child, Roy had been very quiet. Soft, his father would say through the yellow-brown film of his cigar in the evening. The boy is soft. It was a word Roy couldn’t hear without the memory of a hacking cough and Perry Como on a scratchy record.

And now, as a man, Roy was still soft. Still quiet. This was something his wife admired. She knitted him scarves, hats with little flaps to keep his ears warm; she filled his thermos with soup and kissed him at the door and told him to be careful out there.

For this, the thick Maine snow was no bother. The occasional blown tire was no bother. When Roy left the warmth of his car he could smell the cold air sneaking into the wool of his scarf and he remembered to be careful. It was all a man could want to have someone in the threshold every evening telling him to be careful.

Sometimes they weren’t dead, not really. Someone would see a lump on the side of the road and make a call to the police, and the police would call him to clean up the mess. Squirrels, mostly, or raccoons that had misjudged the distance of approaching cars. There goes that strange man, that soft man, that quiet man—that’s what the drivers might have said if they slowed down to see Roy with his shovel lifting the hapless animal from the gravel. Instead they sped on, always, and he was only a blur to them. He was as substantial as snow, as passing trees, as a small animal wandering to its death.

Each death was twenty dollars. Each near-death was still twenty dollars—to the state of Maine there was no difference between living and dead on the side of the road. But Roy always knelt to look. A squirrel, a raccoon, someone’s cat, its stomach rising and dropping, its eyes closed like it didn’t know it was still alive at all. A living animal would always rather scramble away, even if only to die in peace.

If they weren’t dead, they died in Roy’s truck, a white ford pickup that lost itself in the snow. Best to stay invisible, Roy knew. People expected roadside animals to disappear, or to have never existed at all. They didn’t care that his wife poured his soup into a thermos, that the sweaters she knit for him smelled like crisp, cold wool, or that she told him to be careful. They paid their taxes and all they asked was for the road to be clear, to be able to go for a walk without having to explain this lifelessness to their child, without having to pull on their dog’s leash to keep it from devouring something with a disease.

And they didn’t care where these animals went. At night, the headlights of Roy’s truck filled their curtains and then retracted, anonymous as any other car. It was a funeral procession as ceremonious as the garbage truck that emptied the metal cans magically by dawn, or the newspapers that appeared in plastic bags on doorsteps.

It was a quiet life, a soft life, to be so simple as a blur in the windows of passing cars. Nobody ever said thank you.

The things that make New York stifling are the same things that make it magical. The city is a core, giant and unavoidable. Even when it’s quiet the energy is overwhelming. I cross the Manhattan Bridge on foot, letting bikers fly downhill to my left, and I’m drowning right out in the open in the white of the sun.

Saturday, I took a daytrip into Manhattan. I crossed the bridge and stopped at its highest point where some boats were sailing off into the ocean in gunshot ribbons of motion. There were plaques telling me who had been to this place before I existed to see it. Strangers asked me to take their picture as a helicopter puttered beyond them and made its way into the moment. Its pilot may end up in a scrapbook that family keeps for years, and he’ll never know.

I find my brain is unavoidable, inescapable. Thoughts come at me and I have to acknowledge them. My group became impatient with me when I stopped walking and fumbled through my purse for a notepad and pen. This is the best way to get ideas, when they come at me like the cars speeding past in the street. It’s like I could see into those cars for a moment. I could see two hands about to touch, or a blur of someone’s bright hair, an instant of riotous laughter. These are my ideas. I see an awestruck girl staring up at a towering building caught in late afternoon sun, lovers trying to stay quiet in a dormatory bed.

I am always chasing thoughts, trying to make sense of these images, sitting down later in the solace of my desk and turning those glimmers, those hands, those images into a story that can be understood by those who have not been in my brain, who have not been dazzled and compelled to stop walking in a New York street to write down a sentence.

This is a long explanation to a question I am frequently asked: Where do you get your ideas?

And this is my honest answer: I don’t know. They pass by me and I grab them. They hit me and I stop to listen. They’re children running ahead of my reach, laughing and dodging down alleyways, luring me. I feel in no way that I’ve created them. Only that I contort them, make them readable. When these pages are read, I want there to be more than words. I want to write a book, and upon opening that book, I want it to swirl around you. I want you to feel that you’re drowning in a city street.