![]() ![]() ![]() Each night, my writing regimen was interrupted because the upstairs tenant spent his moon-drenched hours clomping back and forth on his floor. Was it just luck? Or was something larger looking out for me?Īt one point during the book’s revision process, I was stuck on a particular chapter’s rewrite. The book that almost died in a shaft became a national bestseller. The path to the novel’s soul was revealed. The story fell into place as easy as a knife cuts through butter. I took the pages into my hands, and suddenly it was no longer a spear in my heart. ![]() “I thought you might have thrown it away by mistake.” “I found this at the bottom of the compactor shaft,” he said. The next morning, the building superintendent knocked on my door with my manuscript in his hands, my name typed across the front page. I didn’t know that the week before, based on New York City ordinances, all apartment incinerators had been replaced with trash compactors and our building’s compactor unit had been installed the day before. I felt relieved I could return to my life, go to work, and earn a paycheck. Determined to kill the beast, I took the nearly completed manuscript-the only copy I had-and walked it to the incinerator shaft and dropped it down into the fires. ![]()
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