It wasn’t long before more than a few of my ideas turned into manuscripts, partial and whole drafts of novels that I shared with my agent, with Sally Treadwell. Dear Reader, there isn’t time to share more than a few of them with you. Life is short, and I have only so many of these composition notebooks left to fill before mine comes to its brutish, inevitable end. And for sure you have better things to do than read about a failed novelist’s failures, which is why you may want to skip the next page or two, where I’ll touch upon them ever so briefly, just enough to give you a sampling, as it were. By all means, skip the rest of this page — and the one after it. After all, why should you care whether or not the next manuscript I shared with Sally Treadwell was called “The Sidewalk Artist,” or
