Somehow they got mixed up in my mind and spat as a poem. In this case, I was sitting at my desk on a spring day, watching the clouds thicken and the wind stir the trees outside my window. A sudden glimpse of blue sky seemed very incongruous. Rain often rouses a visceral feeling that seems to be part anticipation, part awareness of some ancestral memory, and part sleepiness. Rain is a strong force to me, probably because I experienced Kenya's rainy seasons when young.
Time management is critical and stress a constant companion.
I wrote A Girl and Her Dog over a weekend when ideas for the novel weren't flowing. Rather than stare at a blank screen and drink beer, I blasted the short story out as an exercise in dialogue. My girfriend never read it. There was a summer, back in 1973, when I sat in the window and watched the fans on the roof of the cafeteria all night. She sat there beside me, and we didn't say a word the entire time.