That's a major plot point in Get Shorty: the gambler who misses his plane, watches it crash on takeoff, and tries to use that as a way to get out of the clutches of the mob boss he's in debt to.

Writer's brain is a scary, cynical place.

I heard that report this morning, and I thought the same thing. Great minds...

I occasionally have moral crises that while other people are going, "Oh, the poor families," I'm going, "I can use that."

I occasionally have moral crises that while other people are going, "Oh, the poor families," I'm going, "I can use that."

That's not a moral crisis. It's just writers' mind at work. I don't think I've ever met a writer who didn't react that way, even as we may be condemning ourselves for being heartless.

I caught myself taking mental notes at my own father's funeral on how various relatives were reacting, but I figured Daddy wouldn't have minded. He'd have been snarking right next to me, if he could have seeni t.

Mine usually kicks in after whatever the event is, rather than during; all I remember during my mother's actual funeral in New York in mid-February was how fucking COLD it was (wind chill factor made it just below zero). But afterwards, things began coming clearer, in a very writery poetic sense: how hard the ground had been, the way there was almost an echo underfoot and was that due to the frozen earth itself, or to the catacomb effect of all those holes in the ground, and the colour of the sky, all compact of how I define winter.

For me, it's more as if the event is for absorption and the aftermath is for effective channeling.

as if the event is for absorption

I call it "recorder mode", when I'm not so much thinking but simply sucking in all the sensory information possible. I did that a lot on my first trip to New York, where I'd stand on corners and just ... absorb.

Yep. Sometimes I can do both - if the situation is less personal and less emotional and more purely visceral, I can absorb and record at the same time. Somewhere in this house there should be a notebook containing seventeen handwritten pages, the sensory basis for the second half of And Then Put Out The Light. There are freeform nonstop do not pause for breath notes on everything from the polyglot chatter going on around me to the stones-not-sand freel of the beach to the way the light moved on both the Med to the south and the hills to the northeast.

Mostly, though, it's a two step process, at least. Absorb, then channel.

It can take me a long time to write about stuff, if it is painful or confusing stuff.

Dear god, this one is hard to write.

A Memory, Returning After Thirty Years

The first drop was almost invisible.

Had I known it was there, had I looked at it closely, the survival instinct that runs bone-deep in all of us would have told me that something was very wrong. This blood was the wrong texture; spongy, diluted. Just a drop, so small, so very small.

Another drop of blood, wrongly textured, edging out over the elastic of one silk panty leg. A sudden cramp, a thin streaming flood. Panicked, I reached for the phone.

I hadn't known I was pregnant. I hadn't known there was something, blood, anything at all, to lose.