Author vs. Writer

For as long as you've given any thought to such distinctions, you've preferred the term writer to the use of author.  Perhaps the reasoning began in the early sense that authors have published things and you'd not published much worth thinking about.  But you'd written any number of things you believed worth continued thinking about.

Author seemed somehow pretentious, even though you had no qualms about discussing authors you admired or had polar feelings about.  You even added to your amicus brief for writer the observation that write stands as a verb while if one were to use author as a verb it would need the equivalent of crutches to support it.  Even then, author as a verb would still sound pretentious.

Even after you'd had more things published and were on your way as well to acquiring hands-on editorial techniques, moving toward becoming what is called a shirt-sleeves editor, you found more comfort in thinking of yourself as someone who writes in the present, wrote in the past, and had written in the completed past act.

Not until you began compiling a sense of vision about ways in which the narrative techniques for telling stories had evolved, from the distant past, from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, did you feel the need to define terms, conditions, and the evolutionary process to yourself in order to bring the weight of confident voice to what you write.  

When you began assembling and relating terms, then recognizing you were going to put them together in a book, some critics told you you were crazy; such definitions were available in such common places as dictionaries, Wikipedia, and studies in critical theory.

Your answer to these critics was to wonder where you could find your definitions of composition building blocks.  Why of course, in dictionaries, Wikipedia, Google, and studies in critical theory.  In such places, you'd find the definitions you'd absorbed from the literature culture in which you were schooled, in the books you'd read, and in all the unchecked sources you'd not yet found time to explore and decode, for some of these were indeed in a code every bit as enigmatic to you as the languages of the First American Code Talkers must have been to our World War II foes in the Axis.

The lesson to be learned was forming your own language, in effect identifying as many tools as you could find in your archaeological, anthropological, and historical searches, then writing your own instruction guide.  You are well on your way of doing so, to the point where you can recognize your own voice in the clamor of ideas and materials sweeping through your head, over and beyond the conventional and editorial equivalents of leaf blowers, scattering the detritus from your intended events, their meanings, and their consequences.

Author, as you see that individual, is the person who has assembled a crew of distinct personalities, driven by inner and conventional goals to achieve some result which will upset some stasis, cause possible reverberations, and invite consequences.

Almost from the get go, authors have strolled forth into the readers' midst, making observations, encouraging, explaining, using his or her storytelling persona to direct us toward a conclusion that seems plausible and at the same time whets our appetite for more story.

Early readers, having no experience with novels or short stories, believed they were getting true accounts of real persons who had experienced the trials and tribulations of abandonment, shipwreck, orphanhood, and broken romantic promises.Some readers felt betrayed or deceived; they resolved to be more careful about believing things in the future.

Authors used various devices to entice readers to believe, paving the way for one of the great, if somewhat overblown critic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to define for himself, and then for all of us to follow the concept where the reader willingly suspends disbelief, and what that great humbug, Donald Rumsfeld, wrapped in his tailor-made fitting of the American flag, called plausible deniability.

Over the years, you've watched the process of evolution in the way authors have moved from telling a story to showing it, to presenting it.  Now, just as you are becoming aware of the author, seeing him or her for what the author was, has become, and is even now evolving toward, you are going to have to make some more decisions about Author vs. Writer.

Boundary Line

The concept of a boundary has within it a fine set of standards for individuals who try to live in observation of the Social Contract.  Such individuals tend to a kind of politeness, consideration,  and regard for others that can, if left unchecked, lead to empathy and compassion.

Thus, the beginnings of your approach to defining boundary and, by doing so, defining yourself and, even in the face of frequent, maddening, frustrating causes for pessimism, your own glass-half-full vision of the human condition.

Boundaries contain those standards for writers, particularly for those at the onset of their careers.  But rules change as ability changes.  Increases in ability inform different ways of looking at boundaries.  Although this progression may suggest a certain underlying cynicism, your intent is to argue for the growing complexities of social conventions becoming apt landscape for a writer's investigations.  

You note within your own personal history a time when you were wholehearted in your embrace of idealism.  As you aged, you did in fact begin to regard idealism with cynicism in direct proportion to your recognition of ways in which idealism for its own sake rarely had a firm foundation.  

Idealism required, you felt, enough awareness of process and technique to allow setting boundaries for the sake of a work or issue at hand rather than the abstraction of Platonic ideal.  You have over the years accommodated for democratic principles or more pragmatic, self-serving ones.  You have as well set and observed boundaries based on experience and principle-related standards.

In general terms, a boundary line separates one territory from another, in the process defining different personalities, terms, conditions.  Boundaries may well be used to set property lines on standards or behavior--even both, in the process becoming ways of defining individuals.  This last process is where the writer's relationship with boundary begins, then acquires momentum.

Of the many boundaries readers are acquainted with, the most basic is the "with us or against us" demarcation.  A strand of stories carry the reader, via protagonist characters, into the landscape where the gauntlet of choice is flung with some deliberation.  "You're either with us, or--"  Now the character has to chose, often appears to pick the least healthy option, then suffers the consequences of dealing with the outcome.  

Your favorite author wrote with typical self-deprecation about the choice of becoming a military associate of The Confederate States of America.  This condition did not last long, and from it, you like to think, seeds were sewn for what would become his most honest and probing piece of fiction, Huckleberry Finn.

Twain did, indeed, come to the terms of which you speak about boundaries in that remarkable novel.  He caused at least one of his front-rank characters to step over his self-imposed boundary for one of the most memorable moments of all in that novel so filled with memorable moments.  "All right then"  Huck said, speaking ever so much more to himself than to us, "I'll go to hell."  He was in the act of a major life change at that moment of speaking.

To be successful, a story needs to provide either tangible evidence or strong implication of the internal codes and boundaries of its major players.  To be believable, the issues and pressures within the story must drive the characters to the boundary of their internal landscape, and do so while giving the reader the impression that being on the verge has raised a considerable sweat within the character's internal workings.

So far, so good; we've got successful and we've got believable.  Now, we go for the throat.  To be memorable, the story must have within it the momentum and acceleration to push those characters over their boundary, into the expanse on the other side, the no-person's land of conscience and consequence.

The story becomes a record of what those characters do, having trespassed.  We know what Macbeth did.  We know what Michael Henchard did; he became the eponymous Mayor of Casterbridge. We know what Bathsheba Everdine did in Thomas Hardy's earlier novel, Far from the Madding Crowd.  Come to think of it, Hardy had a way of pushing his people over some edge or another.  We know also what Michael Corleone did in The Godfather, and we know what Antigone did way back when, in a story named after her.

Being pushed over the edge or beyond one's set boundary does not always result in negativity, but it does help illustrate a common humanity that has been with us as long as there has been story.

How Could You Not Remember Your Own Story?

When you listen to an admired writer being interviewed, particularly on the longer NPR or cable news segments, where there is room for some depth, you feel a pang of envy at the way the author seems to be so familiar with the text, almost on a scene-by-scene basis.

Your first thought emerges as a frisson of disquiet. So, this is part of what it takes to be a writer.  You not only articulate the concepts, you in effect become them, make them a part of your consciousness. 

You could see the possibility for you being that able to recall a specific line or moment from a short story.  But a novel seems daunting, perhaps impossible.  Anything of book length seems beyond your hope of recall, like rummaging about in a drawer for a sock of matching color.

But actors do something similar all the time, don't they?  Actors have access to the entire arc of story in which they appear as a character.  And, didn't you hear from more than one source that some actors, Daniel Day-Lewis, for one, stay in character the entire time a work is being filmed?

That's somewhat better, isn't it?  In addition, actors rehearse, run lines.  Actors are also able to conflate action with their lines, and the added sense of blocking, the sense of knowing where they are to be in every moment of a given scene.

With that assurance closer to hand, you don't feel so daunted when an interviewer asks a writer about a particular scene or even a memorable exchange of dialogue.  Perhaps there's a connection somewhere between the actor and the writer.

Of course, there's a connection.  The writer has to keep up with the entire script, the entire ensemble of front-rank characters, subsidiaries, and walk-ons who come delivering pizzas, bad news, eviction notices, and summonses to appear in courtroom proceedings.  At some point, all these individuals spring from the psyche of the writer, places where there are bright, overhead lights, casting motive and awareness in clear light, but also the equivalents of a wall sconce with a guttering candle, providing flickering shadows.

The connection becomes clearer as the image grows.  You often lose track of how many actual drafts you write before saying the work is all down in captured keystrokes or handwritten pages. Time now to get a completed draft you will then subject to your own laundry list for revision, which begins appropriately enough by asking you, the creator, if you've gone through the entire manuscript to determine where the action meets your criteria for a proper beginning.

You know what a proper beginning is, how it resonates intrigue because of the way it sets characters into immediate motion.  The action may already have begun before the curtain rises or page one of the text appears.  This means the audience/reader sees interesting, quirky individuals in the act of doing something intriguing, something the reader wishes to understand.  But the characters are too busy being caught up in the story to stop the action now to explain,either in dialogue or interior monologue.

The next item on your list is to discover where the story ends.  This is a direct challenge to you as creator; are you trying to explain what the characters have already conveyed through their own words and actions?  Do you trust the reader to get the sense of ending from the clues you've provided?  Perhaps you need to go back, scene by scene, to the beginning, looking for places where a slight hint or implication might help or, conversely, ought to be removed because you were caught red-handed, trying to toss some hints to the reader.

Your checklist has at least a dozen other aspects to be examined, such as dialogue, length of scenes, duplication of scenes, duplication of characters, choices relative to point of view.  Make that a focused search or revisit of the entire text with that one aspect in mind.

Before you know it, you've lost any hope of counting the number of times you've looked at each sentence in each scene, wondering if a scene earned its keep or needed some ballast.  Let's be realistic:  you've been through the manuscript twenty or twenty-five times, minimum.  Then your literary agent sees it, may have suggestions.

Now the work goes off to one or more editors, one of whom says she wants the project, but only after certain issues and elements are addressed.  Once again, you return to the text, which has already changed measurably since you began.

With luck, that's all for the time being--until the time for proofing arrives.  A work in type looks different, more vulnerable in type than in manuscript form.  Since you're already undertaking a review for misspelling or punctuation issues, we can add yet another run through, another equivalent of a dress rehearsal for a stage play or the shooting of a scene for film.

Months pass.  Now, ARCs, advance reading copies, have been sent for review.  In this crowded world with thousands of new publications appearing each week, you consider yourself fortunate to be given any kind of review at all, much less one with the potential of a five- or ten- or perhaps even fifteen-minute interview on a local NPR station.

The interview, a nice young person--nice because she or he appears to have actually read your book--asks you about the symbolism in the opening of chapter three or the satiric intent in the portrayal of Character X.

You listen to the question, then gulp, the first word coming to mind is some inchoate er or um, which you are poised to deliver in an apologetic manner.  After all, it's been months now that you've been away from this project, perhaps even engaged in a new one.

But something remarkable happens.  The inchoate er or um are quite unnecessary.  You are on autopilot as your writer self spins off focused, articulate sentences, all of which are quite relevant.  

You are only surprised at the result for a moment, but soon, quite soon, other sentences come.  You settle into them and you can tell from the expression on the interviewer's face that your responses are carrying your intent forward in graceful conversation.

Squirrels, Pebbles on Tombstones, and Massive Notes for Stories

 As you recall the matter from conversations long past, one of your oldest and closest friends was born into a Church of England family who did not spend much time among the Sunday communicants or, for that matter, the communicants of any day.  

If anything at all, your pal had an affinity for the culture into which you were born, seemed drawn to many from that culture, but in the overall arc of his life seemed to get on with those from all cultures.  You know for certain his sponsor in AA was a Navajo whom he suspected of certain shamanic leanings.

One tradition from your culture, among others, is to place a small pebble at the burial site of a departed friend or relative.  You do not know if your friend was buried or interred at all, rather than being cremated, ashes strewn or otherwise kept.  In the spirit of leaving a pebble on the closest analogy for a tombstone as you could find, you stopped by his Facebook page today, the day of his birth, to leave a pebble.  

"Old pal,"  you said.  No surprise to see dozens of individuals, stopping by to leave their pebbles, some a good deal more overt in sentimentality and a good deal longer in terms of expression.  Your friend had that effect on people.  

One such person, a former student of his, told you, when she came to study where you taught, how he'd had an indelible effect on her life, her career choice, and the discovery of her writing voice.  Yet another student of his, sent to study with you, said more or less the same thing.

While he was on his deathbed, you promised him to finish a project you'd begun together, developing on his visits to you or your to him.  The work began as casual conversation over a favored meal, pasta with clams.  He dropped his fork, clutched your arm.  "Wait.  What did you just say?"

You said you wondered if there were such a thing as a dramatic genome.

"That's it,"  he said.  "That's our book.  Of course there's a dramatic genome.  Of course that's the title.  Of course we're going to identify it, then show those willing to take the trip how to locate and use it."

This first day after you have come upon a three-week stretch with no classes, you turn to the task of getting your notes in order, compressing and filing separate ideas and concepts in convenient storage for a less scattered access.  Among other things today, you turned to the Dramatic Genome notes in order to hear your friend's voice, spend a few moments of reminiscence with his towering and probing intelligence.

On a scale of one-to-ten with one being lowest, you'd rank yourself at most a 2.5 towards being a hypochondriac, and even that ranking an exaggeration of intensity.  Nevertheless, these past few years, when some symptom comes your way, carrying a warning that it will be visiting a few days rather than a simple early-to-bed and sleeping in the next day, you greet it with the warning that you have no time for it to be serious, much less fatal.  Too much to get done.

Your hope for such matters is the hope of always more to get done than you can possibly manage. Thus yesterday's mild wooziness that came about between about twelve thirty and four were greeted with the offer on your part to take a nap and a quick shower before your five o'clock class, but no more.  "Do not even think," you warned, "of cutting into the three-week gap between classes."

The strategy worked.  At about six o'clock last night, you were aware of interacting with students well past the assigned time for them to begin reading their work, no slight residue of the wooziness to be felt.  Earlier in the week, an acquaintance had retired from a reported wooziness that sounded similar.  Tomorrow, you'll compare symptoms before returning home from Friday coffee to continue transcribing notes, alert to where your enthusiasm takes you.

From this great friend of yours, you got the habit of storing notes the way the squirrels where you used to live stored away the peanuts you bought for them at the pet supply shop.  At first, the feeding of the squirrels was a simple, straightforward delight.  You were sharing with a delightful tribe of your neighbors, often taking morning or afternoon coffee near the trees where they lived, watching, enjoying their ventures at life.  Then the pleasure of feeding them increased as you realized your landlord's mean-spirited attitudes toward them and his imagined litany of the consequences of feeding them.

Tomorrow, after coffee, your plan is to stop at the pet supply for some bird seed and peanuts, then sit in the patio, transcribing notes.  There are ideas to visit, half-formed characters, concepts for stories, new blends of coffee to brew up.  What better atmosphere than your own patio, among the chatter of birds, squirrels, and ideas?

Hello? Anybody Home?

During the many years when you commuted from Santa Barbara to the university in Los Angeles, sometimes twice a week,Books on Tape or Disc presented you an excellent distraction from the sameness and traffic of a near two-hour trip.

Moat days, the trip south meant you listened to half a particular title, the remainder to be experienced on the way home.  Factor in a dinner at one of the LA restaurants for which SB had no equivalent, say The Tasty Q on Hoover, The Pupuseria Elegante on Figueroa, or one of the Korean restaurants in Koreatown, where they would refuse to serve you certain dishes in the reasonable belief that they were too spicy for you.  Then, rush hour traffic dissipated, northward along the PCH, ears tuned for the second half of the novel.

This was good news and bad news.  Good news because you were able to put the commute time to some use beyond introspection and being alert to the road.  Good news because you tend to retain material you've heard to a slightly higher degree than were you to have read it.  

Bad news because you were beginning to realize your commutes in either direction were punctuated with a sense of departure, the ingestion of half a narrative, then the arrival at a destination, either Gate Three, University of Southern California, whereupon to your class room, or arrival at 1367-B Danielson Road, or, later, 652 Hot Springs Road, each in the same zip code of Santa Barbara.

The bad news came to you in slow increments, the primary one being the realization that the driver of a vehicle ought to be in the immediate present rather than in some abstract, muscle memory state where the probabilities were nevertheless high for you to respond to immediate emergency or variation.  To be even more blunt about the matter, a driver is supposed to be alert, aware, poised to immediate response for any contingency.

You were relying on muscle memory, grooving on a novel or historical account, arriving at school or home anything but bored or lulled from the near two-hour commute.  In other words, you were frequently unaware of your physical surroundings.  

The dynamic was similar to your days of running upward of five miles a day, prone to the same kind of interior focus as when you drove while listening to Books on Tape.  As a runner, you'd had at least two experiences of running into parked cars, once into a chair link fence, and in one notable event, into a single strand go chain draped between two posts as a means of preventing cars from driving into and along what was intended to be a pedestrian walk way.

Such nondrying events were fun to talk about at the time, but as the distance from them grew and the association with such moments of being absorbed seemed to conflate with your commuting to Los Angeles, the humor devolved to one of the true sources of humor, fear.

The effect of your behavior when reading, writing, or editing is to merge with the medium you've chosen to place before your attention, thus you are to whatever degree possible merging with the performance, the book you are reading, the material you are trying to compose, the manuscript you are attempting to engage as though you were its author.

This focus has been acquired over time.  Although you have frequent experiences of seeing three- and four-hour chunks of time sucked into the quicksand of work, you still have moments where you are uncomfortable in your awareness of the passage of time, seemingly on a minute-by-minute basis.  This means you still have to work at concentration and focus to the same degree you have to work at narrative, of dialogue, of scenes in particular, and then, when you have a notion for a scene, where it begins, and how it ends.

You've entered the anteroom of a time warp.  With each entry and each new project, to read, write, edit, or teach, you have to learn once again how to find that place of concentration without which nothing has traction.

The Laboratory Mouse as Character in a Novel

 For as long as you can remember, you've held the common house mouse in the highest esteem, a fondness that grew upon your discovery that your mother was, as she put it, "Not the species most ardent advocate."  In greater fact, the appearance of a mouse caused her at least a shiver of fright.  You understood in later years how the appearance of a mouse in your mother's house translated somehow as a negative report on her housekeeping skills.

This last aspect was a carryover from the fact of your father sweeping a young Jewish princess off her feet and into early marriage well before she, your mother, learned kitchen skills.  In the equation, your paternal grandmother, a superb cook and, for some time, the single-handed source of raising her brood, variously as a bootlegger, saloon manager, and pastry chef.  In the simplest of terms, your mother considered any mouse a likely presence to be reported to Grandma Lizzie.

In consequence, several times during the arc of your mischievous little boyhood, your mother discouraged you from strategies involving the enticement of one or more mice to linger in your presence.  This of course made the mouse--any mouse--seem all the more desirable as a pet.

Matters remained at that stage of detente until after you were married and your wife had other ideas about rats and mice as pets.  But you remained, mousse and fond, not giving the matter much thought until you became the acquisition editor of a book, The Cholesterol Controversy, 

by an M.D. author with whom you got along quite well, to the point where, during one of your many conversations tangential to the editing matters, Dr. Pinckney introduced you to the concept of what he called the stress mouse.

Since that conversation and subsequent reading on your part, the stress mouse was given its release from being a laboratory mouse, used for medical and biological research, and into your imagination as an excellent metaphor for any given character in any given story.  The laboratory or stress mouse, a close relative of the house mouse, is raised to be used as an actual participant or a statistical presence in some double-bind checking procedure.  

Because of its close parallels to the human genome, the lab mouse can become the medium for observation or experimentation.  You could not resist the temptation to label the laboratory mouse as the guinea pig for psychological, physiological, pharmaceutical, and other forms of observation to see how much, how little, or if at all a human might respond to the equivalent stress put upon him or her.

To your knowledge, and thanks to Dr. Pinckney, there are waltzing mice, who walk in circles due to mutations with adverse effects on their inner ears, so-called Murphy Roths mice, with even more accelerated reproductive properties than the standard mouse's fifty-day cycle; oncomice, who are more likely to get cancer than non-oncomice; and immunodeficient so-called rude mice, lacking hair and thymus, not to forget the Doogie mouse, which is even brighter at solving problems than your average laboratory mouse, which you might well have suspected, is already of considerable brightness.

In a real sense, you could argue how laboratory mice were participants in most of the significant scientific discoveries of our times, a fact bound to disturb many animal rights activists who are not satisfied to learn that laboratory mice are well fed, have drinking water and clean sanitary facilities available, and are not crowded into circumstances similar to those animals being raised for food.

You cited only a few of the possible permutations available in laboratory mice, some of them having their particular "stress" arranged by genetic splice before they were born.  Thus they come forth with their stress already in place.  The list of possible stresses for characters is infinite, and in the bargain,not all of them by any means are free from worry about where their next meal will come from or what kind of roof they will have over their head.  Sometimes, in your imagination, you visualize a facility for stress mice who have served their purpose and are now free to live out the remainder of their life span of about two years.  

Compared to the estimated four-month life span of a mouse in the wild, two years seems a luxury, even given the fact of the mouse taking on the particular stress for which it is employed.  Even writing about such behavior reeks to you of experiments and agendas pursued by the National Socialist Party during World War II.  Comparing such behavior to the three- or four-month life span in the wild does not make the life of the laboratory mouse seem comfortable, and so you attempt to use grim humor to cover the concept.  

In this grim humor mode, you liken the retired stress mice as the elderly retired you sometimes see here in Santa Barbara, perhaps at lawn bowls or cards or comparing the fortunes of their grandchildren as a way of advancing their own status over that of another.  "My grandson walked circles all the time,"  "Ah, but my grandson was genetically modified to be smarter.  He was always escaping from mazes or finishing tests before the others."  And of course the inevitable, "Help, help, my grandson, the medical mouse, has fallen in the swimming pool and drowning."

The onus to devise experimental, moral, philosophical, and spiritual stress for characters weighs heavily on writers, causing us from time to time to hold back, go easy.  But the works in where the author's forbearance to apply stress rarely squeeze through the slush piles of submissions, into actual publication.  Readers want characters who walk in circles, have albino traits, are too smart for their own good, eat too much, get too fat, drink too much and in due course coagulate their liver.  Readers want characters who are more than just a bit romantic; they want as many square inches of the whole nine yards that we can supply.

When a characters comes your way, promising to tell you a remarkable story, if only you will listen, the first thing you look for is the possibility of a limp before you say, "Come on, we're going off for a nice, long walk,"

Irony, Sarcasm, Subtext, and Moral Outrage or Plain Old Sermon

Any given novel in any given genre does not begin to come to engaging life for you until two essential thematic elements are present.  When these issues appear, the narrative seems to pop the literary equivalent of a wheelie, grinding against the texture of the plot line until traction is achieved and escape velocity realized.

These two elements appear from time to time in the most plot-driven narratives, even in some of the specific subgenera of romance where reader expectations are so arduous in their classification.

You're speaking of irony and its close cousin, subtext, in brief, irony being matters of making fun of or criticizing a thing while appearing to commend it, and subtext becoming the effect of something said by a character as opposed to the evoked awareness of what that character really means.

Both elements require a certain amount of careful handling, reminiscent of the way some explosive such as TNT needs guarded husbandry.  The volatile element governing irony is sarcasm which, under most circumstances, puts the user at the extreme edge of being an unlikeable bully.The ironist may also run the risk of seeming self-piteous.  

Through careful control, the writer may inflict ironic circumstances on a character, preserving the notion that the universe has orchestrated the situation rather than the character's bumbling or airs of superiority bearing the responsibility.

We become aware of subtext in circumstances where we would spot the elephant attempting to hide in the living room, in exaggerated example a convention of strict vegans discovering they'd booked a dinner meeting at a steak house.

Novels without significant irony or subtext within their recipe have found their way into publication.  Although you cannot identify any such novels by name at the moment, the thing that impresses you about the ones you're aware of reading is the sense you had on staying to the final resolution that something was missing.  Only later were you able to understand why.

Charactrers?  Check; at least two or three with some potential for being outliers.  Conflicts?  Check; some nicely engineered collision of ideals with profitability or of altruism with selfishness.  Dialogue?  Check; some exchanges bordering on the scathing because there is a point where well-controlled senses of moral highground cause readers to take sides, root for the fortunes of some characters ovfer others.  Narrative?  Check; the writer has allowed the characters to duke it out and allowed us to discern the barbs and thrusts of the subtext-heavy personal jabs between the characters.

You could, if you wish, blame any problems with the lack of a compelling and well-articulated difference of opinion, but by then, you'd know what you were looking for.  Almost an irony that the weak spot in the story would be the kind of plot you heard writers referring to as a paper tiger when you were a kid. A plot with a minimal menace, one with its claws removed.

Moments of irony and subtext can come at any time, and should. You skim dialogue with an edge of impatience, alert for potential incidents where the masks of politeness are removed.  Now, let the story begin.




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