Chapter One. In which I am not born.

My name is Lawrence Lockwood, and supposedly I'm dead. I died in a ridiculous way in the late nineteen-seventies, falling or stepping out of a slowly-moving car (or was I pushed?) one cold winter night, cracking my skull open on the icy pavement. That death caused crises for various people - for my best friend and lover Arthur - for the driver of the car - for one of the fellow passengers in particular who had a secret crush on me and worried that he might have been responsible for my death - for my family of course who had always been worried about my irresponsible behavior (I'd been a heavy drinker since I was thirteen) but never thought it would come to this...! - and for Elaine Pritchard, poet and editor of the pretentious and amateurish campus literary magazine, Breakwater.

I say supposedly I died, but you have to have lived before you can die, don't you? And that's the big limitation of being a fictional character. Most of us never get that chance. We're like spermatozoa in that respect. Our authors imagine us, make notes on us, name us, rename us, write short scenes with us in it... but they never get around to actually sitting down and writing us, which actually would be to conceive us and bring us to term.

I say "us" because in the place I find myself - the place I have been for the past quarter of a century - there are millions of others like me. Waiting, waiting, waiting without hope. I suppose the religious term for this is limbo. This isn't life after death, it's death before life. We're the shades of our thwarted selves here.

However, we are still connected to the brains of our procrastinating creators, as long as they live and as long as their brains are functioning adequately. If I concentrate I can see the world through my author's eyes. Hear his thoughts. Just as readers might have been able to do with me, if there'd ever been any readers. Tit for tat I call it...

Recently I've begun to notice that the state of mind he enters when he has been on this internet thing for a while is trancelike, mediumistic, and I can take advantage of that, quietly take possession of him while he's zoned out this way. I'm doing it now, as you can see. He had the nerve to criticize me for being an alcoholic, but he's seven different types of addict. On this I will have more to write -much, much more.

Occasionally, however, I suspect he will "come to" and I will allow him to think that he's in control. Such as what follows below...