Dorothy Parker once excused herself for missing a deadline by telling her editor "Someone else was using the pencil." I was young when I first learned to fight my temptation to write. At 12 I had an idea for a novel. I thought cultures and political systems might be evolving much like an individual psyche. For years I mused on this idea...  When I finally shared my idea with a friend in college he said my book had already been written by a corrupt interloper named Thomas Mann and was called The Magic Mountain.