During my extended Galting period (see below), my editor sent me a query from Penguin Putnam NAL’s Customer Communications Department:

We have a consumer complaint about pages 210-213.  The consumer states that these are the only pages in the entire book that mention characters by the name of Kent Shambling and Nancy, and he says that there is no mention of these two characters leading up to this point and they seem to have nothing to do with the story.

I have to say I was a little taken aback. Pleased, certainly, that a reader had made it all the way to page 210 — as a writer, you want to know people are still with you into triple digits. And that someone cared enough about the narrative to write or call the publisher with this concern. (For those few of you who haven’t yet read A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Read, let me assure you that the chapter is question is a modernistic leap into a new character’s point of view in order to tell a bit of story that does not directly involve Our Heroes, a technique I filched from either Virginia Woolf or Stephen King.)

But who knew that multi-national publishing houses had Customer Communications Departments? That if I found a bit of a book I didn’t like, there were operators standing by to take my complaints? If I wrote to the CCD at Farar Strauss Giroux and pointed out that after almost a thousand pages of 2666, I still didn’t know who killed all those women in Mexico, would they send me back the name of the murderer? If I suggested to Anchor that I’d be enjoying Enduring Love a lot more if Joe Rose wasn’t such a jerk to his girlfriend, would Ian McEwen zip out a new version where Joe apologizes for not realizing she has feelings too, and her bad day is just as important as his? Could they finally get Thomas Harris to apologize for writing Hannibal?

This has changed the way I approach literature. No more passive reading for me! From now on, I’m going to be an engaged consumer of books. Mr. McEwen, consider yourself warned…

The rumors you’ve heard are all true: I did, indeed, Go Galt.  By which I mean (for those of you who don’t study at the feet of Michelle Malkin) that I took inspiration from the Second Worst Prose Stylyist in the English Language and withdrew my services from society in protest of a threat to return marginal tax rates on top earners to what they were a decade ago. You see, if all the creative, productive people were to simply walk away like John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, the theory goes, then the rest of you crumbs would fall into anarchy and chaos while We Chosen Ones would live in Smart People Paradise forever. Or something like that.

For two months I refused the world my creative genius on this blog. And what happened? The Dow plummeted. Unemployment skyrocketed. Paul Blart, Mall Cop became a massive hit.

Finally I realized that what I’d been doing was too selfish and too destructive to continue. I will no longer withhold my genius from the USA, and instead do my part to make us all better off. And I hope you notice that as soon as I began even thinking about coming back, the stock market jumped up. We Galt people are pretty powerful.

Oh, who am I kidding? Actually, I flipped to the end of Atlas Shrugged at Borders the other day and discovered that to really be John Galt I’d have to deliver a sixty page speech explaining the intricacies of my philosophy. (And that’s sixty pages of the smallest type visible without an electron microscope — if my Psych books were printed like this, they could fit on the back of a Cap’n Crunch box.) Since I have trouble stretching out my philosophy to fill a bumper sticker, I figured it was time to give up Galting…

I know the competition is pretty tough, but it’s hard to imagine something much clumsier in its desperate attempt to be clever than this:

We’re trading a dogmatic president for one who’s shopping for a dog.

The next eight years may indeed be long for those looking for ways to poke fun at the president…

We’ve all seen the scene a million times: The impenetrable headquarters. The computerized security system with a fleet of guards watching a dozen screens. And then something happens. Maybe all the screens go out for a couple of seconds. Or maybe it’s just a weird glitch in the feed. We the audience know that someone has just hacked in and completely subverted the entire system. But the crack security leader looks at the monitors, grunts, and says “Well, it’s fixed itself.” And now the intruders — good guys or bad, depending on the movie — are free to romp through the site, while the monitors show empty hallways.

But on the first hour of 24 this season, there’s a scene in an air control tower where several of the controllers see a strange glitch in the system. The glitch itself is finished in a second or two — but one of the controllers actually calls his boss over to check it out. And when he can’t figure it out, he calls the FAA, who calls the FBI. Everyone along the line takes the situation seriously, and within minutes they discover a major security breach.

Now, given that this is the first hour of the new season, that discovery isn’t going to help the good guys a whole lot. But the simple fact that everyone in the scene acts responsibly and professionally and doesn’t ignore the “well, it’s fixed itself” security breach is enough to keep me watching gratefully through the rest of the season. I have no doubt that things will get absurd eventually — the show’s franchise essentially requires that – but I’m so happy to see Howard Gordon and his squadron of fellow EPs skip over this one hideous cliche, I’m willing to forgive almost anything.

Now if only they do a scene where Jack Bauer sets out to climb through an air vent and discovers it’s really only three inches wide…

Every time I’m in the middle of a project, I start having this recurring fantasy that I’ll go to bed one night, and when I wake up I’ll find that I’ve finished the damn thing in my sleep. Well, that still hasn’t happened, but it’s beginning to seem less impossible:

An article that will soon appear in the journal Sleep Medicine, detailing the experience of a sleepwalker, shows that we can send messages even when we seem to be sound asleep.

 The Sleep Medicine article — prepared by Dr. Fouzia Siddiqui, a neurologist at the University of Toledo Medical Center in Ohio, and two colleagues — describes one woman’s e-mailing while sleeping as the first reported case of “complex nonviolent cognitive behavior.” It involved not just composing messages, but also navigating past two separate levels of password security to reach the e-mail software.

According to the article, the patient suffered from severe insomnia and was taking zolpidem, which is marketed under various brand names, the best known of which is Ambien. She decided on her own to increase her daily dose to 15 milligrams, from the 10 milligrams prescribed by her doctor, to counteract what she perceived as diminished efficacy of the drug over time.

Later, she received a call from a friend, asking about a strange e-mail message that the patient had sent the caller the previous night. She had no memory of having done so. When the patient checked the computer and looked at a folder containing her sent messages, she discovered that three that had gone out within eight minutes the previous night while she was asleep, all with unusual capitalization, punctuation and language. “!HELP ME P-LEEEEESE” was the subject of one message, an invitation for “dinner & drinks,” and the message also implored the recipient to “come TOMORROW AND SORT THIS HELL HOLE Out!!!!!!”

Okay, so she didn’t actually knock out act three of  her feature script in her sleep.  But maybe if she upped her dosage a little bit, she could at least solve some of those knotty act two problems before she woke up…

…just to see him die.

Oh, wait, no I didn’t.  I guess I just hummed that song so often that somewhere along the way I internalized it as my own experience.

That sounds believable, doesn’t it?

Almost as believable as it does when best-selling religious book author Donald Walsch uses it an an excuse for publishing someone else’s mawkish essay as his own.

Neale Donald Walsch, author of the best-selling series “Conversations With God,” recently posted a personal Christmas essay on the spiritual Web site Beliefnet.com about his son’s kindergarten winter pageant.

During a dress rehearsal, he wrote, a group of children spelled out the title of a song, “Christmas Love,” with each child holding up a letter. One girl held the “m” upside down, so that it appeared as a “w,” and it looked as if the group was spelling “Christ Was Love.” It was a heartwarming Christmas story from a writer known for his spiritual teachings.

Mr. Walsch’s story was nearly identical to an essay by a writer named Candy Chand, which was originally published 10 years ago in Clarity, a spiritual magazine, and has been circulating on the Web ever since. Mr. Walsch now says he made a mistake in believing the story was something that had actually come from his personal experience.

 I just hope before he writes that essay about what it’s like to have a dead guy in your bed, he stops to think that he might not actually have experienced it himself…