“A sequel,” said Todd. He was thinking fast now. I wrote the first one, didn’t I? How hard can it be? “And if I say yes, you can guarantee me some decent… a proper advance?”

“Yes,” said Nora. “You come up with the goods—and I know you can, in fact I shouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t been working away at something already—and I will negotiate an advance as big as the Ritz for you. Not that this is all about the money of course,” she added.

The hell it isn’t, Todd thought.

“Okay,” he said. “I better get to it.”

Nora rang off, and Todd leaned back in his seat.

Todd reached for his copy of All My Colors. He had it in his head, or so he thought, but every time he tried to focus on it, on the characters, or the story, it slipped away from him. Holding the book down like it was an animal that might otherwise escape his grasp, Todd tried to read it. Passages came back to him, familiar scenes, but he was damned if he could retain anything. In the end, he got out a pencil and started making notes. By early afternoon, Todd had written out—slowly, and with tremendous effort—an outline of most of the story. Now he was on the final stretch (thank God, he thought).

The last mile was, indeed, the hardest mile. Todd struggled to recall characters he’d been following for chapters, and he kept going back to earlier scenes to refresh his memory of major plot developments, but somehow, with a tremendous effort of will, he made it to the final page.

He drank some water, picked up his pencil and began to copy out the last paragraph of All My Colors.

“Helen knew then,” Todd copied down, “that if life were made up of a series of colors, then it was not, as she had believed, a spectrum of feelings ranging from empty, mindless white through bland gray to the darkest, deepest black, but something else entirely. Life, she had learned, was—and she could almost laugh at the simplicity of the idea—a kind of bright rainbow, made of colors that a child would love. Bright blues and garish yellows and furious purples. Greens and browns and, yes, blacks and whites, but all mixed in with magentas and scarlets and golds.

‘This is my life,’ she told herself as she walked out the door, into a new world. ‘And these are all my colors.’

The End.”

Todd put his pencil down. Is that it? he thought. Is that what the critics are going crazy for? It seemed pretty hokey, but then he’d always been what he considered a manly kind of writer. Still, it sold, and he was the guy who’d—well, it had come out of him, hadn’t it? Todd was always reading about writers and painters and musicians who’d said that they were just the conduit for great art, that it just flowed through them. Todd remembered the diaper days.