Peter: I had no plan. I was just following my instincts wherever they led, and drawing on what was around me. The way the demon’s two heads‌—‌I named them Webster and Azazel‌—‌jokingly snipe at one another was taken straight from the way Phil and I talked. But at 85 pages I hit a wall. I couldn’t go any further. When the summer was over and we returned to New York I put the unfinished manuscript away. I did show it to my parents, and to my agent Elizabeth, and I shared it with Enid in California. They were all very nice. No one rejected it or told me to abandon the idea. But I simply couldn’t figure out where to go from the point I stopped. It was a dead end.

Connor: You know my theory on this. I think there was a war in your head between the two different stories you were exploring. The unicorn was on a quest to find her lost fellows. That’s fine. Meanwhile the two-headed demon was on a quest as well, trying to start up his/his own Hell using a coal he’d stolen on the way out the door‌—‌a coal which all Hell is bent on getting back. That’s fine, too, but it’s hard to imagine unifying such different quests in a dramatically satisfying way. You could write one or you could write the other, but I don’t think there was room for both in a single book.

Peter: Which is probably why, years later, when I did come back to The Last Unicorn, the first thing I did was abandon the demon’s story entirely.

Connor: After this first attempt at The Last Unicorn crashed, what did you start on next?

Peter: I have no memory of writing any other fiction when we got back to New York.

Connor: Really? Nothing at all?

Peter: Mainly I was working myself up to tell my parents about Enid and my son Dan, who by then had been born. During the summer in the Berkshires I had taken a break to fly west and see all of them, Enid and Dan and Enid’s two girls, Victoria and Kalisa. That was the trip that made me realize that this woman and these kids were my responsibility. All honor and credit to my folks: when they heard the news they neither disowned me nor had major heart attacks‌—‌not even when I said I was leaving New York to join Enid in California, or that I was going to make the trip on a motor scooter. Phil and I drove our scooters all over New York that winter, getting used to these new German Heinkels we’d bought, and breaking in the whole notion of traveling. When we weren’t out on the road we’d sit for hours playing guitar, or watching Maverick, or playing cards, or just fantasizing about what life was going to be like when I was a successful novelist and he’d broken through as a painter. We both wanted to go, but I wanted to go before he did.