Another early morning staring out the window. Dawned quietly crept into the city from Long Island.

X liked early mornings. He could think then and he liked looking down on the city before its canyons teemed with worker bees doing the things people do to get by, to get rich, to get somewhere, to do it all again while dreaming of getting away from it all.

He felt industrious, imagining himself an intellectual captain, if not a businessman with a puritan work ethic. But he never got anything done.

At least not now, not since his heady days up the river at Bard, where his short stories under his real name won him critical acclaim. Well, at least on campus, among his local poser beatnik friends who gathered from the nearby state schools at the diner not far from campus to relive a heyday they never knew, and in a couple of obscure journals a publisher had read.

Now he was benefiting from a friend’s trust-funded apartment and squandering an advance on a novel he could not write.

He needed a new name.