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craft."
    "So I could just work with the stories that you tell me, couldn't I? At least for starters."
    "As long as you approach them with respect. The telling of tales is a most honorable profession, Cat. Remain true to the tale— never forget to give it its proper due, whatever you may add to it— and you will not go astray."
    Her first short story— ignoring her Wind in the Willows pastiches— took her the better part of six months to write. She worked at it with a determination that surprised her, listened carefully to Kothlen's criticisms, and discovered that there was far more to writing than simply setting the words on paper. When she had finished that first story— at 30,000 words it was more a novella— and she could sit with her notebooks on her lap and flip through all those pages filled with her neat handwriting, knowing it was her own hard work that had gone into its making, she felt a sense of accomplishment that would not be repeated until she made her first professional sale seven years later.
    Throughout her teen years she remained busy transcribing— at first Kothlen's stories, then Tiddy Mun's as well— scribbling in her notebooks, rewriting, appraising, considering, researching, trying to find her own "voice." She never considered sending the stories out in the beginning. In fact she never shared them at all, because she had no close friends she dared lend so much of her inner self.
    She switched from handwriting to a typewriter when she was seventeen, and after much heart-searching, submitted and sold a story the following year. It was "The Three Daughters of the Green Wizard," which appeared in the May '73 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and was later reprinted in her first collection, Grindylow and Other Stories. The next year she sold three stories; in '75 she sold two.
    On New Year's Day of the following year she began her first novel, which took her a year and a half to complete. It was rejected fifteen times before it finally found a home in the back of her file drawer with the rest of her stories that hadn't quite worked out. By then she'd finished the final draft of The Sleeping Warrior, realized all the mistakes she'd made with the first novel and why it would never sell, sent out Warrior and received a contract for it in the mail three months later.
    During those years she finished high school and moved into her own apartment— a one-bedroom in Centretown at $150 a month. Working as a waitress, a CR-2 government clerk, a librarian, and in a bookstore, she wrote in the evenings initially until she'd saved up enough money and nerve to try her hand at writing full time.
    And all that while, she went night-visiting in the Otherworld, grew closer to Kothlen and Tiddy Mun and more withdrawn from the world she lived in during the day.
    Where do you get your ideas?
    Cat sighed. Gathering up The Moon in a Silver Cup manuscript, she put it in an oversize manila envelope and stowed it away in the bottom drawer of her desk under "things to get back to." Where did she get her ideas? Where did other writers get theirs?
    She was beginning to feel depressed again. There was nothing inside her that needed saying, nothing she wanted to share. She needed someone like Kothlen to bounce ideas off of. She needed Tiddy Mun to tell her one of his presposterous stories, like the one that had become "How Tod-Lowery Met the Moon."
    The light on her desk seemed too bright. She switched it off and sat in the darkness for a long time, not ready to face another night's dreamless sleep, but not quite prepared to stay up all night either. She wished she had someone to talk to, but found it hard to deal with people. At least on a personal level. Which was strange, for people seemed drawn to her; she was the one who drew back, who kept relationships at a certain distance. Like this afternoon. The only reason she'd managed to admit her block to Melissa was because it affected Melissa as well. If Melissa