What you see here is a description of what became known, in the novel’s final draft, as the Clock of the Time Dragon. So the pandemic has encouraged archeological findings that might otherwise have been lost forever one can say at least that much for the disaster, if nothing else. I had fully forgotten that in 1989 I’d already come up with the book’s title and begun to scratch out an opening scene. These three or four pages-the initial handwritten prose effort and my “idea page”-notes printed in dot-matrix technology, that’s how old they are!- predate by several years the 1992 document that I donated to the archives of the library of the State University of New York at Albany. In it, I found a few pages that appear to be my earliest notes on the novel that would become Wicked, and a page or two of handwritten first-draft effort.
My orderliness being a given, then, I was surprised recently when an old folder turned up in a file drawer reserved for tax documents. Storytelling would make us free if we could park our obsessions on the page rather than carting them around with us in the wrinkles in our foreheads. Is there a relationship between an aversion to material goods and a compulsion to make fictions? Our ruminations were inconclusive on the matter, though I think we conceded that storytelling existed, for some, to use up ideas with which we are burdened. We agreed that we have a similar horror of baggage-that stuff we travel with that the Romans, I’m told, called “impedimenta.” But Ann and I seem to go about subduing our demons with different strategies. About a year ago, the novelist Ann Patchett and I tore up the cybernet with a feverish correspondence comparing her campaign not to buy anything for a year with mine, which was to throw out three things a day for 365 days. I suppose this is because I’m fairly orderly to begin with. So, you ask, how am I doing? I mean in pandemic behavioral terms? Well, I’ve avoided succumbing to the syndrome that befalls some, that of morphing into a deranged über-hausfrau.
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