Sprawled sideways on the sand, I tried to read a few pages of my book while I sipped a beer; I read a sentence and then read it again because I had forgotten what I had just read or perhaps because I wasn’t reading at all. Then I realized I was reading the words, just not processing them and this frustrated me. Usually, when you concentrate on reading the words, they travel from the page into your brain. I wondered where the words went after I read them if they never made it into my brain. I doubted the existence of a word limbo, a special place to harbor all the lost words. But they had to go somewhere. I imagined the words coming off the page and floating toward my brain but then, inexplicably, falling from midair into the sand where they were lost forever. I imagined the guilt I would inherit when I looked back to the page of my book and saw, in place of the words I had just read, a blank space. I would have to be careful not to read more of the words because then I would be responsible for losing them into the sand, and soon I would become the monster responsible for destroying all the beautiful words in all the great books of literature. -A tiny excerpt from my forthcoming novel