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Shower | Jan 31 2002

In the showerParker Posey just now I had an idea for a story. The idea was inspired by something that happened earlier today, which is that I received an email from a guy I hadn’t heard from in seventeen years. Coincidentally this same guy was the model for a character in a story I just wrote. So it was as though I had conjured him by writing about him. Thinking about this in the shower, I had the idea to write a story about a writer whose stories make the people in his stories contact him all of a sudden. Like even ridiculous people such as Parker Posey. The guy writes a story about a Parker Posey-like character and then the next day he receives an email from Parker Posey. And he doesn’t have to show the story to anyone to have it happen; it just happens.

Well, I hated this idea, and for several reasons. To begin, it’s a rip-off of a recent Kevin Fanning piece, Emails from Dead People. In that story (which I so love) a person starts receiving emails from dead people. So it’s the same thing, basically—dead people, people who’ve been fictionalized.

Despite this, and despite the fact that I hated the idea and knew I’d never write it, I remained in the shower until the hot water ran out, trying to imagine why Parker Posey would send me an email.

Straight off I decided that it couldn’t be because of Oblivio, since that’s ever so slightly plausible: one can imagine Parker Posey stumbling on Oblivio and deciding to “shoot” me an email. In fact it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Parker Posey has “shot off” several such emails in exactly this way.

So I decided that the protagonist couldn’t have a website. But this still left the question of why the sudden email from Parker Posey.

By this point the water was definitely beginning to run out, I think because the journalist woman downstairs was insisting on taking a shower, even though it must have been obvious to her that someone already was.

At first this pissed me off, the nerve of that journalist woman, but then I remembered that I had been in the shower a good fifteen minutes already and was in the process of using every last drop of hot water.

So in the end, as the water temperature shifted from almost-kinda-lukewarm to definitely-no-longer-lukewarm, I decided that the protagonist’s email address is one letter different from the email address of a famous “dentist to the stars.” Thus Parker Posey sends an email to her dentist, describing some tooth problem she’s having, and the protagonist has to respond saying, Listen, Parker, I’m not your dentist, but I really loved you in Scream 3.

This wasn’t one of my better showers.