Deleted bit from original intro to FLICK:

You will see that I can write. It is easy, too easy. With pen in hand I am as adept or as clumsy as I choose, but I am not a writer. I have, until this moment, scrupulously avoided marking up clean white paper with my cryptic, cramped slashes, squiggles and dots. Ask me what I’ve been doing with my life, and I will tell you that, that I have been a good dog, obedient, content, writing no books.

If that does not seem like much of an accomplishment, you are not looking at it from a dog’s perspective. Told to stay, a dog remains motionless for the exact length of its attention span. It is not bored. In its little brain is a refrain, “I’m staying put, I’m staying put, I’m not moving a single foot.” Every cell in its being strains to stay in that moment that it was told to stay. The dog thinks it is accomplishing something monumental. It breaks from its stance not because mischievousness overcomes obedience, but because its brain is exhausted.

This then is not so much a book as it is a lapse of attention, a bit of forgetting, the fading of a moment.