“The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the dog’s mat is.” (Not mine.) Stolen. Taken.

He sat on the rug plagiarizing. It was easier than he thought it would be. He took sentences from one story and paragraphs from another and glued them together. He used real glue for this procedure. He didn’t worry about the different typefaces because it was the words that mattered. He needed to get this done and once done he would call it his own. His exacto knife made short work of the shiny magazine pages. He checked both sides before cutting to ensure he wasn’t excising text he would need later. It was a difficult process.

He was not good enough to write himself. He knew that already. What he couldn’t do was let on to others that he wasn’t good enough. It took a certain skill to cut and paste. Most of what real writers do—and he didn’t claim and would never claim to be such a real writer—is cutting and pasting their own words, manipulating them to fit within a logical framework. He just cut out the front man. He took writer’s work and manipulated it to fit within his logical framework. It’s easy to be one of those million monkeys pounding away, but to be the monkey’s editor, now that took true genius.

His parole officer wouldn’t understand. She looked down on most of his plans. She claimed they were get-rich-quick schemes that always seemed to fail at the most inopportune times. But this was different. He wasn’t trying to get rich, at least not rich in the traditional sense. He wanted notoriety. He wanted people to be impressed by him: here he was, a high-school dropout, a former convict, someone who had no place being in these highfalutin magazines, and yet it was clear by the byline that he was there. They would eat it up. The editors certainly would. They give special allowance to foreigners, and how much more foreign can you get then federal convict.

But there was more to it. Notoriety in the larger circles definitely played into part of it. He had to admit that to himself if nobody else. He always tried to be honest with his own decisions. Even when he robbed houses, he was honest about what his goals were. It was never about the money. He did like the money and how easy it was to get. But he knew that if it was only about the money he would get have gotten the money honestly. The risk verse reward of robbing houses—of most crimes, he knew—weighed heavily on the risk. He looked at his life of crime as a mountain climber looked at a mountain. You don’t live life unless you take risks that have real consequences. Losing years of your life to prison a real consequence. It makes the crime that much more exciting.

He looked down at the piles of cut magazine articles and began organizing. It’s about the cutting and organizing. He was the editor, the writer. He knew what he wanted to say and he just needed to find how to say it.