It was ten at night. In the basement. A sound near the top of the stair. The door opening and closing. A footfall on the steps. Had to be his daughter, seven, interrupting.
The lights out. Listening for the rush of small feet.
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Obviously it was Lisa, his wife. Only, she too—asleep, dead to the world.
“I couldn’t do it,” he says with a chilly laugh. “I’d totally freaked myself out. I had no idea what it was. I still don’t.”
Sidor works hard. Fortified with a pot of coffee, he heads down to his haunted basement each night around nine and plugs away for hours, often until two in the morning. His ideas come unsummoned—usually one book starts in the midst of writing the previous one. Often it’s only a fragment, a scene or a character. “I’m like a movie director,” he says. “I set things up and start the camera rolling.” When a scene feels “hot” he writes it, no matter where it fits in. He wrote the end of Mirror first. One of the book’s most compelling scenes, a paraplegic gangster at a New Jersey YMCA pool, came to him long before the hero had reason to go to New Jersey.
Tap-tap-tap.
