Notes from the Bench

The case had not come down off that cabinet in years. The boy knew it for a fact, and he built his whole plan around it.

A well-made machine from the last century outlasts the household that bought it. The old ones were built to be opened and kept, and I try to give the ones I write the history they actually have.

The written entry outlasts everyone who was there. That lesson became a way to plot a mystery.

Wear is a record of habit, not of intention. This is how I read a worn object, and how I put that reading to work in the fiction I write.