In the last chapter of Wolf in White Van, there's a sword catalog. Sean, the narrator, orders it from Brazil; he sees an ad for it in a small magazine and it sounds cool, so he takes a chance and sends a couple of bucks off in the mail, and then when he gets home one day, there it is, in a slick envelope with an unfamiliar postmark. Later that day, he has what he ends up referring to as an accident, and he is changed forever.

People ask about "the creative process" a lot, and I'm never entirely sure how to understand the term — I don't have any method I rely on; any given piece I'm working on will be beneficiary or victim of its own chemistry. But one way of thinking about process can involve tracing how the things that got into a song or book got there: when they first germinated, how long it took them to sprout, how they ended up in the row where they ended up. In the case of the sword catalog I can tell you.

But for either sad or great reasons, depending on how you think of things, I will have to tell you from memory: Because when I remembered the spam email I got in maybe 2001 or 2002 that eventually manifests itself as Sean's Brazilian sword catalogue, I thought, Go dig that up, it's got to be around here someplace, you can quote it directly, it'll be cool. Back in the late '90s we had an old iMac — it wasn't old then, it was just an iMac — and it sat in the corner of our one-bedroom place in Ames, Iowa. We had moved to Ames from Colo, Iowa, where our internet was 56Kbps; being suddenly able to check email without watching the beach ball spin for several minutes was quite novel. I'd just put Last Plane to Jakarta, the web version of my zine, online. There was a contact email right there on the "contact" page. The spam influx began within hours of the site going live.

It took years for me to be able to just reflexively delete spam, or filter it so that I never see it at all. I blame the spammers for this; the quality of their work took a sharp nosedive at some point. But during whatever period of the internet's growth you'd call the early 2000s, it seemed like you'd still get some winners: things that had been typed up by a person, sent out to a bunch of email addresses they'd bought or rented for 5 or 10 bucks from the only guy who was ever going to make any money in this particular exchange. Most of them went directly, if manually, into the trash; but once in a while, there'd be one that seemed to earn, at the very least, the minute it'd take me to read it.