relentlessly on me, we had'd talk about what we were going to have dinner or how he had dinner with mario vitali. >> i wrote about working with pj o'rourke like going over anthropology field notes. his reporting so intricate and careful. and richard price would riff like lenny bruce when we would pitch, when he was pitching movies or tv shows like we sometimes did together. in the end, it was all practice for his novels. tom used to call it having a long reach. which in his case, which meant being minated to are a national book award in fiction the same year he won teen roping at the small rodeo in gardner, montana. so, book is full of stories like this, but there are interstitial chapters that are about the tricks of editing. editing is about ideas, of course, but it's mechanical as well. and you have to get under the hood, so to speak, if you're making magazines as we used to say, or websites or swimsuit issues, as i did for ten years. and the things that you learn in those exercises, like if you can-- if you can rewrite headlines on deadline. if you can get good at that, it's a kick like thos