Those forced to share their quarters with writers have our sympathy. We are familiar with the more common hazards: the risk of head-on collisions with a writer pacing restlessly from her keyboard to the fridge and back; the scorching of delicate, shell-like ears from curses hurled by a writer dealing with a clogged metaphor; the incessant paring away at pencils until the very air you breathe is left hazy and hazardous from lead.

But we had not previously been aware of the following inconvenience until a startling report reached our ears — by devious means and circumlocutions which we suspect were intended to protect the identities of the (allegedly) guilty parties. Despite these cloak and dagger misdirections we have no reason to doubt the essential truth of the report: our informant is regarded by his peers (or by her peers: you won’t catch us out that easily!) for an honesty which is almost pathological; s/he has never been known to tell a lie. S/he reports (and note that we have revised the text in subtle ways to disguise a writing style as distinctive as a fingerprint) that:

my colleague has warned me that he may be difficult to get along with in the next little while as he is writing again and his protagonist is an angry and difficult person.

To which the only possible reaction is a baffled “?????” We’ve heard of method acting before, but method writing? That this colleagial writer gets so caught up in the emotional workings of his characters strikes us as rather dangerous, both to his mental health and to the physical safety of our informant.

Accordingly we have advised our informant to create a gratingly cheerful antagonist to act as antidote to the cranky protagonist. Immutable laws which bring order to the land of literature ensure that the two characters will react to each other as antimatter to normal matter, producing a burst of pure energy that annihilates the pair.