conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a story about em>West, Here</em, Port with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this story could be 'West of Here'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first three paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: West of Here
  The very morning of the impasse, while eating his cold stack of gillettes by the weak fire — the last gillettes he would eat for the remainder of the journey — Mather pondered the decision still.
  Indeed, there was coal in Mather's belly, and it was a slow burning panic. Was it fear that had him leaning toward the west? Fear that the southwest route would be the longer crossing and that food scarcity was more likely to catch up with him and his men? Or was it recklessness that drove him west? The courage to lower his shoulder and charge straight at Olympus, just as he'd charged up the gut of the Elwha. An honest accounting of himself that morning by the fire yielded the unsettling suspicion in Mather that it was the former. And had he given his own doubts the power, had he been able to summon any passionate response whatsoever to the journey ahead, it might have been one of mortal fear.
  After an hour march up a pristine snowfield — the last visible thing approximating a gentle rise — the party arrived at the base of the wedge-shaped collision of mountains that formed the junction of the two valleys, one running southwest to the head of the Elwha, the other due west toward Olympus. Mather stopped in his snowy path until the others pulled nearly even with him. The wind was whistling on the plateau, swirling with snowflakes, stinging the men's faces.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: To her further surprise, the boy allowed Hoko to take his hand, and she began leading him down Ediz Hook toward Hollywood Beach. The clouds on the horizon were draining of color. Darkness began to settle over Hoko and Thomas as they walked, and the lanterns of Port Bonita began to alight, along with the fires of Hollywood Beach.
  The boy could summon only flashes of a recent past. A desolate beach, not so different from this one, the pounding surf, the urgent crowing of a dozen seagulls swirling above. The eyeless, bone-white carcass of a dogfish and its unaccountable significance. Apples and cigarettes and the cold metallic stink of armpits. Dry throat, and aching spine. Stinking rags, hatred, and the sting of fire and ice.
  He could only understand the woman when she spoke English. He did not know if he was inside of his head or outside in the world. He did not know whether he was talking or thinking. He did not know whether he was deciding what happened next or whether what happened next was deciding him.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: First, Nick Belardes for his super-cool maps; Michael O'Conner for his killer cartoons, though they didn't quite work, to no fault of his own; and also Shannon Gentry for her work on the early maps.
  My wife, Lauren, gets her own line for the patience and diligence it takes to survive a novelist (even on a good day).
  I would also like to acknowledge the entire staff of the North Olympic and Bainbridge Island Libraries, the Klallam Tribal Center, the Jamestown Tribal Center, Port Angeles Seafood, the Bushwhacker, the Klallam County Historical Society, Olympic National Park, and the guy who invented beer.
  A huge thanks to my brilliant editor and advocate Chuck Adams, who pushed me to do my best work at every juncture. Also, big thanks to Elisabeth Scharlatt, Ina Stern, Craig Popelars, Michael Taeckens, Jude Grant, Brunson Hoole, Katie Ford, Michael Rockliff, and everyone top to bottom at Algonquin. And lastly, my friend, agent, and trusted reader, Mollie Glick.