conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Grade, Golden, Sail with the genre: Children's Books, Literature & Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Odder Than Ever'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Odder Than Ever
  Summary: A collection of nine short stories featuring a ghost, a goblin, a giant, and other unusual creatures.
  HIS NAME was Jan. He was short for his thirteen years, and the sun had roasted his skin to a golden brown. His long, unruly hair was black as a moonless night, his heart hard as a sailor's knot. As for his eyes, they were mostly green but seemed to shift with his moods.
  Jan loved the sea. But he also hated it, for it had taken his father when he'd set off to find the ship with the golden sail.
  It was a story his father had always loved, the tale of a mysterious ship that fishermen and traders would see on the horizon, yet could never reach. Then one day word swept the coast that the ship had been seen again, and his father announced that he was going in search of it.
  But Jan had not stopped waiting, not stopped hoping. Which is why he was squatting at the water's edge now, looking for a sign of his father's ship.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Odder Than Ever
  Summary: A collection of nine short stories featuring a ghost, a goblin, a giant, and other unusual creatures.
  HIS NAME was Jan. He was short for his thirteen years, and the sun had roasted his skin to a golden brown. His long, unruly hair was black as a moonless night, his heart hard as a sailor's knot. As for his eyes, they were mostly green but seemed to shift with his moods.
  Jan loved the sea. But he also hated it, for it had taken his father when he'd set off to find the ship with the golden sail.
  It was a story his father had always loved, the tale of a mysterious ship that fishermen and traders would see on the horizon, yet could never reach. Then one day word swept the coast that the ship had been seen again, and his father announced that he was going in search of it.
  But Jan had not stopped waiting, not stopped hoping.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know three more paragraphs? Start with the sentence 'The cold hands kept pulling and pulling'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The cold hands kept pulling and pulling. I swung myself around, jamming my shoulder against the side of the bed, deciding I would rather let them pull my arm out of its socket than let them pull me under the bed.
  A third time my father slammed against the door. It splintered and burst open. Too late. My bed slid across the floor to reveal the swirling gray nothingness that lay waiting beneath it. A horrible crackling filled the air as the nothingness sucked me in.
  I was sinking into something like a thick, foul-smelling pudding. It was colder than anything I had ever experienced—a cold that worked its way into the deepest parts of me, penetrating to the center of my bones.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Those were the stories that came together quickly. Most of them took much longer to find their final form. "The Japanese Mirror," for example, was something I originally drafted in 1987 but that didn't find its final form until 1995—and then only because a gifted editor guided me through a number of revisions.
  The slowest gestation period of all was for "The Golden Sail," the opening lines of which I wrote in the late 1970s, when I was teaching elementary school. I had my kids do daily journal writing, and I used to write with them, by way of example. One morning I started to write a story about a boy waiting for his father, who years before had climbed aboard a ship with a golden sail and never returned.
  These two stories were fascinating writing experiences. After I had concocted the basic idea for the story I wanted to write, Dick and I would discuss what kind of music best suited the tale. Later, Dick would bring me stacks of compact discs that he felt might offer the right sound for what I was going to attempt. I would listen to these numerous times over a period of weeks as I tried to find the story, letting the music soak into my skin.
  Once the tale was written, Dick would go through the music and find sections he felt matched the text. He would then give these suggestions to the conductor (Peter Rubardt for "Justin Jones"; Grant Cooper for "The Golden Sail"), and we'd continue the process of refining both the text and the exact length of the musical selections, trying to knit them ever more closely together.
  We chose music from Russian composers for "The Golden Sail" and from the French impressionistic movement for "Justin Jones." In both cases the music shaped and inspired the text. The performances themselves were absolutely exhilarating. What more could a writer want than to be able to read his own work in a large symphonic hall while a superb seventy-piece orchestra plays some of the world's greatest music behind him to enhance the emotional impact? Even so, since I did not really know if the stories were going to work until I had them on their feet in front of an audience, the actual performances were white-knuckle inducing.