1527. They had other skills besides acting, these including poaching farm animals, grave robbing, and if nothing else would suffice, outright highway robbery, although this was not resorted to except in dire necessity. But from the instant Otis grabbed the fish pie, their road became paved with gold. Where they went they were expected. They no longer passed the hat around, there was an admission charge and their audiences were anxious to pay.
1528. Otis was a wolf, that we know, but he shared certain feelings and ambitions common to people, one of which was creative ambition. I do not know if everyone has an instinctive desire do something creative, but certainly many people do. A person my have a half-finished novel or the outline of a play in the back of their desk. A lifetime may go by and that novel or that play may never be touched or even looked at.
1529. And yet that barely started creative effort may be very important, more important to its owner than anything else they have ever done. How many times I have seen a person grow old, be diagnosed with a terminal illness, be give six months to live, and then lo-and-behold, that manuscript finally comes out of the desk where it has waited a lifetime to be resumed.
1530. Assuredly, the author almost never adds even two words to the text. He looks at it and immediately begins to daydream about what fame would feel like. He pictures himself at a podium giving a talk at some famous university, after having received a literary prize. These images come easily to him, but the first sentences of chapter 2 are nowhere to be found in the recesses of his imagination.
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