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| | The Novelist by Chris Orcutt |
 | | They are not writers, and certainly not novelists, you tell yourself; and as non-writers, they do not deserve to know about what you are writing, nor how many pages you have finished. |
 | | You are a novelist, as they see by the mounting stack of bond to your right, the two thesauri, and the dictionaries (also two). |
 | | The janitor does not take them, you say to yourself, because he knows you are a novelist, and novelists are by definition poor, and you need the five-cent deposits more than he. |
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