His publisher calls every second Thursday, to find out how things are going. He's maybe despairing of ever seeing a finished copy. Each time he calls, Lance says, "I'm working on it."

Because he is. He works on it all day, every day, and Lance knows he can do this. He has all the research at his fingertips, he watches TV until his eyes have bled, he reads interviews and transcripts until his mind is swimming with dates and names and faces that lost all significance years ago.

Lance can do this. He just has to start, begin.

The problem is, he can't start until there's a first line that doesn't involve Justin in some way. So he keeps writing these first lines out longhand, and then scratching them out. He has half a notebook full, practically.

Because Justin has to be there. He can't come up with any lines that don't start with, "The five of us, we were big in Europe and as soon as we got back to the states, Justin said," or, "It was all because of Justin and Chris that we--" or, whatever. He can't seem to erase Justin from their history because, really, the band was five guys and Justin was one of them and so he has to give that due. And he can't seem to give him equal weight with other guys, because Justin never really had equal weight with anyone.

All Lance really has is a list of chapter titles, clever phrases that he figures will each stand for more than a year of his life. The book isn't going to go chronologically, he knows that much. Some pages are already written, he has various Word files of sections that he's written out, noted out, little slivers of life that float, unsorted, minutes of time that he's saved in written form but can't seem to classify. His titles are outlined and his memories are all dug up, but Lance can't seem to match them together.

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