A blinking little red light. Another voice mail. Didn't I just go through them? I sat down. I never delay listening to voice mails; call it a compulsion, a personal quirk.
I put down Mrs CR's chart and dialed my answering machine. It was my father-in-law, telling me he had loved my short story, The Kite Runner, but wished it had been longer. At some point between the instant I put down the receiver and the moment I knocked on the door to tell Mrs CR about her diabetic nephropathy, a seed planted itself in my mind: I was going to turn The Kite Runner into a novel.
And so it began. For the next 15 months, I tapped away at the keyboard. I created a troubled, 12-year-old boy named Amir, the privileged son of a.....
