I was walking my dogs in the rain one evening in my crow-inhabited neighborhood in north Portland, listening to music or maybe a podcast (I forget) on my wired headphones (this detail is important later), when a funny, dark, and (to me at the time) nearly perfect story just sort of started appearing in my mind.

The story was about a guy who tries to train the neighborhood crows to bring him money, but everything goes nightmarishly sideways and the crows end up taking over his life.

I recorded the story into my voice memo, almost an hour of audio, cracking myself up as I walked home in the rain. At the time I was working on a edits for my second novel, Rainbow in the Dark, so I set the crow story aside...

Months later I opened my voice memos, ready to transcribe my work of genius. But when I hit play, this is what I heard ...