I think this story, by Tom Crippen, is brilliant:

There is no reason to invent a character named “Kid Glove,” not unless you are working on deadline and short of inspiration. It helps if it’s a Sunday evening in 1941 and you’re 22 and you suspect that you’ve been stuck with this particular job because your life has taken a wrong turn and you’ve been dumped like a heap of tin cans and busted rubber boots in a back alley that gives out on other back alleys, on a vast network of them that branches across, maybe not the whole surface of the earth, but as much of the surface as you personally will ever see. And to a degree you’re right. You will never finish your next poem (it would have been your 18th, a sonnet, and the subject would have been the Irish janitor’s third daughter, Theresa, as she and her skirt were caught against the light). The New Yorker won’t publish your debonair, amused essay on spending Sunday in Prospect Park with your parents and their brothers and sisters and your seven cousins. You won’t even get as far as the copy desk of the New York Post or the Tribune, though word has it that just three months ago PM accepted Wallace Kaplan, the high-flyer who tore up your drama reviews at the Brooklyn College Vanguard.

But at least you won’t go on writing comic books. In some 40 years you will retire as deputy executive editor of Electrical Conduit Wiring Monthly in Willford, Conn., after having been eased out of your 17-year run as chief author of the magazine’s Plugged-In column. . . .

. . .