Woke up, put on clothes, went to work.

When I was a freshman at the U. of Penn, there was a senior who wrote a column for the Daily Pennsylvanian named Mike Finkel. He was a fascinating enigma - a DP sportswriter who was equally adept at feature and travel-writing, and oddly enough, he was in the business school (not liberal arts) studying finance. My favorite columns of his were often about social ills he saw in Philly; in one, he followed a homeless man to see where he went. He founded a group called Wharton Democrats. I also remember seeing him among a group of upperclassmen taking kids trick-or-treating in my dorm. Before he graduated, he got a personal essay into the New York Times magazine, when most of us hopeful writers and DP journalists couldn't get bit. As our now-deceased non-fiction writing professor Nora Magid put it at the time, "Mike got $1,000 from the Times, and an A from me."

He graduated and got a job at a skiing magazine, again when most writers fresh out of college couldn't get bit. He was apparently an amazing skier. He traveled the globe and started writing for the Times magazine.

Then he wrote a story that included a composite of a down-and-out child, comprised from several kids he knew while visiting West Africa. Only he didn't tell the Times it was a composite. When they found out, they fired him and pored over every other one of his stories. They didn't find any other fabrications, but the tarnish was there.

At the same time, believe it or not, some guy was being pursued for murder and had been passing himself off as New York Times writer Michael Finkel. So Finkel started following that.

His book on that is coming out in a week. I'm looking forward to reading it. Even since I was a wide-eyed, innocent freshman, I was captivated by his writing.