What's missing from this story?

This is my first lipogram. No, no – not liposuction! In a lipogram you simply cut out a consonant or nonconsonant.

A lipogram might omit Z and thus all words containing it, such as lazy. It's an approach found as far back as Lasus, who was born in 538 BC.

Why would any author do such a thing?

It's a notion of choosing constraint as a stimulus to innovation.

You may spur originality by composing in a haiku's strict syllabification (just 17).

And you must fashion unorthodox phrasing if you author anything omitting a particular nonconsonant from your vocabulary.

A familiar dramatic soliloquy turns into "Living, or not living: that is what I ask" in a famous lipogrammatic book. It's "A Void," a translation of "La Disparition" (1969), about a missing man, Anton Vowl, and complications involving a missing nonconsonant (in both original and translation).

I, too, am omitting this nonconsonant, forcing omission of many if not most words that jump to mind.

It's a bit awkward to say you start a day with tomato fluid. Or a first bird obtains a worm.

I can only gasp at "A Void," a full book without what "pluribus unum" follows on US coins. You'll know why I honor its author, G*org*s P*r*c.

Go on, r*ad my lipogram!