Well, it had to end some time, right? Long illness left me dry. I can neither read nor write. My body of work became uninteresting and inert. It used to be a sparky adventure, always eager to stand taller and straighter, better magic to gamble and triumph again.
All gone. Whatever I achieved, so be it.
If it matters, or if anyone cares, the Playboy centerfold twins were real. The vacation house in Holland and the snowbound Belgian chateau were real. Assaulting the Dept of Energy and the rest of First Feature were real events. The Last Book was real, and Dreamland was 7/8 factual. I carried a gun and fired it. When Chris Cable went to prison I was writing from experience.
Obviously, I never went to Mars, but the characters were real people I encountered. Cocktail happens in the real world, people and places I knew, and it addressed an uncomfortable fact of life. Sexuality trumps everything else. Private actors do what government cannot do. They can't be stopped by religion or laws or common sense or physical danger if they fall in love.
It's hard to name the story I liked best, but Charity was closest to the truth of life, Partners my finest saga of raw courage, and The Executive Branch a fair guess of what's likely to happen in reality when things fall apart.
.
Sunday, March 31, 2019
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
Weak and very ill
I wish there was more to say. Let me look. There may be something in the files.
I guess it was 1990. The managing director had arranged an afternoon seminar for the sales people, and he wanted me to say a few words about what writers did. Not being innately clever, I said what I knew about it: "Writers go naked in public." Got a big laugh.
There are other consequences, of course. Wrecked marriages, credit card debt, inability to hold a job, paying assholes to write terrible 3-star reviews, and being ignored and dissed for decades are relatively small potatoes. Truly awful consequences are in the work itself. For instance, once glimpsed a story must be told convincingly in its entirety. The language has to be original. It has to sing and frighten and dazzle in believable grit and grandeur. Events in the third act have to be foreshadowed on Page One.
Hours and weeks and months fly by. In the old days, there were piles of balled paper and spent typewriter ribbons on the floor of an office that doubled as a bedroom, back rent due. Nowadays computers hide how many ideas and sentences get junked. I miss physical paper, never had to worry about software crashes or lightning strikes. I use a USB drive for back-up when I get close to the end of a chapter, a frantic procedure when I'm nearing a complete final draft, re-reading the whole thing six or seven times to fix a single comma, or alarmed at repetitive use of a word, an emergency to conceive a substitute. Professional writers use a thesaurus. I think it's cheating. I did it once in 1997 and regretted it. Felt phony.
Worse, finished work is finished work. It would be treason not to publish it. After a while the business of life recedes in importance, can't matter and doesn't matter. I could be taken any second, and it wouldn't matter. Stories matter. Nothing else.
I guess it was 1990. The managing director had arranged an afternoon seminar for the sales people, and he wanted me to say a few words about what writers did. Not being innately clever, I said what I knew about it: "Writers go naked in public." Got a big laugh.
There are other consequences, of course. Wrecked marriages, credit card debt, inability to hold a job, paying assholes to write terrible 3-star reviews, and being ignored and dissed for decades are relatively small potatoes. Truly awful consequences are in the work itself. For instance, once glimpsed a story must be told convincingly in its entirety. The language has to be original. It has to sing and frighten and dazzle in believable grit and grandeur. Events in the third act have to be foreshadowed on Page One.
Hours and weeks and months fly by. In the old days, there were piles of balled paper and spent typewriter ribbons on the floor of an office that doubled as a bedroom, back rent due. Nowadays computers hide how many ideas and sentences get junked. I miss physical paper, never had to worry about software crashes or lightning strikes. I use a USB drive for back-up when I get close to the end of a chapter, a frantic procedure when I'm nearing a complete final draft, re-reading the whole thing six or seven times to fix a single comma, or alarmed at repetitive use of a word, an emergency to conceive a substitute. Professional writers use a thesaurus. I think it's cheating. I did it once in 1997 and regretted it. Felt phony.
Worse, finished work is finished work. It would be treason not to publish it. After a while the business of life recedes in importance, can't matter and doesn't matter. I could be taken any second, and it wouldn't matter. Stories matter. Nothing else.
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