The price of things

Shocking how much it cost. Forget the thousands and tens of thousands. Lots of things are expensive. But writing has mountains of constitutional and moral expense. Writers go naked in public, confess all, obvious in their ideas, in narrative, every word and glance exchanged by fictional characters. Writing careers are measured in long lonely decades of effort. I began to write over thirty years ago. It was never cheap or easy.

The fourth volume of Chris & Peachy was extremely costly in every respect. I sold my car to write The Tar Pit, destroyed my remaining credit to write Charity. But Finding Flopsie was worst of all. I gambled and lost. I liked the story well enough, but I failed to conceptually sew together a believable portrait of Peachy and her sister Kelly. Flopsie was a weepy soap opera, preposterous and overly ambitious. Chandler had similar trouble with Farewell My Lovely, one of his best, and Hammett choked with an unwieldly Dane Curse saga.

It happens. Writers reach too high. They get confused about how brilliant they are. I should not have tried to write from inside a female character's head. Men can always get away with depicting how women react and behave, but not their internal experience.

I can't say that I regret writing Flopsie, win lose or draw. Without Flopsie and everything that it cost financially and spiritually, there would have been no Kyle, no Karen, no Partners, and worse, no Executive Branch. As bizarre as it sounds, my entire life was lived to write a short story about Alaska. I'm famous in Fairbanks, and it finally sunk in that Alaska is an uniquely free and independent arctic continent, totally unlike the Lower 49. It wouldn't take much to push Alaska into secession when the Lower 49 go economically kablooey, which is already baked into the political mudpie, purely a matter of time, maybe sooner than we know.

A huge expenditure, when you think of it. 68 years of life, eight novels, an enormous trail of ambition and wreckage, high water marks and penury, all the fullness of life as a confused youngster, a charismatic playboy and a serious intellectual voice, every day of it a qualifying precondition to conceive a story about Alaskan independence, a future worth winning.

Fair price, I guess.

There's a terrible truth about entertainment. You're only as good as your last show. It's an impersonal fact of nature. Same thing is true of medical practice, engineering, government, and family life. Screw up once and your career is over. That never deterred me from going forward, endeavoring to get it right at least once. The Executive Branch was a final wager at the table of history. I bet my reputation as a soothsayer and storyteller, winner take all.

People don't do that for light and transient causes.

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