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.