Rats!

 My masterpiece is unreadable. No doubt that Partners is brilliant, finely crafted, believable and utterly compelling. It's also sad, violent, true to the time and place in which Kyle finds a mentor, a gunslinger nearly dead to the world, and a girl who's equally courageous, destined to love Kyle as completely and deeply as two innocents can devote themselves to each other in the grit and fury of a mob war.

The language is crude and ruthless, a tough white swagger in 1975. If I had cleaned it up, the zeitgeist would vanish, none of the events would make sense. Most men who go to war swear, smoke, and shun tenderness as a debilitating threat. When a man is in love, he questions his duty to kill or be killed. No woman in love wants to lose her man or see him suffer. Kyle's gunfights and wounds are real. The end cannot be happy, icy death at the gates of hell. Told in first person voice, Kyle suffers consciously and clearly, pushes it away, explodes with callous brutality and psychological collapse repeatedly.

It's unreadable. I want to celebrate such a fine achievement, and I can't. A little laugh at the thought of something remembered. I paid an enormous emotional price to *WRITE* it! -- months of pain and daring and dramatic triangulation. The minor characters are vivid , vital, as real as you or me.

Well, rats. Forbidden to re-read my best work of fiction. I try. The opening is mostly innocent. Clever. Sometimes I can make it to Kyle's first murder, sometimes to his 2nd, 3rd, and 4th -- and the glory of a week with Karen in snowbound Door County, to live and love, alone together, one of the finest love stories wrapped in gentleness and sparkling good humor, like an island of good, a thousand miles from hell. In reality, it's only a three hour drive, and bonded together as man and wife they will endure hell together as long as they can, a matter of weeks, with increasing incisiveness and valor.

I feel like a failure, unable to re-read Partners. That's why I wrote Chiseltown, a screwball comedy that ends happily, full of preposterous fun, a little crisis fixed by friends, some insider jargon. A distinguished pal in Hollywood liked the twin sister starlets and suggested it should be a film school textbook. I can read it with pleasure, forget about the unreadable masterpiece of tragedy.

I sort of cringe when I re-read Heaven. A little too honest.

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