You’re a writer, you know how it goes. A book you’ve thought about writing won’t leave you alone. You think about it all the time, and you think, man, I should just sit down and write it.
See, thing is, I DID write it. I published it myself last year, before I moved here to smoky New Jersey.
Not to worry about the smoke – we had it imported from Canada.
The scenes that are calling to me so clearly, however, are the scenes I chopped out to simplify the storyline. It wasn’t a mistake- the published version is smooth and...
You know what’s a pisser? Nobody really wants to read your book – okay, MY book, do they? No, no they don’t. I’m not whining, here. It’s a fact of life.
You’ve spent years of your life piecing the words together- words, by the by, that have never before been pieced together in that way in the HISTORY OF HUMAN LANGUAGE, thank you very much. And then you have to find somebody to read the first draft, and the rewrite, and the rewritten rewrite. That’s a pisser…
What’s the point of all this? Well, of this post? I think it’s pretty clear, don’t you? Well, all right then.
The things we write are like ghosts until we write them, aren’t they? Voices and images that aren’t real wandering about in our heads, willing us to jot them i to being.
My mind is torn between a noisy curb in 1905 Paris and a hot and dusty hillside overlooking the brilliant sea and the musket is heavy and the path to the fort is narrow and a slip could send you rolling down to the beach but you want to be the first to report the ship from France…
Those things don’t exist, except that they do exist, except that you and I are not privy to them because they’re buried back there in time, so they may as well not exist, except that we think about them, thereby bringing them into existence.
Word games. Word games and ghosts.
I think I’m going to go eat a peach melba and go to bed.
I advise you to do the same, just as soon as you’ve finished that book.
John D Reinhart 