Quote of the day

"these are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but MINDS alive on the shelves"
Gilbert Highet 1906-1978
Teacher & Scholar

I am not familiar with Gilbert Highet, but his words are immortalized on a bronze plaque outside the public library in Baltimore. I don't remember much of whatever else I saw that day on our family trip to the adjacent Baltimore Aquarium, but I do have a photograph of this plaque beside my desk and I find myself glancing at it often. Reading and rereading these simple words which are really so profound, inasmuch as they speak volumes to my writers heart when I struggle to compose that perfect sentence or design that imperfect character who will grow into my story. Writing...it's really the most incredible process, one I don't altogether understand. The way the tiniest speck of an idea will spark and then somehow, whether consciously fueled or not, will quiver, persistently swell, to become a raging inferno which grows to consume every waking moment. And I am never anything less then awed and amazed when the dust of creativity has at last settled and a finished manuscript rests in my hands. Friends and acquaintances will often ask about the process of writing a book and I tend to answer in the vaguest of terms, not because I'm too puffed or pretentious to take the time or interest in detailing the drill, but quite honestly, I don't altogether understand how it works. It just does, not easily, but it does.

It takes me at least a year to finish a first draft of a novel -- not 700 page Stephen King size tomes, but rather half that size, something between 300-375 pages. Then comes the editing -- another year of rewriting, rewriting, disgust, agony, despair, only then does it begin to look like something of the picture I'd believed to exist at the start. I envy those writers who produce a masterpiece in the space of a few months -- or worse, weeks. How that works I can't imagine. Maybe it's because my mind is set at 33 and theirs at 78. My best friend and comrade of the keyboard, Janet, is a screenwriter and that girl is a whirlwind when it comes to producing excellent writing. Her mind is forever perking with new concepts as she piles up the pages -- good pages, great pages in fact.

Still, I've come to accept my slower pace as necessary for me. I am after all a self-admitted editing machine. I edit and edit until I feel the words coming to life and my characters breathing on the page and for me that takes some time. But there is a worthy reward when it's finished, a steady confidence that my work is pruned and polished, more or less ready to stand right up there in the shadow of the big boys.

Except that it's not. Because my first and finest story, carefully combed and well groomed novel, "The Last Summer", is still here waiting at the gate, ready to take off at a gallop but nowhere to run.

For the first ten years my submission efforts rewarded me with a vast and uninspired collection of rejection letters. I of course saved them in a bludgeoning pile in the event that there was ever a toilet paper shortage or trees became extinct. And I continued to keep the faith - rewriting, editing, querying, mailing, squandering my childrens college funds on stamps and manila envelopes, trusting and believing that God never plants a dream that isn't meant to be realized.

Fast forward several years, the rejection letters become much improved, even inspired -- hopeful on occasion. By a stroke of Divine intervention I have secured an honest, successful, and diligent agent, my novel is still being rejected, only now accompanied by encouraging comments, "rich, moving, powerful, superb writing" but nevertheless, "no place for this novel on our list right now."

And all at once I am Rip Van Winkle and it is somehow twenty years later - 2009. High time for this writer to shake, rattle, and roll.