Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
At least part of the allure
In retrospect, I took a haphazard approach to writing. My goals varied with the season or with my current project: finish a novel, get something published, get something published in print, get a novel published. I’ve managed all but the last and I know (mostly from reading Kate’s blog) that even if I succeeded at that, it wouldn’t end there, it would likely never end.
So I’m goofing around trying to kill three hours while Jake satisfies a bit of his school’s community service requirement. While he runs a concession at a local church fair, I’m in an old Woolworth’s. Still sports the name but inside, they’ve converted it into one of those multi-vendor antique stores. You know the type: they sell LPs and 45s, back issues of LIFE or Popular Mechanics, grandma’s china, great-great-grandma’s china, countless tchotchkes, tinder-grade furniture, pocket watches that don’t work, jewelry that has gone in and out of fashion a half dozen times since it was first crafted.
And books. Innumerable series of “great classics” — Ibsen, Voltaire, Flaubert. Hard cover first editions of the last thirty or forty years. And the only interesting thing, to me: musty brown-leaved fictions by authors long-dead and long-forgotten, with oddly boring names like Where Men are Men and Pandora Opens the Lid, or dog-eared pulps with Murder in the title. There may be some gems among them; who knows? If you tried to find the author on Wikipedia you’d likely be at a loss, and even the Amazon booksellers would probably scratch their figurative heads.
It seems to me that the desire to write would not stop at the success of publication. That merit badge would be shelved and another grander one desired: to be immortal. To not be the author of The High Cavalier’s Lady, but of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
I don’t imagine this is every author’s dream; I’m sure some would be delighted simply to know financial success, to be able to make the pin money or, gasp, quit the day job. But no one does this who is not also a lover of great books and an appreciator of great writers. Can I be forgiven such a grandiose dream, even while struggling to write a daily blog? Well, it is what it is. You can’t censor your dreams.
D.
Looks like you were published on Empowher.com:
http://www.empowher.com/salivary-gland-infection/content/salivary-gland-infection-parotitis-sialadenitis-or-sialoadentis?page=0,0
Thanks for the tip, Andrea. If you happen to come back here to check for a reply, please tell me — how did you pick up on this?