If they were potboilers, it’s too late for them to boil any pots. Let them stay in the drawer. If they were meant to be bestsellers, my back cover photo is too aged to attract and my grandmotherly self too staid to go on booktours. They are literary novels, deeply sharing of a troubled life masked in characters who then took on their own, different, lives. I glory in them. Novels that came back with encouragement to rewrite, to hone these characters that are not me, take them to a new place..
They sit in drawers . Recently I read Emily Dickinson’s diaries. Sealed in a wall by a interior home improvement of her house in Amherst, then unsealed by another workman, and kept secret for years. Once I buried an out of print novel in a tin box in my garden. A fine novelist I knew once turned her talents to pottery. Pots to be dug up by a later people and admired.
But lately I think there may not be a later people. A new thought for me.
I follow the news like a sportscaster following a crucial game. What will save us? Recently I read an article feeling the outlines of a new industrial revolution. It is being previewed by the internet. Electric power, like words, will be generated by localnodes: each building, with one of the new powersources like solar, sharing the surplus with a web.
It gave me hope.
So I put my five unread novels on Kindle. Off to the ether, to the cloud. They are fledged and flown. And maybe all the dense life in them will be puzzled over by aliens. It’s a fine feeling
This is the first entry in a blog called SKYWRITING. There must be many writers out there who share these thoughts. Let me look at your work. I'll show you mine. Let us be nodes of power...