That impulse to lay down a few words is here once more. I try to leave a two day space between blogs just to let the unconscious percolate. in fact, it is my contention that books are written unconsciously and what we do is channel them. I say that because the first book of “i” was written in white heat in about seven days; what is remarkable to me is that it didn’t need much editing at all. So when I come to write I let it flow out and then I revise; I try not to censor myself, often giving birth to some handsome passages, sometimes not.
In correspondence with a reviewer who decided to read the Tetralogy after reviewing Down to a Sunless Sea, she has emailed that the book is “amazing, depressing, but amazing.” Now that is exciting for my sore eyes. In a few weeks I’ll be part of a reading in Green Valley at its library which is pleasing to me, and I’ll probably read “Mortise and Tenon” from the short story collection. While I go about haphazardly “marketing” the book, I generally don’t write except for these blogs which do serve to keep my hand in it. I will probably work on a finished novel that I wrote more than 20 years ago, Sojourner, a book about a Chinese who migrates to California, Gum Shan, Mountain of Gold, during the goldrush years. It is a quest novel — quite philosophical but grounded in adventure –that I thought was for young adults until not a few editors disabused me of that notion, saying that it is a serious fiction dealing with serious questions — purpose, meaning et al.
Jane will write another one of her lucid introductions and it needs only minor editing until the POD editor gets a hold of it. I feel insecure about Sojourner but Jane has reassured me that it is of substance. Ah, yes, substance — that is my characterological glitch. Why write dreck. So, reader, I don’t.
It seems that at this time of my life I am out there with brush and dustpan gathering all the literary threads and detritus I wrote as a young man. Among the silt I am looking for substance, quality and redeemable work. An attribute of myself as a therapist and man is a quality of naivete; often in therapy it is useful to be naive, for in that innocence can be trust for the client. It is not necessarily a negative. The therapist can learn, he or she can be informed and in that honest exchange more trust accrues, the barnacles of a relationship. When the client chooses to leave, a reef should have been born out of trust.
Enough!
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