Watching a writer work must be the most boring activity in the known universe. At least with watching paint dry you can watch the slight color change that usually happens during the process. A writer can be hard, nay, even furiously at work and still moving less than the average graveyard angel. Then comes the big burst of activity—if you’re both lucky—typing. Or maybe scribbling with pen and paper, if you’re into that old school method. Then…nothing again. For greater or lesser slices of eternity. Most writing doesn’t happen on the page. It happens somewhere inside and in the kinetic connection between mind and computer keys. When it happens, which isn’t always.
Still getting the words down, which is what it’s all about. Making my quota most days, sometimes a bit more. Hit something of a milestone this morning when I crossed the 50,000 word threshold. As thresholds go it’s pretty meaningless, but to me it signals that the book is over half way done. I don’t write doorstops, I know I’ve mentioned this before. I expect to wrap it up at about 90,000 words. If I don’t, I’ll be as surprised as anyone. I know what’s already happened, what’s about to happen, and a penultimate scene that breaks it down, wraps it up and kicks the entire thing to the curb. In a good way. Some old friends return. Some not-so-friends, and All is Revealed. Well, most of it.
I am so looking forward to that. I think Yamada is too. And by the way, this is a three-princess book. First time I think there’s been more than two. Nope, three. And one especially.
To the left is the cover of my third story collection, issued in 2010, On the Banks of the River of Heaven, which is the title cut. Not only was it the third collection in ten years, but it was my first hardcover collection. As of a week or so ago, it’s out of print. If you look on Amazon it will say that it’s “Temporarily Out of Stock,” but this isn’t so. There may or may not be a few stragglers with the publisher and a few more with me, some in the used market, but basically it’s gone. We’ve talked about that whole thing where publishing short stories is like “throwing rose petals in the Grand Canyon and listening for the thud.” It was definitely true here. I can’t complain too much, as the book sold well enough to finish out its run, which is something a lot of print books never do, but in five years it never got a single Amazon review. Things like that tend to make a writer feel unwanted. Whereas on GoodReads it had sixteen ratings and a score of 4.5 out of 5.0, and anyone on GoodReads knows what a tough crowd they are. It is a good book, and I’m not going to let the fact that I wrote it stop me from saying that, but its time on the physical plane is over. It will live on, possibly forever, in ebook form.
Richard Parks 