The late E.L. Doctorow, from The Paris Review, Winter 1986, "The Art of Fiction #94"

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any idea how a project is going to end?

DOCTOROW

Not at that point, no. It’s not a terribly rational way to work. It’s hard to explain. I have found one explanation that seems to satisfy people. I tell them it’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

INTERVIEWER

How many times do you come to a dead end?

DOCTOROW

Well if it’s a dead end, there’s no book. That happens too. You start again. But if you’re truly underway you may wander into culverts, through fences into fields, and so on. When you’re off the road you don’t always know it immediately. If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty. So you have to trace your way back, you see. It sounds like a hazardous way of working—and it is—but there is one terrific advantage to it: Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author’s. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is unlike the others because you are not bringing the same voice to every book. I think that keeps you alive as a writer. I’ve just read the latest Ernest Hemingway publication, The Garden of Eden—it’s actually a fragment of a work he never completed—and in this as in the others he spoke with the Hemingway voice. He applied the same strategies to every book, strategies as it happens that he came upon and invented quite early on in his career. They were his triumph in the early days. But by the last decade or two of his working life they trapped him, restricted him, and defeated him. He was always Hemingway writing, you see. Of course at his best that wasn’t such a bad thing, was it? But if we’re speaking of entry to the larger mind, his was not the way to find it.

"Look out Mama, there's a white boat comin' up the river"

I turned 50 on Saturday, 3 days ago.

I've been trying to make some changes in my life. Cutting way back on my drinking, trying to get our house and finances in order, trying to concentrate more on my writing and wife and family. The opposite of the mid-life crisis, maybe -- instead of trying to act like I'm in my twenties, I'm trying to be a grown-up for once.

I miss my friend Mike South, who is still semi-laid-up in Georgia from his motorcycle accident 9 weeks ago. I would like to visit him but making time for the trip is difficult.

I started working on a new short story today, a crime story called "Schooling Damien".

reading: Lucky at Cards by Lawrence Block
hearing: Kind of Blue, by Miles Davis
seeing: Peter Jackson's "King Kong"

In the Lovecraft Museum

Just got the new hardcover novella from Steve Rasnic Tem today... came all the way from PS Publishing in England. Can't wait to read it -- I am a madman for Steve's work and cannot recommend his books highly enough.

"Make a joke and I will sigh and you will laugh and I will cry"

Spent the day with my two youngest while Beth worked. Did some minor yard work: trimmed the hedges out front, cut some plants that were growing around the back porch, cut some grass in the backyard. Getting ready for a show tomorrow with the band -- we're playing Oddbody's, a concert venue here in Dayton where we played last August and did very well. Looking forward to the show, which will be our first "real" show since Kent Martin left the band and moved to Colorado in January.

Woke up and weighed 198 today, which is a step in the right direction, but still far from 185, which is my goal weight. I plan on stay on the low-carb regimen for another week until my wife takes me to Spaghetti Warehouse to celebrate my 50th birthday. 

Music: Ozzy & Sabbath
Reading: Steve Rasnic Tem, "In the Lovecraft Museum"
Watching: Jackie Brown

By Your Side, Brother

Beth is working today. I read for a bit, then got the kids into the Pontiac and headed up to Troy to visit Animal.

Animal is in his early 40's, and he worked for me at Flamingo Showclub when I was the manager there. At various times, he cleaned the club, bounced and also worked as a D.J. He left before I quit, and since then we've stayed in touch and remained friends. He's been through a few relationships which have resulted in 2 small kids, 3 major strokes and several minor ones, and (I think) 3 heart attacks.

He's currently in a rehab center recovering from a recent stroke and heart attack, and I wanted to take the kids to see him. We brought him one of the band's posters to hang in his room, some books to read and a bottle of Coke (which he'd asked for).

The kids were good. He gave my daughter Stormy a drawing of Winnie the Pooh he had done. We couldn't stay as long as I wanted to, but it was nice to visit with my friend and wish him a speedy recovery.

I plan to dedicate "Sweet Leaf" to him at my band's show this Friday.

Music: Herbie Hancock
Reading: Steve Rasnic Tem
Watching: Cartoons

Rules For Writers, Part One

Caitlin R. Kiernan is the award-winning writer of such great books as The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, The Red Tree, and Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart. She keeps a blog which you can read at Dear Sweet Filthy World, and on March 22, 2005 she posted the following:

"I have to write. I have to write regardless. I does not matter if I've had a bad day. It does not matter if I am depressed or in some other sort of mood not conducive to writing. I still have to write. I does not matter if the weather is crappy or if there's trouble in my family. It does not matter if I'd rather do something else. It does not matter if, in some objective, cosmic sense, I've earned the right to do something else. It does not matter if it's not my fault. It does not matter. I have to write. Nothing else matters, ever. Nothing else matters more. Them's the rules. I knew them when I signed on, and now I'm stuck with them. I have to find a way to write in spite of chaos. That's the only option, because clearly things have no intention of becoming any less chaotic."

Good Advice.
 

His Inner Poe: Rare Tennessee Williams Horror Story Published For First Time

From www.foxbusiness.com

NEW YORK –  As she takes in the despair of her in-laws' one-room apartment in "A Streetcar Named Desire," Blanche Dubois exclaims, "Only Poe! Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe could do it justice!"

Years earlier, Tennessee Williams channeled Poe for an entire story.

Williams' "The Eye That Saw Death," appearing in the spring issue of The Strand Magazine, is a feverish, 4,800-word horror tale clearly inspired by the patron of the genre. Recently unearthed by Strand managing editor Andrew F. Gulli, "The Eye That Saw Death" is narrated by an unnamed man who has suffered from a seemingly incurable disease that has left him nearly blind. At age 30, he receives an eye transplant that restores his sight, but leaves him with ghoulish side effects. The narrator is afflicted with visions that begin as a "chaotic blur," then become more focused and traumatizing, whether "huge, black, bulging eyes" or "terrible, tusk-like teeth."

The new eye, it turns out, belonged to a convicted killer. The narrator begs to have the surgery reversed.

"It is true that the pleasures of the blind are few and frugal," Williams writes. "They live apart from the world and participate little in its affairs. But I do not regret that choice I made the day I fell, raving mad with horror, to the floor of the oculist's office. Oh, never! Far, far better to be blind than to see with the eye that saw death!"

Gulli, who has previously published little-known works by Graham Greene and John Steinbeck among others, found "The Eye That Saw Death" at one of the country's leading literary archives, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Williams scholar George Crandell says the undated work is a "pretty good story" and surprisingly polished for a piece never published before. Crandell is especially impressed because he thinks Williams was likely in high school when he completed it.

"The story has a similar feel to 'The Vengeance of Nitocris,' kind of a horror story that was published in Weird Tales in 1928 (when Williams was 16)," says Crandell, the associate dean of Auburn University's graduate school and a member of the editorial board of the literary journal the Tennessee Williams Annual Review.

"The Eye That Saw Death" has a fable-like quality even as its plot recalls Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." It reads like an inversion of Greek mythology, in which the blind are not prophets or wise men, but those who truly will not see — or like an allegory for creative expression, when the artist is almost literally tortured by his vision.

Williams had good reason to be preoccupied with eyesight. He had poor vision in his left eye and would undergo four cataract operations, one of which he describes in "Memoirs," published in 1975. In a humorous but unsettling scenario that his early short story seemed to anticipate, Williams remembers agreeing to a procedure for which the doctor waived his fee in return for Williams allowing the operation to be the basis of a lecture to observing student ophthalmologists.

"The patient is now in position, apply the straps," Williams remembers, roughly, the doctor saying.
"Tighter, tighter, he has a history of vomiting during the surgery. Eyelids secured against blinking, pupil anesthetized now. The needle is now about to penetrate the iris. It is now into the iris. It has now penetrated the lens. Oh, oh, vomiting, nurse, choking, tube in esophagus. My God, what a patient. I mean very good, of course, but an unusual case."