pendrifter

I’m thrilled with the cover for Grave Shadows, my anthology of dark fantasy short stories. The talented Rachel did a great job! Here it is…

I’m double-checking the manuscript formatting this week, and hope to publish the anthology at Smashwords by Friday or over the weekend. I’m really liking this whole self-publishing thing. I feel in control of what I want and what I’m doing. Granted I don’t know if I’ll sell any copies at all, but I love the feeling of accomplishment and I’m excited at the prospect of people reading what I’ve written! Excited, and at the same time, I want to run and hide my head.

Surrounded, Tim Burton

August already! Summer wings by at a swoop–shortest season of the year! I’m enjoying The Letters of John Cheever. He struggled for years to become a novelist. It’s interesting to read both Cheever’s letters and John Fowles’ journals at the same time. Seeing how both writers wrestled with their calling is illuminating and revelatory to me. It’s enlightening to peek inside the head of other artists.

Cheever was dismissed by critics as a short story writer who was no master of the novel form. He eventually proved them wrong. Fowles’ tusseled with Demonic Doubt and a deep sense of alienation. Both writers overcame their artistic weaknesses to gain success. The most important thing is to finish.

I’m not sure how Shadow Walk will turn out but I have to finish this new first draft, and I should stop thinking of it in connection with the old manuscript. Already, even as I write it, Shadow Walk is reshaping itself, veering from my outline to find its own path. I’m following along, from scene to scene, and at the end, I’ll look back and see what I’ve got. All I’m doing right now is making clay.

Destiny, John William Waterhouse

I’ve been doing much reading of writer’s journals lately, partly to get through my stack of must-reads and also because I take particular pleasure in reading about the creative struggles of other writers as well as getting a peek into what they thought and how they lived their writing lives.

John Fowles in his The Journals: Volume 1, 1949-1965 writes as a twenty-five year-old university lecturer at the University of Poitiers, France in his neophyte days and gifts the reader with a journey through his philosophical, self-analytical mind.

In A Writer’s Diary, Virginia Woolf’s observations and commentary, her anxieties, and ruminations about her work, both published and in the making, are beautifully written with unselfconscious talent and it saddens me to know this brilliant woman  took a deliberate walk one day into the River Ouse the pockets of her overcoat weighed with stones.

Gail Godwin’s journals, The Making of a Writer,  begin in her early years as a young woman working as a receptionist (“glorified receptionist” as she describes it) at the United States Travel Service in London, struggling to write and determined to succeed as a novelist. She let nothing stand in her way.

For me there are emotional resonances and recognitions in the heartfelt pages of these journals. In reading of other writers’ creative struggles, I realize the value my  ideas, and accept that my way of thinking, writing, and creating will never fit a pattern. Each novel that comes has its  individual journey to ultimate creation. This is a very freeing thought.

John Fowles photo credit: Lidia Vianu