ONCE MORE INTO THE BRINK....

Here I go again... I have started my second unpublished novel in a series. I have written one hundred and eight pages into it.

No one ever said writing is a rational occupation. It is a profession that lives on hope, little sleep, and less praise. One has to be a master of dreams to push on through the most dreary of situations. The bills, sick kids, ill self, lonely nights typing at the computer, the blank screen that does not cheer with its stare uncomprehending as a government form that asks "Well, what is your work?"

Let me think... I am the tender of imagination, the midwife of new beings in print, a guardian of a world.

Doesn't get one very far in the "real world". I usually scrawl "homemaker" on a form. "Writer" means, at least to the bureaucratic people that I know, 'unemployed person with an English degree'. Not very prestigious.

So what keeps me going and persisting and hoping to be published? Because my characters, those mischievous struggling (almost) human creatures I've known for all these years, make my life reflective and intellectually alive. If they died unwept, so would the part of my life that budges the humane in me. This keeps me going as a writer.
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WHAT'S THE POINT?

Borders bookstore chain is installing televisions. The bookstore chain has partnered with Ripple, a national provider of in-store content to deliver information to "upper class" customers. Ripple also delivers content to such chic businesses as Jiffy-Lube and Jack-in-The-Box.

I don't know about the majority of the readers of this blog, but I'm old-fashioned. When I go to a bookstore, I expect to find books and periodicals. I like bookstores because I can escape the yak-yak of television. Bookstores are supposed to help people think not leave them hanging with their mouths wide open and drooling like eejits on the carpet. Or have I missed some crucial lesson in modern publishing?

Once upon a time, books were actually conveyors of knowledge not units to move out the door. When I was a child, too many years ago, I fell absolutely in love with the warm pencil colours of D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths. The sweet face of Aphrodite arising from the sea or the poignant reunion of Demeter and Persephone in the grain fields kicked a hole in my tidy go-to-churchy view of life. My world was suddenly aflame with ideas. Books aren't meant to be a marketing tool alongside television. Books are intended to open up new venues for the mind to explore.

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