Posts Tagged ‘writing’

Seriously, if you’re not waiting with bated breath for every installment of Uncle Orson Reviews Everything, there’s something deeply wrong with you.  But today, well, today I read the latest installment, in which Uncle Orson (Orson Scott Card, for the layman, author of Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, and a couple dozen other novels of amazing depth and great power) says goodbye to Barbara Bova, one of the greats in the literary world, and a person that despite this you have never heard of.

Here’s a bit of it, which I’m only providing to you because I know you’re going to go and read the whole thing:

Her loyalty was not merely professional, it was personal. She love us and we loved her. Even when we disagreed about what should be done with this contract or that writing project, even when I refused to make changes a publisher was insisting on, even when I was late turning in a book, she never gave up on me, and continued to give me and my books the benefit of her best thought and strongest efforts.

Barbara fought fiercely for us, as fiercely as she fought cancer this past year. She told almost no one of the personal battle she was going through, and only when it was clear that the treatments had all failed did she telephone us and tell us good-bye. A week later she was gone.

I feel her absence every day.

My greatest wish, and at the heart I believe my only wish, is to live a life that someone of that skill will write something of such beauty about me in my memory.

Cj

P.S. Apropos of that, one of the great geniuses of Card is that although I never met Barbara Bova, or Valentine Wiggin, or almost any of the people he knows or characters he’s created, when he writes them, I love them the way he does.  I can’t imagine the skill required for this.  It is one of the things that prevents me from being a writer – that I see how it can be done well, and despair that I can do it, knowing that a lesser effort will not satisfy me.

The other reason is that I haven’t the discipline.  Yet.  But that’s a topic for another time.

and one of the problems that has occasioned is that I’m writing about 20 pages of stuff per week already, and now I’m adding another 3-4,000 words to that.  Folks, I can’t write that much.  I love writing.  I do it all the time.  But I find that I’m getting burnt.  Where I used to blog three or four times a week, now I’m down to once if I’m lucky.  I used to write a lot in my journal, too, but now I almost never get to it.  It’s as if there are only so many words available, and once I’ve used them up, that’s it.

Yesterday I spent most of the day at home, doing things I’ve been putting off and needed to work on.  I made bread.  I made loganberry-crabapple jam, which is about the tastiest stuff ever created by man, if I do say so myself.  I made grape juice and apple juice and crabapple juice and crabapplesauce – also incredibly smooth and tasty (it looks like yogurt) – ground wheat and cracked wheat and sprouted wheat.  I did a few mortgage things as well, just for spice and variety.  It was a great day.  I wrote less than 200 words for the first time in months.

I recognize that this is normal, that life goes in cycles, and that there’s nothing particularly wrong with not blogging.  Several billion people get on just fine without doing it at all.  Still, I realize that this blog is important to me, and like most important things, it requires time and sacrifice.  So I will not be quitting or even phasing out this blog, just so you know, though shortly I’ll be breaking it into two pieces, a mortgage piece and an “everything else” piece.  Watch for that.