Somewhere in his craft-and-process book The Rivan Codex, David Eddings says, “Write every day. You can take a half-day on Christmas.” Which means that holidays don’t necessarily apply in this work. You’ve got to the work every day, especially to keep the pace I’m trying to hit. So even on a day like today, I’m at it.
The blogosphere is filling up with end-of-year best-of lists, and I’m trying not to pay any of it too much mind. I remind myself that I’m doing just fine for my first year, and I shouldn’t let anything distract me from that.
But sometimes you need a bit of a distraction, in which I’m giving this question:
Which pre-1950 author would I want to be and why?
You know, I look at that, and I don’t even know how to answer that. I mean, I don’t want to be anyone else. Who would I want to emulate, perhaps? I think along the lines of Arthur Conan Doyle, who created a set of characters who endure to the point that they’ve become icons. I like the idea of my work enduring like that.
(Of course, the dark side of that is Doyle got so sick of his main character that he killed him off, and then reluctantly resurrected him due to public demand. And if you’ve actually read The Final Problem, the weariness is so evident. It is a perfunctory tale that dispatches Holmes with little fanfare. And yet even that created another enduring character in Moriarty, despite not actually appearing in the story proper.)
So that’s all I have. Be well to each other this holiday, and I’ll see you down in the word mines.