[lit-ideas] Re: portraits of angry Jesus

Unpublished writing is in one sense distinctly superior to Literature.
Literature, out there rubbing shoulders with the public, getting chips
knocked off it by persons armed with stones, sticks and theories, is 
bound to suffer signs of age.  Unpublished writing, residing comfortably 
in the memory of the writer, only gets better and better.

______

Ha! I wish I had such benign experience. The 290 page manuscript of this 
novel gets worse every time I look at it. The two best things I can say 
about it are that (1) it's evidence of a long sustained project brought 
to completion and (2) I refrained from sending it to an agent.

I took the germ of the thing--three chapters and an outline--to a master 
fiction class taught by novelist Peter Carey, who wrote superlatives in 
the margins. That encouraged me to finish it, while holding down 
full-time employment at a profession I loathed.

Now it's stuck in my drawer, and I hope that I get enough advance notice 
of my death to be able to burn the thing before commencing a death 
rattle. It's worse than the portrait of Dorian Gray: I get older and it 
gets uglier.

Erin wrote about junk in her room and her charming list of detritus made 
me think of my early novel, a fat stack of browning paper inside a 
manila envelope. But wait, maybe there is a third best thing about the 
novel: (3) I won't have to write it again. My current project is much 
better and I will never write anything that terrible again...except in 
my posts to the list.


Eric

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