#55
March 11, 2004
From: Kelley

A special virtual toast to Michael Ventura, author of the essay "The Talent of the Room," which I recommended earlier this year in my thoughts on writing. He's graciously given me permission to post his essay. I'm grateful.

Every time I read this piece, something different resonates with me. Right now, as I bang my forehead bloody against plot, I'm drawn to this sentence: Sometimes it takes weeks or months even to begin writing. This is a hard truth for me. It's easy for me to feel that if I'm not producing word count, I am not working hard enough, which leads down the cheerful road of I'm lazy, I am undeserving, I will fail utterly, everyone will point at me and laugh, the cat will pee on me, Nicola will leave me, the planet will explode.... And yet I know, as I've said before, that it's not a race, that there is no relationship in writing between quanitity and quality (and I mean no relationship: more is not necessarily better, but neither is less), and that, as Michael Ventura goes on to say, the point will always be how you behaved, what you felt, what you thought, what you dared, what you fled, how you lived life, how life lived you, alone, in that room.

Enjoy.

#54
March 11, 2004
from: Jeff Aufderheide, jeff@thot-tech.com

I was depressed/frustrated with marriage/work/life and was spending a couple of days alone. I needed to escape into another world, which is what reading good fiction does for me. Periodically I decide to diverge from my usual list of favorites and Solitaire caught my attention about two minutes into B&N. Ursula K. Le Guin is one of those special favorites and with her endorsement I felt compelled to try you out. You immediately sucked me in, I read the tale non-stop, exercised my emotions, gave much fodder for my sub-conscious mind to chew on as I slept. This will brew within me for some time and I look forward to your next.

Thank You.

Jeff

I'm the same way with good fiction, I fall down into it and lose myself while the everyday chunters on around me. It's been like that since I was a child and would bring stacks of books home from the library and escape into them. What a gift, a story that I can immerse myself in, that feels true, that engages and involves me, that makes me feel and think, laugh and cry. It amuses me that "escapist" is so often used as a synonym for "crap fiction," as if a story's ability to draw a reader completely into itself is somehow a bad thing. I suppose it's like much else in my life—the conflict between my relativist point of view, and the wider worldview that seems to be more comfortable with absolute standards and either-or categorizations. But it is far too pretty a day in Seattle to grump, so I won't.

Since you are a fan of Ursula (whom I admire profoundly as a person and a writer), you perhaps already know about her recently published text of, and thoughts on, the Tao Te Ching. Beautiful stuff.

I hope your frustration is less and your world is sunny, emotionally if not meteorologically. If you brew up any thoughts you'd like to share, come on back.