What? A book?
Count me in!
Goldie -- I have never met CJ -- He was "Just Passing Through" 20-odd years ago. And for at least half that time, having read perhaps 15,000 of his posts (TINS) I have been at him to
seriously write. Why? Because what I recognise as an author is his unpolished talent.
So, at the moment, I am both pleased and appalled.
VERY pleased he is going to start.
Appalled because he plans to write/publish "raw". <-- C.S. Forester hisself couldn't do that. It is a sure way NOT to give your work a snowball's chance to be seen, remembered, discussed.
A practical point to the above -- Please take note, CJ -- this is important:
You write a chapter, and you are three chapters later in writing, and you remember an anecdote that would triple the interest in that previous chapter. Or you made a grievous, dumb-ass mistake in that previous chapter. Or you regret the fargin dead-end that chapter sticks you with.
Or a hundred things yer Unca has already fargin experienced!!
If it is already out there when you discover it -- warped, crooked, "oh shit" flat wrong, potentially poisonous, somehow awful to the bone...
you cannot touch it -- even if it costs you every reader you ever had.
The Internet is forever. Got that?
Jack Kerouac did that. (Unedited stuff) Other than nutcases, does anyone know what he wrote?
The guy whose novel I am now editing (as he writes/adds gems/re-rewrites it) humbles me. And when he first started a few years ago, I saw
his talent with words. We worked together, and his first novel was great.
This will be his second, and it is ten times better than his really good first.
That's where I want CJ -- Not out panhandling day to day.