The Unsent Correspondences
To Ms. Rowling:
Despite my bittercisms and my doubts, it's completed, you pulled it off. Not well -- no, my judgment of your technique and your talent remains the same -- but still, you've done the grand thing I haven't. You finished something. You completed a creation: and it was in a nod to that that I waited all day in a bookstore, and then returned straight home to read, sleep ending up a non-factor for the entire 36-hour period. Apparently the front covers of some non-Metro newspapers feature pictures of me there, in the regalia I pulled together for your honor. I'll probably never see those pictures, and I doubt you'll ever have reason to know my name, but still, I feel there's a strange continuity in place here. I don't regret it.
We will only ever be parallel in this one respect; beyond it, we are working in entirely different directions. I am a technical writer, art-obsessed and almost masochistically meticulous, whereas you are a teller of stories and an imaginer. I read your work and cringe at the carelessness with which you handle words; you would read mine and disintigrate from boredom. And yet, I find myself wishing I knew the taste of your brain: you have a gift for raw invention I lack. No, I should rephase -- I, too, read that interview -- you'd been given an invention, which is remarkable in of itself, and something that I, even with all my skill for quantum-exactness in writing, still have reason to envy.
I too might bear the marks of a darling of the Universe, but Its courtship tactics are multi-dimensional, and we are being pursued very differently. I am moved and encircled so slowly that I'll probably never end up anywhere -- I'm threading together any number of perpetually-unfinished pieces, at a pace of one-paragrah-per-hour on the good days; I'm grateful to have any progress at all, but the whole ordeal does seem to wrap me pretty thickly in solitude. (Do you ever remember the solitude? You've been surrounded so long by so many people, so many readers -- how long has it been since you didn't have an army of a million eyes to multiply your words for you?) I realized recently, with something of a cold shock, I don't know anyone, not even among the people closest to me, who could tell me even the most basic plotline of my novel, the one I've been writing for the past five years.
But, enough: you must be busy with your next venture. Maybe, if in some alternate universe we chance to meet, we'll sit down over tea and I'll give you -- free of charge! -- a stern talking-to about your dialogue.
Yours truly,
I.A.E.
Despite my bittercisms and my doubts, it's completed, you pulled it off. Not well -- no, my judgment of your technique and your talent remains the same -- but still, you've done the grand thing I haven't. You finished something. You completed a creation: and it was in a nod to that that I waited all day in a bookstore, and then returned straight home to read, sleep ending up a non-factor for the entire 36-hour period. Apparently the front covers of some non-Metro newspapers feature pictures of me there, in the regalia I pulled together for your honor. I'll probably never see those pictures, and I doubt you'll ever have reason to know my name, but still, I feel there's a strange continuity in place here. I don't regret it.
We will only ever be parallel in this one respect; beyond it, we are working in entirely different directions. I am a technical writer, art-obsessed and almost masochistically meticulous, whereas you are a teller of stories and an imaginer. I read your work and cringe at the carelessness with which you handle words; you would read mine and disintigrate from boredom. And yet, I find myself wishing I knew the taste of your brain: you have a gift for raw invention I lack. No, I should rephase -- I, too, read that interview -- you'd been given an invention, which is remarkable in of itself, and something that I, even with all my skill for quantum-exactness in writing, still have reason to envy.
I too might bear the marks of a darling of the Universe, but Its courtship tactics are multi-dimensional, and we are being pursued very differently. I am moved and encircled so slowly that I'll probably never end up anywhere -- I'm threading together any number of perpetually-unfinished pieces, at a pace of one-paragrah-per-hour on the good days; I'm grateful to have any progress at all, but the whole ordeal does seem to wrap me pretty thickly in solitude. (Do you ever remember the solitude? You've been surrounded so long by so many people, so many readers -- how long has it been since you didn't have an army of a million eyes to multiply your words for you?) I realized recently, with something of a cold shock, I don't know anyone, not even among the people closest to me, who could tell me even the most basic plotline of my novel, the one I've been writing for the past five years.
But, enough: you must be busy with your next venture. Maybe, if in some alternate universe we chance to meet, we'll sit down over tea and I'll give you -- free of charge! -- a stern talking-to about your dialogue.
Yours truly,
I.A.E.