Attack Of The 50-foot Verbose Mutant Killer Fountain Pens From Mars | Page 9

I can prevent a
shattering travesty.
You see, something shocking has happened in the future: I made it as a
writer. My words stood the test of time to survive beyond my death.
Amazing.
Now that's not the problem (other than finding as way to collect the

royalties in the next world). This is: some bright spark has hit on an
idea. It's a real money-spinner, or so this bloke hopes. He wants to cash
in on my post-mortal success by publishing the Collected Works of
Mark Cantrell, author extraordinaire of the early 21st Century.
Okay, fair enough, it's some kind of acclaim and I am gracious enough
to accept the compliment even it's from some money-grubbing bastard
out to rob my tomb - but it's also a total disaster. I mean this individual
cannot be serious, right?
I hope you see my problem, or at least the first inklings. Then again,
looking at your face I can see you're in some doubt. Hang about, you
say, I'm dead so my opinion just can't hack it. Well, that's the reason for
this - ultimately posthumous - message. So stop picking over my corpse
and I'll explain.
Now, when I was breathing I tended to be prolific; I'd heard it said that
a writer should strive to write something every day. I did my best to
live up to that. I wrote articles, news, comment, stories, poems, novels
and stuff I couldn't make head nor tail of.
And now this bright spark wants to pull it all together?
Are they mad in this future world?
Do they have specially reinforced shelves?
They obviously have no idea of just how much crap they are about to
unleash on an unsuspecting public. Nor do they seem to care about the
bucket of shit they're about to smear all over my reputation as a writer.
I mean, to create the gems that made my name I had to wade through a
lake of slurry. That's the nature of the writing game.
My life as a writer was not a phenomenon. It wasn't a singular event. It
was a process, which like a story had a beginning a middle and an end.
And contrary to narrative causality, my beginning wasn't a great hook
for the reading public.

In that literary beginning, I may have got lucky with my words but
sooner or later lucks runs out. A writers' development must leave luck
behind (in the creation of their words) and develop their craft. And so I
did. Learning with each assembled sentence, each completed passage
each rejected (or published) manuscript.
My first words as a literary creature were but the proud products of a
newly-potty trained toddler. A milestone in life, a necessary step to
onward development, but still essentially a potty full of shit.
It takes time to hone and develop the scribing skills and it is a learning
process that goes on for a lifetime. Even the best of us are but
journeymen.
As for the end, so maybe I got lucky and died face down on that final
conclusive manuscript, or truly unlucky and my brain turned to still
metabolising jelly. In this worst case scenario, I lost my skills and spent
my final years as a dribbling geriatric infant. 'Nuff said on that score,
lets focus on the middle. The realm of the great journey.
Here is where I produced my great works; the ones that caught your eye
and emblazoned my name on your souls. This is the realm of my
literary life, of so many days spent thinking and living and writing. All
of it now to be collated and collected.
So let me ask you a question, and please think very hard.
Was everything I wrote a gem?
No.
No it was not.
Others will tell me the proportion, the ratio of crap to gold, but you in
your quest to cash in on my fame seem to have lost your ability to
appraise. So I say to you, be a prospector, pan the stream of my work
and separate the gold from the dross. If I have made my name sufficient
for you to consider throwing every word I ever wrote upon the

publishing pile, then your task cannot be that difficult for the appraisal
has gone on throughout my life.
Don't, I beg you, poison my work, my legacy, my reputation by
polluting the good with the bad.
Sort them. Judge them. Edit them by all means, but don't mix them up
to make a weak alloy. Junk the dross where it belongs: in the backroom
archive, a dusty repository of interest only to academics studying my
development.
For in my life I wrote much that was good, but also much that was bad
and indifferent. That is the