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

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 nature of the literary beast. We have good days and we have bad, great words and drivel. We scribes are not Engines of Perfection. Nor should we be.
So don't poison my oeuvre. Publish the selected works by all means but don't collect every last word I ever wrote. It would bury me far heavier than the earth that holds my bones. And I have no wish to spend eternity in my grave spinning dizzy with shame.
January 2003

The story was...
... That after the frivolity
There came...
A Walk In The Woods
The Ghost Of Sarajevo
The Rise & Fall Of Sisyphus
Sinners In Streaming Video
Joe's Last Meal
Time Changeth The Man
You Looking At Me? - The Almost True Story Of Paddington Bear
Shopping For Katie
Nathan's Friend
To Heal The World
Deadly Night Shade
A Walk In The Woods
ONCE, there lived a simple woodsman called Grimble. He made his living from the Great Forest, cutting timber to serve the meagre needs of his family. Life was hard, but he was his own master and the Forest did not unduly suffer from the tender pruning it received.
Yet all things must change and such a time came to Grimble and his kind. Great cities arose throughout the land, spreading southwards until a city was founded on the very borders of Grimble's