Introductions
Nov. 27th, 2007 12:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceYou'd think - wouldn't you? - that a person who has been reading books for forty-five years and expressing opinions about them for pretty much the same length of time, who has been professionally engaged in the booky business for thirty years, etc etc: in short, that a person who knew his way around a book could write a 700-word introduction to a collection of short stories with at least a modicum of fluency. Wouldn't you?
Uh-uh. It's taken me three days, and an awful lot of shelf-building and related displacement activities.
It's not that I disliked the book, because I completely did not; it's not that I had nothing to say about it, because I had more than I could conveniently fit into 700 words. Which isn't much at all. Three pages. The waft of an airy opinion, I could do it in my sleep.
Can't do it on paper, though. Not waftily. Fiction's easy by comparison; blogging is breathing. As soon as someone else's work is involved - a review or an analysis or an introduction, anything like that - suddenly I have no confidence in my own judgement. I have this magnificent inferiority complex anyway, that I haul around with a will - Chaz Brenchley, you know, the one who's not a graduate, the guy who never finished his degree - and being invited to be serious in print just brings it out full force. My opinions are suddenly worth nothing, my arguments are phony, I am myself a phony...
And like that. You know. Which is why a wee intro takes me three days of skull-sweat and neurosis. And gets done a month ahead of deadline, so's I still have time to pull out, or for the editor to discover what a phony I am and find someone else to do it. Like that.
Still, today's good news is that he likes it, so that's okay. He's asked me to find a better title than 'Introduction', but hey, I can do that. There's a lot of Tom Waits lyrics out there, and some of them I haven't even used yet...
Uh-uh. It's taken me three days, and an awful lot of shelf-building and related displacement activities.
It's not that I disliked the book, because I completely did not; it's not that I had nothing to say about it, because I had more than I could conveniently fit into 700 words. Which isn't much at all. Three pages. The waft of an airy opinion, I could do it in my sleep.
Can't do it on paper, though. Not waftily. Fiction's easy by comparison; blogging is breathing. As soon as someone else's work is involved - a review or an analysis or an introduction, anything like that - suddenly I have no confidence in my own judgement. I have this magnificent inferiority complex anyway, that I haul around with a will - Chaz Brenchley, you know, the one who's not a graduate, the guy who never finished his degree - and being invited to be serious in print just brings it out full force. My opinions are suddenly worth nothing, my arguments are phony, I am myself a phony...
And like that. You know. Which is why a wee intro takes me three days of skull-sweat and neurosis. And gets done a month ahead of deadline, so's I still have time to pull out, or for the editor to discover what a phony I am and find someone else to do it. Like that.
Still, today's good news is that he likes it, so that's okay. He's asked me to find a better title than 'Introduction', but hey, I can do that. There's a lot of Tom Waits lyrics out there, and some of them I haven't even used yet...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-27 10:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-27 11:28 am (UTC)- look at me, this piece of paper means I know stuff
- oh really? debug this software now
- huh???