Not no one.

I'm thinking about something in a friend's email to me night before last. A while back I mentioned to him that I realized that, most likely, no one at all will read my novel. He responded as follows:

>which no one at all will read.
but now I know that that is okay.
that that is not important.
well. let me change that. as long as one person reads. and enjoys. then it's worth it.
one is enough.
that's my new rule.

That "one is enough" has been rolling around in my head ever since. I think it pretty well encapsulates the drive behind all efforts at putting words into public circulation. You're looking for the one person who will really *get* it. Contact. It's what we all need, especially bloggers, or we wouldn't be doing it, would we?

If I knew that there would be only one, though, would the impetus I feel to write longer fiction die out? Die is the right word, here, because the effort is against mortality. We write books, I think, to grab a little piece of immortality. Something of our selves will endure beyond us between the covers of a book, or a journal, or a packet of letters to a loved one (the epistolary form can be as little as ordinary letters between mother and son, sisters--the unique authorial voice as clear there as in the finest work of art).

Blogging is so different, though. It's all about connections right now. Twenty years from now is anyone you care about going to be able even to find all these digital words of ours? Aren't we spending time creating something even less enduring than our own fleshly selves?

Now back to that comment: *one is enough.*

Is it?

The Day After

Oh, that sounds portentous. Don't mean it to be. But it is September 12, at long last. A friend's birthday is today. She's so glad it's not yesterday. She says if it were yesterday, she'd change it. Always wanted to be a Leo, she says, also younger, so she'd push it to August 11, next year. We each deal with misery in a different way.

The editor who's been looking at my novel sent back her comments this morning. She has an interesting workday, beginning (in Seattle) at dusk and going until dawn. So what's today for her? If it's still dark out, she counts 5 AM to be part of the night of the previous day. So I guess, for her, she sent me her comments on Sept. 11. Does that change the way I think about them? (Of course not.)

They were insightful, too. I haven't, it appears, written the Great World Novel, after all. She said it was beautifully written, that my writing reminds her of A.S. Byatt, which is "good company" to be in. (Indeed, it is.) So the problem isn't the writing; just most everything else...

Well, I exaggerate. She raised some issues a) that I believe a revision will resolve; and b) that need copious thinking about. These aren't really the same issues. Whether that's good or not, I don't yet know. What's equally interesting to me, however, is my reaction. On one hand, I'm dying to get started on that revision; on the other, I'm fighting depression over some of the elements she called into question. My plot, for instance--okay, part of it; also, my characters' failure actually to have lives, beyond their drive to work out the problems the peculiar plot has handed them. And then there's the fact that one of the characters is a writer. Apparently one can only have a character who's a writer if you've already published a book of fiction. She pointed out that this is the view of agents and editors.

Well, shoot, honey. I figure I know as much about it as anyone who has published one book (the amount necessary for the agents/editors to accept a writer/character). I've been writing for, well, twenty years; I've lived with a much published writer for 25 years; I've edited a number of published writers; and my son is a writer. That's pretty much full Berlitz immersion, if you ask me.

(Yes, I know that this sounds defensive, but it's not, really, since right now I plan to ignore that part of her criticism.) You have to know your work well enough to know what applies and what doesn't, it seems to me.