THE FIFTY-FIRST PAGE

With all that art colony talent--nay, competition--one would have thought I had got novel-writing out of my system after my first ridiculous experience. Oh, no. A fool there was and will be.

Rationalization can be its own rationalization. I decided that the work of my youth was too cynical, too market-driven, too contrived. Despite my harbored hatred of the publisher, I realized that it was he who lost money.

Furthermore, a computer was one of my first purchases in the house and writing up reader’s reports is a pathetic sole utilization of the machine. I was probable the only person over forty in the region who had mastered the beast at that time. A novel would be the most ambitious use I could make of it. My computer graphics side had never emerged as it should for a true Macintoshian.

I vowed this novel would be from the heart, pure story-telling with real people doing real things to each other. Birth! Copulation! Death! A magnificent panorama of human experience flooding the pages. No reader would be required to think; the story would tell itself through laughter and tears. It would be neither art nor commerce, but something deeper, richer, more profound.

That really was my goal. Panorama. . . experience. . . flooding? Jesus. Yes, indeed, a fool there was.