A fine and well-established writer, Robert Olmstead, spoke in Nantucket, MA this past January about his novel “Coal Black Horse.” Two things struck me about his work.
I related to the “excessive” time it took him to write. “For 10 years my mother and my brother would ask me what I was doing and I would say ‘writing.’ They would ask if I was working on the same book and I would say yes. I felt pathetic.”
My own work, The Legend of the Great Horse took that much time, and yes I felt embarrassed about it after the first few years. (Years! How many tweets could I have done?) I was doing quite of bit of research, since the Great Horse deals with history, but it was the writing — or more the re-writing — that filled every moment I could give it.
Is book-writing becoming impractical?
More importantly, is book reading becoming an anachronism? Life seems to have sped up into a facebook news stream, blurbs and tweets and advertising combining into a time-consuming torrent of steadily less meaning.
A happier thought was something else Olmstead said: “The horse started out as a way for the boy to get where he needed to go, and the horse hijacked the novel…”
Now, I could have warned him ’bout that.
The heroine of The Legend of the Great Horse trilogy is resourceful, quick-witted and brave … her name is Meagan Roberts.
Okay, my blogging is a mess. There, I said it. And once you slow down it gets hard to go again …