{"id":2311,"date":"2010-04-21T11:26:49","date_gmt":"2010-04-21T15:26:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thegreathorse.com\/?p=2311"},"modified":"2017-05-22T13:43:35","modified_gmt":"2017-05-22T17:43:35","slug":"the-horse-hijacked-the-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/2010\/04\/the-horse-hijacked-the-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;The horse hijacked the novel&#8230;&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/red_cover.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-2312\" style=\"margin-left: 6px; margin-right: 6px;\" title=\"red_cover\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/red_cover-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a>A fine and well-established writer, Robert Olmstead, spoke in Nantucket, MA this past January about his novel \u201cCoal Black Horse.\u201d Two things struck me about his work.<\/p>\n<p>I related to the &#8220;excessive&#8221; time it took him to write. <em>\u201cFor 10 years my mother and my brother would ask me what I was doing and I would say \u2018writing.\u2019 They would ask if I was working on the same book and I would say yes. I felt pathetic.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>My own work, <em><strong>The Legend of the Great Horse<\/strong><\/em> 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 &#8212; or more the re-writing &#8212; that filled every moment I could give it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Is book-writing becoming impractical? <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>More importantly, is book <em>reading <\/em>becoming an anachronism? Life seems to have sped up into a facebook  news stream, blurbs and tweets and advertising\u00a0 combining into a time-consuming torrent of  steadily less meaning.<\/p>\n<p>A happier thought was something else Olmstead said: <em>\u201cThe horse started out as a way for the boy to get where he needed to go, and the horse hijacked the novel&#8230;\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Now, I could have warned him &#8217;bout that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It seems to me the world belongs to those who have time to think &#8230; will the texting, tweeting future allow us commoners that luxury?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[26],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2311"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2311"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15027,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2311\/revisions\/15027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}