Oops, I forgot my camera at Terry Bisson's house the other day, Terry being a fellow SF writer. He says he'll send it back.

So I'll be relying on recycled images the next few days. This week I'm hoping to get near the end of my novel. Reaching the end is always bittersweet — I get used to my invented world and hate to leave it; also there's always a feeling that I could have done more with the world than I did. The actuality of a work of art tends not quite to live up to the golden vision of it that one starts with. Oh well, it's another pumpkin on the vine.

I'm referring there to a phrase in Italo Calvino's marvellous If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, where he speaks of “someone who makes books the way a pumpkin vine makes pumpkins…” He also has a character saying, “The novel I would most like to read at this moment…should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth, like a tree, an entangling, as of branches and leaves…” The desire to narrate, yes. Growing novels like pumpkins, yes. So far, so good. Thank you, Muse.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 25th, 2005 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.