to time, Iâm ashamed to say.
In any case, I thought about this quote more and more as I struggled with the panic in my body and the frozen feeling in my head, that awful locked-up feeling. It seemed to sum up my despair and my growing certainty that I would never be able to write again (what a tragedy, V. C. Andrews with a prick felled by writerâs block). It was this quote that suggested any effort I made to better my situation might be meaningless even if it succeeded.
According to gloomy old Dennison Carville, the aspiring novelist should understand from the outset that fictionâs goals were forever beyond his reach, that the job was an exercise in futility. âCompared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there,â Hardy supposedly said, âthe most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.â I understood because that was what I felt like in those interminable, dissembling days: a bag of bones.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
If there is any more beautiful and haunting first line in English fiction, Iâve never read it. And it was a line I had cause to think of a lot during the fall of 1997and the winter of 1998. I didnât dream of Manderley, of course, but of Sara Laughs, which Jo sometimes called âthe hideout.â A fair enough description, I guess, for a place so far up in the western Maine woods that itâs not really even in a town at all, but in an unincorporated area designated on state maps as TR-90.
The last of these dreams was a nightmare, but until that one they had a kind of surreal simplicity. They were dreams Iâd awake from wanting to turn on the bedroom light so I could reconfirm my place in reality before going back to sleep. You know how the air feels before a thunderstorm, how everything gets still and colors seem to stand out with the brilliance of things seen during a high fever? My winter dreams of Sara Laughs were like that, each leaving me with a feeling that was not quite sickness. Iâve dreamt again of Manderley, I would think sometimes, and sometimes I would lie in bed with the light on, listening to the wind outside, looking into the bedroomâs shadowy corners, and thinking that Rebecca de Winter hadnât drowned in a bay but in Dark Score Lake. That she had gone down, gurgling and flailing, her strange black eyes full of water, while the loons cried out indifferently in the twilight. Sometimes I would get up and drink a glass of water. Sometimes I just turned off the light after I was once more sure of where I was, rolled over on my side again, and went back to sleep.
In the daytime I rarely thought of Sara Laughs at all, and it was only much later that I realized something is badly out of whack when there is such a dichotomy between a personâs waking and sleeping lives.
I think that Harold Oblowskiâs call in October of1997 was what kicked off the dreams. Haroldâs ostensible reason for calling was to congratulate me on the impending release of Darcyâs Admirer, which was entertaining as hell and which also contained some extremely thought-provoking shit. I suspected he had at least one other item on his agendaâHarold usually doesâand I was right. Heâd had lunch with Debra Weinstock, my editor, the day before, and they had gotten talking about the fall of 1998.
âLooks crowded,â he said, meaning the fall lists, meaning specifically the fiction half of the fall lists. âAnd there are some surprise additions. Dean Koontzââ
âI thought he usually published in January,â I said.
âHe does, but Debra hears this one may be delayed. He wants to add a section, or something. Also thereâs a Harold Robbins, The Predators ââ
âBig deal.â
âRobbins still has his fans, Mike, still has his fans. As you yourself have
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