Ars longa, vita brevis
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"And so it is... Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off. And thus, doubtful of strength to travel so far, we talk little about the aim--the aim of art, which, like life itself, is inspiring, difficult -- obscured by mists."
~Joseph Conrad
So many of today's magazines and books on writing focus on the process of writing, with the subtle message that if your words dazzle and sing, you will be a success. Too often, they overlook the fact that a writer needs to have something to say, a message worth printing, a story worth telling. Even when this is so, there is no guarantee of success, for the "race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but time and chance happen to them all." Nevertheless, we press on. We speak because we are impelled to speak, write because of an inner necessity. And at night, on our beds, we dream dreams.
Like Unremembered Histories, my first book of stories, the tales in this volume are varied and unrelated, except that all have my personal psycho-pathological fingerprints on them. “The M Zone” has a sci-fi aspect. “A Poem About Truth” began as a reproduction of the first paragraph from a biography of General Irwin Rommel which quickly morphed into a Borgesian tale. “The Unfinished Stories of Richard Allen Garston,” a story about writers, was given birth as I unpacked the adage, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears…”
A friend of mine suggested that this would work well as the beginning of a novel. I invite you to decide.
The fourth piece, “The Nose”, promises to take you somewhere unexpected. And “Terrorists Preying” began as a dream. The dream became this story's seed. The common trait shared by all is their quality of being Newmanesque.
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~Joseph Conrad
¥
So many of today's magazines and books on writing focus on the process of writing, with the subtle message that if your words dazzle and sing, you will be a success. Too often, they overlook the fact that a writer needs to have something to say, a message worth printing, a story worth telling. Even when this is so, there is no guarantee of success, for the "race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but time and chance happen to them all." Nevertheless, we press on. We speak because we are impelled to speak, write because of an inner necessity. And at night, on our beds, we dream dreams.
¥
Like Unremembered Histories, my first book of stories, the tales in this volume are varied and unrelated, except that all have my personal psycho-pathological fingerprints on them. “The M Zone” has a sci-fi aspect. “A Poem About Truth” began as a reproduction of the first paragraph from a biography of General Irwin Rommel which quickly morphed into a Borgesian tale. “The Unfinished Stories of Richard Allen Garston,” a story about writers, was given birth as I unpacked the adage, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears…”
A friend of mine suggested that this would work well as the beginning of a novel. I invite you to decide.
The fourth piece, “The Nose”, promises to take you somewhere unexpected. And “Terrorists Preying” began as a dream. The dream became this story's seed. The common trait shared by all is their quality of being Newmanesque.
My only regret here is the title. Someone suggested that many of my stories were Kafkaesque, which seeped into the title.
Newmanesque was published on Amazon.com as an eBook
15 years ago this October.
