I Studied The Cello For A Long

Book Tours Are Excellent Things, And One Is Lucky To Get To Go On One, But They Have A Way Of Leeching Away One's Will To Live.

Every Year The Literary Press Praises Dozens If Not Hundreds Of Novels To The Skies, Asserting Explicitly Or Implicitly That These Books Will Probably Not Be Suffering Water Damage In The Basements Of Their Authors' Houses 20 Years From Now. But Historically, Anyway, That's Not The Way The Novelistic Ecology Works.

Fanfiction Is What Literature Might Look Like If It Were Reinvented From Scratch After A Nuclear Apocalypse By A Band Of Brilliant Pop-culture Junkies Trapped In A Sealed Bunker. They Don't Do It For Money. That's Not What It's About. The Writers Write It And Put It Up Online Just For The Satisfaction. They're Fans, But They're Not Silent, Couchbound Consumers Of Media. The Culture Talks To Them, And They Talk Back To The Culture In Its Own Language.

We're Wired To Expect The World To Be Brighter And More Meaningful And More Obviously Interesting Than It Actually Is. And When We Realize That It Isn't, We Start Looking Around For The Real World.

You Don't Want To Move Toward Some Utopian Literary Situation Where Everybody's Free Of All Conventions. That's Ridiculous! Conventions Are What You Need. You Have Nothing To Break Down If You Don't Have Conventions.