Old-Fashioned Fruitcake
A word about the title. It is related of Thackeray that, hitting upon Vanity Fair after retiring to rest one night, he leaped out of bed and ran seven times round the room, shouting at the top of his voice. Oddly enough, I behaved in exactly the same way when I thought of Summer Lightning. I recognized it immediately as the ideal title for a novel.
Yes! It is at last that exciting time again, when I have done to the Work In Progress about all I can do for it at present, short of remembering all the Oxford commas and/or setting it on fire.
I am therefore preparing to send it out to a select group of dauntless volunteers who will do their level best to read it and then tell me (ideally uniting civility and truth) what they think of it. Or, failing that, upon what page the book lost the ceaseless battle with that struggle we call Life.
It is often said that one half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives. I had no idea that this was true of brains as well. I have long been aware that there is a part of my brain that does the hidden work of creating characters and so forth. What I hadn’t realized is that this bit of my brain has such different tastes and interests as to verge on being the Other Half.
What has the Other Half been doing to spark these wild surmises, you wonder. Playing chess? Concocting recipes for a new and improved pain au chocolat? Alas, no. What I caught the other half of my brain doing, shortly before I woke this morning, was writing a country song.
