If nothing else, when this is over, I hope I've earned a couple readers for whatever fiction I write.
Like my music, the majority of it is dense, it's dark, it's hard to assimilate, I'm not sure I'd look forward to reading a lot of it if I didn't write it, but it's really only dense if you are accustomed to something user friendly. I think the things I can say in fiction are much more interesting things than anything I can say in essay form. Essays inevitably end up becoming polemics of what you believe and only you, but in fiction, you can get a whole community of beliefs, in dialogue with each other, creating the workings of what a whole community thinks, a whole society, whole eras and peoples.
It's not that what I have to say is important, though sometimes I've deluded myself as a way of keeping morale up, but the things I have to say are only able to be said the way I write it. I was not born with the gene to make myself accessible, I wish I was. Delete that, I think they are important to say, but I think it's important that someone say them, not me.
For better or worse, I've come to realize that Jewish history is my life, I'm boxed in by it and have never been able to escape it, so I've had a very dense epic of Jewish history in my head for the better part of fifteen years that I only made a workable start on in the last two.
Shortly before 'this' all started, I was exhausted by it. If I couldn't convince the editor I paid that this was the way it had to be written, how could I convince anyone to publish it, let alone read it or like it? But it stays in me, insisting on itself, aching to get out, if only I have the nerve to persist through all the doubts.
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More later probably...
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