hopefully I helped him get through whatever it was he needed to get through.
You know how you have a favorite author and they write something that doesn’t impress you or move you or really do much of anything for you at all, other than make you cringe just a little teeny bit?
And you say, “oh they must have lost their Muse.” Only you don’t want to admit that, because you carry that writer so deeply in your pocket, you can’t stand to think of him/her not being perfect, even in their glorious imperfectness. No one likes to lose things they’ve got inside their pockets.
The flip side? You don’t want to admit that it’s not the writer, it’s you, the reader. The writer hasn’t changed, the writer is the same old chap with the same old muse, churning out the same keen and delicious drivel as always. But you’ve changed, something inside you has turned over in its sleep, and now everything is different.
Still though, sometimes that author just writes shit, his lousy muse is nowhere to be found, and you only hope it’s not a permanent condition.
Now, for an excellent read with a lot of Musing going on, I recommend Kurt Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus. It is timely and funny and interesting and just all of the things you think of when you think of KV.
Did you just finish reading that new Stephen Hunter book about Bob Lee Swagger also? Cause that doesn’t strike me as your kind of book at all, but I love those Hunter novels, and this one sucked like he was deliberately trying to make it bad.
I am very sorry to hear that the new Hunter book sucks. I know how fond you are of them. My deepest condolences.