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About William McGuire and other unexpected stories
The original plan, as plans often do, went awry. Two of the stories I had hoped to include with the print edition of the novella, I Am William McGuire, did not work out as hoped. Most of the shorter material I write is intended as backgound or continuity for novels–stories within the story–and one of those novels, A Young Man From Mars, is one of the oldest of the unpublished works precisely because the internal stories that make it whole are not yet satisfactory to me. I have made the point elsewhere that I believe the novel is best when it reflects the whole of a human life, and that plot should be a natural outgrowth of a life and the way it is lived, or of several lives, and not superimposed. Each of us is a creature of a plot of our own making. What we are born with and the accidents that befall us are only the raw material. How we choose to deal with or avoid those motivations is our story.
The two novellas, I Am William McGuire and If Blood Were Orange, were written originally as screenplays, but as time passed and I began to accept the fact that I would never be able to see them finished that way, I completed them instead as they are now. She Knows Her Onions was a story I took out of The Dark Heart of Night to keep the book a more reasonable length. That Little Old Lady and Me was intended as a part of John Finn but in the end I thought unnecessary to that effort, though still fun, in and of itself. Seely’s Surfside is a key moment from a novel that will never be completed for other more complicated reasons.
In any case, these stories, long on my website, are now available in print through the Great and Mighty Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/William-McGuire-other-unexpected-stories/dp/0989790363/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=I+Am+William+McGuire&qid=1600286701&s=books&sr=1-1
About Resolution 451
The old Cincinnati Library 1874-1955
A dialog.
“What’s this?”
“What?”
“This ‘Resolution 451’ business.”
“Not a business. Just a revolution. Like a New Year’s revolution.”
“You mean resolution.”
“Well, yes, but it’s a revolting matter to have to deal with after all the ages..”
“How so? What’s the matter?”
“It’s about time for the peasants to revolt. That’s all. Past time, I think.”
“Why?”
“To save books from perdition. They’re being destroyed, removed, replaced, expurgated, and abridged. Libraries are busy giving up the wealth of their collections for space to install machines that will be out of date in ten our twelve years—machines that operate soft-ware that will be useless in five or six. The arbiters of political correctness are getting rid of anything that does not meet their approval, altering texts they don’t like. Special interest groups are removing books they disagree with. And the publicly funded colleges all assign the same texts. Publishers are refusing to publish books that do not fit with their political templates. Our literature is being lost to morons who read twitter feeds.”
“Wooh! Except for the twittering, that’s always been going on. It’s the way it always was.” read more…
An article of confederation
Years ago, in the midst of my bookshop battles and as some psychological relief, I began writing a comedy which was then entitled ‘Knox Books’ as both a homage to the great Boston bookseller of revolutionary days as well as a ‘play’ on the homophone ‘knocks.’ Such humor can be entertaining to a stressed brain. I staged that concoction as a sit-com of sorts—imagine a ‘Cheers’ for books, if you will, with a cast of odd-ball regulars confronting crises du jour. The crises were, of course, all the concerns of bibliophiles humbled with the usual human defects. Despite a lack of interest in that work beyond my own confines, I’m sure it would have been a hit. . . At least it kept me sane. read more…
A Time for Books
I have finally done something I had promised to do here years ago. But it is posted at the Bookshop site under ‘annotations.’
In the last days of the Republic
I first knowingly encountered the Administrative State in 1972 when I went to City Hall in Boston to get a peddler’s license so that I might sell books and magazines on the street. I was under the delusion (illusion is too kind) that the First Amendment to the Constitution afforded me the right to sell almost any printed matter except pornography, and this being 1972, even that indecency would be overlooked. But the first week out on the street with my yellow pushcart (wittily named De Cart) got me a warning from the constabulary (i.e., the cops) who were charged with enforcement of the laws of the Administrative State, and I was told to get a proper license or I’d get a fifty-dollar fine. read more…
About the knight’s tale
In related matters, my new novel, The knight’s tale, a story of the future, is now available in paperback from the mighty Amazon as well as in at least one fine bookshop. This novel was written a few years ago but only available until now in parts on my website. It has been part of an effort since beginning to write again to touch on several themes I believe to be important while playing with the many genres of fiction that I love and have read since I was a boy. With The knight’s tale my interests were the ongoing predilection of human beings for slavery as much as our amazing sense of regeneration, set in a future time when the worst has already happened but the best might be possible once again. The question is a simple one, if history repeats itself because we so often ignore it, might not the future come more than once? The adventure science fiction story was a staple of my youth and I hope I have done it some justice.