Saturday 12/3/22
I have been walking around with the knowledge that I am writing the best Christmas story there has ever been. I am cognizant of that reality as I go where I go and I wanted to note that here. I set out to do this because I knew I had it in me. I knew I could write something that would prove more lasting than A Christmas Carol, as one example.
I am aware that right now these people are going to do what they can to make sure that no one sees this story. I am choosing not to think about that, or at least not dwell on it too much, as I walk around with this knowledge of what is happening and what it is I am making. I am having that awareness, if you will--that total awareness of what this thing is. It's largely written. It's in manuscript. It has the beginning, the middle, and the end, almost all of it is as it will be in the end, but I am still attending to it, and will continue to do so until there is nothing else to attend to. I find ways to take it to another level, to further increase the cumulative effect, the full emotional force of what I have wrought.
This is one of many very special works of art I am doing simultaneously. But I wanted to have an entry about this one, given its nature. This is a story for children. And it's a story for adults. It has been paramount to me as I create it to not include a single thing a child couldn't understand. A single word. The word "whereas," for example, was struck from the manuscript at one point. It would be a story where there wasn't a single instance in which a child would feel left behind, would never have cause to say, "What does that mean, mom?" and it would also be a story that would devastate--wreck--any adult. In adult ways. In good ways.
This is me talking to me to note something important as it was happening. To fix the moment in time. The story is a gift. Which is how I've thought of it. More as a gift than anything. And how could I do that? What would that entail? How could everything I've become go into that? Everything I live for and believe in? I will keep working on the story. I also put this here because sometimes, later, people wonder, "Did he know? Was he aware of what he was making as he made it?" You hear that. Were so and so aware of what X was or who it could reach? This is me saying I am fully aware. I'm just fixing proof of that awareness in time. Real time, as it were.
I mentioned what I was doing and what I had to a friend, and he asked if it would be ready for this Christmas. It likely will be, but I hate the reality that is behind the question. As I said to my friend. It has nothing to do with him. He said he wants to read the story and read it with his family and to his kids. He's excited about it. But the way it's supposed to work is it's an event, and millions of people buy it, it's not me going around to seven or eight people and giving them a Word doc. I said to him it'd be like having Sgt. Pepper, but something far better, and you don't get to release it to the public, but instead you have to dub a cassette copy and bring that over to your friend's house and it's just nine people who have any clue that the thing exists, and who are able to partake of it. But that's where it stands with these evil bigots of publishing right now. I have the best Christmas story ever written. I have no idea when you might be able to see it.
I think this story will most likely go in No Mercy When We There: Stories to Wreck You or S/He/R/Me: Becoming Story. But it could also be--additionally, I mean--its own "book," an actual stand-alone book, one of those very small books that could fit in a stocking. There is such a series of ghost stories for Christmas ("Christmas Eve on a Haunted Hulk" is one of them) that I have several of and see regularly at both bookstores and in gift shop type places like at the MFA, these stocking-stuffer books. Gift books. Books for the pocket. I have a very cool idea for the cover of this book and the text would be quite large. Make it really nice, an object that one gives. A book object. Could sell millions of copies of this story that way. It'd be like the story version of a single, if you will.
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