One literary Saturday recently I found myself in the attic. When we first moved to this house I sometimes wrote up there but I quickly learned that with no heating it was intolerably chilly on autumnal mornings, and that didn’t speak well for the coming winter. Nevertheless, I set up a shelf with my fiction writing on it. I was looking for something on that shelf when I discovered many things I’d forgotten. Novels mostly. I don’t know how many I’ve started, but I have completed six (now close to seven). Going through the papers and folders on that shelf I found about 250 handwritten pages of another novel—one that I’d completely forgotten. There were stacks of short stories, also handwritten, awaiting some recognition. I haven’t had a ton of success in getting fiction published—the current count is 33 short stories—but I was inspired by what I found.
When my wife and I visited a lawyer some years back to make out our wills, I kept trying (unsuccessfully) to interject a literary executor. At that point I had published only three books and two of them were academic. Besides, there’d probably be an extra charge for adding that codicil. I guess what I fear is that all of this work will just get dumped when I die. Retirement doesn’t look like a realistic possibility for me, and what I need is time to sort it out. Some of the novels aren’t good. I know that. Some are. One was actually under a book contract for a couple of years before the publisher decided to kill it when the acquisitions editor left. I haven’t found a replacement publisher yet. Then, a few years back, my laptop started complaining about the amount of writing I was asking it to remember. I had to buy external hard drives to store some of my writing. Even I forget it’s there sometimes.
Graphomania should have its definition expanded to include those whose thoughts overflow to the point that they’re constantly writing. There’s a reason I get up so early in the morning every day. Up there in the attic I found what I was looking for and pulled it off the shelf. A half-written novel that I had, unwittingly, started to write again presuming that the original had been lost. All of the writing has been done while trying to hold down a demanding 9-2-5 with no sabbatical and few vacation days. Not all of it is finished. Not all of it is good. But someone, I hope, will stand in front of the dumpster on some future day and say, “This doesn’t get thrown away.”
