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Letter to the reader - April 8th 2005 ________ Michael Graeme "To those who say hello, without attachments" |
Dear reader It's now six years since the Rivendale Review began and I note the counter is edging up towards my first 10,000 hits. All right, perhaps a thousand of those are my own, and I have been online since the earlier days of webtrickery, which makes this still very much one of the quieter backwaters of the Internet. However, it's plain by now that readers do drop by occasionally and I'm grateful to those who've written to me over the years. Things have moved on a little since those early days. The website is no longer primarily a sort of retirement home for stories that once saw publication in printed form. Indeed, by far the greater proportion of work you'll find now has not been published, and probably never will be. I do still push the occasional short story towards publication, but find I have increasingly less patience for negotiating the strange shifting quicksands of the fiction market these days. Thus my second major work, "The Road from Langholm Avenue", for which I had high hopes at the time, now joins my apprentice novel: "The Singing Loch", online. Another novel is under way and, though it might seem strange for a writer to say this, it is not being written with a commercial eye at all, and when it's done, I'll most likely post it directly here. It's my age, I suppose. The fiery ambition of the youth who was going to change the way the world saw itself through his words, is now mellowing into the introspective calm of a middle aged chap who understands that the world will think whatever it damned well likes, regardless of what I tell it. Instead, the writer is turning himself around a little more and pointing inwards, towards the core of the writer, rather than out towards the desk of an imaginary editor. I've never made a living as a writer, and heaven forbid that I should ever have to. If I lost my day-job tomorrow, it would not be writing that helped to make up the family budget - more likely it would be a job stacking shelves at Tesco or B&Q, always supposing they'd have me. This is not a bad thing and I'm just waking up to the fact that it actually gives me a lot of freedom to explore ideas I'd never submit to an editor in the first place. I'd rather post work here where one or two strangers might read it than spend years hawking it around until I've lost every spark of enthusiasm I ever had for it. Other unknown part time writers must do as they see fit. This one has decided to trust his instincts and indulge himself for a while. I hawked Rosemary's Eyes all over the world without success until I wondered what I'd ever seen in it myself. Then, after posting it here, one kind lady, somewhere out there in internet-land, wrote to me to say how much she'd enjoyed it. It seemed all that time, I had been writing Rosemary's Eyes for her,... and it was time well spent. All right, perhaps I'm romanticising a little, but it's encounters like that that brighten your day when the rest of the world seems so dry and cynical, and void of any meaning. As if to illustrate this point I notice my Yahoo inbox is currently full of mails that quite simply beggar belief. Computers really are marvellous machines, capable of doing so much and yet these marvels of our age are, in some instances, sitting out there routing junk mail, inviting us all to "click here" for penis enlargement. Do they also send these mails to ladies I wonder, or are they smart enough to differentiate between the genders? Other mails feign familiarity with their dear "mr graeme's", then tell me I've won a major prize, or inherited a lot of money from relatives I didn't know I had - I just need to send some money to cover the legal costs first. Also of late, I seem to have become very popular with Nigerian businessmen anxious for my bank details. Others mails introduce themselves with: "I love you" or some other enticing trap of a phrase while at the same time bearing an ominous sting of an attachment that common sense tells me is likely to wipe out my hard drive. Others solicit me in less subtle ways to partake of their pornography, or to send money for a distinctive college diploma that I can apparently get without studying for anything,... again, I just have to send some money. To be sure, the contents of my inbox conveys to me an impression of the bare underbelly of the world, and it's either trying to sell me something, con me out of something, or simply sucker me into doing something I'm going to regret. It's like wandering incognito along the streets of a bawdy wild west town, filled with freakish side shows, strip-tease and rakish men in top hats selling snake oil - a grotesque caricature of our society that all the same bears an underlying truth I find disturbing and is possibly corrosive of my willingness to trust in the general good nature of my fellow human beings. However, occasionally, speckled amid the dross, like rare orchids growing in a vast meadow full of cowpats, I find the occasional letter from an ordinary, every day sort of soul who just dropped by to say "Hello", but without the attachment of an ominous viral payload. So, to those who've dropped by to say hello, without attachments... I say thank you. Michael Graeme March 2005 |