Strikethrough (Vision and Revision)

I believe in the power of fantasy. Despite all historical evidence to the contrary, I feel with great conviction that fiction changes the world for the better more effectively than politics, social activism, or the most sincere objectives of war.

That’s why I love reading stories that move me. I’ve always sensed that the feelings stirred by fiction matter in large ways beyond our imagining.

This is an online workbook for my current writing projects, my new fiction as well as my backlist, which I am republishing as ebooks.

The dreamweave of writing and the dreamwave of reading, which began with the limitations of papyrus and clay tablets, surges with disembodied freedom in cybernetic media like Twitter and ebooks. Every living author’s published books have suddenly become again works-in-progress! The ease of digital publishing means that choosing not to revise previously published work is also a creative act.

So far, I’ve issued ebook editions of several eight novels and a short story collection. The task of revision is a soulful one. Art elides distance. It brings together writer and reader. Most of these texts I haven’t read since they were published—and now the writer has become the reader. Meeting myself as the writer I used to be disrupts fate. How I read and revise changes the past, and I am becoming a different writer in the chrysalis of being my own reader!

The elision strikethroughs in this blog represent the nullifying force that constrains creativity to art touch on the full strangeness of language to communicate through what is not said change the reader, even when the reader is the writer.

The human spirit is our power to reason, the human soul our capacity to imagine. Our digital age, our world of technological marvels, thrives on reason. Yet, fear and greed endure against all reason. What we love of soul is never loved enough.