(a rough draft from Vladimir Nabokov)

“What is written without effort is generally read without pleasure.”              Samuel Johnson

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If only this quote worked the other way too: “If you work really hard on a book, it’s just bound to be terrific!”

My memoir, The Myth of Solid Ground (tip: if you want to be seen as “in the know,” casually refer to it as MSG, for short), is “finished” only in the usual sense–i.e., that if I died tomorrow, I guess I wouldn’t spend all of eternity wincing in the knowledge that the last thing I ever wrote was a monstrosity. But I know there’s still an awful lot of editing to do. My most reasonable hope is that this will happen soon. (My least reasonable hope is that somehow it will happen when I’m not in the room.) In the meantime, though, I have a lot of neglected family business to attend to. (Suddenly, I have to live life instead of writing about it, and the transition’s been shaky–some days I even have to wear shoes.) I’ll keep you posted. Thanks. NJC