A tale of two writers

My blog stats have been a little weird of late. Usually they reflect what is current — the weekly post plus a few oddballs that get regular clicks. For years my most popular post was about crokinole boards. This post comparing and contrasting the cheesecake scribblings of Chris Sanders and Robert Crumb is a reliable draw. The Monks’ Bad Habits and John Gardner get regular bumps also.

But this past week the post that received the most attention was (drumroll please):

Death, and the epic fantasy series.

It wasn’t just a one-day blip, either. All week that post was Number One, casting shade on even my most current (and surely most pertinent) perambulations.

I imagine this unexpected attention relates to Martin’s ill-considered offer that, “If Winds Of Winter isn’t out by July 29, 2020, fans can imprison him.”

That day came and went last week. Mebbe rr fans were casting about the internet, looking for some surer way to get the book out and the series completed, and stumbled across my modest proposal to this popular novelist I’ve yet to read — hire a younger writer with the energy and work ethic required to meet actual deadlines.

Someone like, say, this chap.

The kicker is Martin used to be that kind of writer — a genre writer who answered the alarm, got out of bed, pulled on his pants and banged out the words while the first pot of coffee was brewing. He’s become insanely successful since those days — the intensity of public focus he receives (to say nothing of the money) is enough to scare the work ethic out of the sturdiest of souls.

And now he’s gone and got himself cancelled. As a younger man he regularly got quite a charge out of egging on the scolds — maybe that’s just the fire he needs to light to get the creative stew a-boiling. Do Martin’s fans dare hope?

*****

“Men’s magazines”: another era, to be sure.

In August of 1989 in a glossy “men’s magazine” I read an essay that blew the doors and windows off my 24-year-old mind — Dreaming Of Hitler by Daphne Merkin (here). From that day to this, she is a writer I have paid attention to.

I couldn’t find a way to rescue my self-destructive protagonist from her dilemma — her search for love from a man who had none to offer — except through some kind of melodramatic device. Could a woman who entered this overheated and dangerous territory manage to leave it behind without killing herself (as Anna Karenina does), becoming a dehumanized slave (like the title character does in “Story of O”) or going nuts (as Ingeborg Day does in her memoir, “Nine and a Half Weeks”)? Was this kind of deus ex machina inevitable?

Merkin spent decades on a sexually charged novel released just last month. Sounds both enticing and not a little maddening — in other words Merkin in fine form. Another new novel joins the queue.