Thoreau: The Land That Was


"It is a country full of evergreen trees, of mossy silver birches and watery maples, the ground dotted with insipid, small red berries, and strewn with damp and moss-grown rocks a country diversified with innumerable lakes and rapid streams, peopled with trout and various species of leucisci, with salmon, shad and pickerel, and other fishes; the forest resounding at rare intervals with the note of the chicadee, the blue-jay, and the woodpecker, the scream of the fish-hawk and the eagle, the laugh of the loon, and the whistle of ducks along the solitary streams; and at night, with the hooting of owls and howling of wolves; in summer, swarming with myriads of black flies and mosquitoes, more formidable than wolves to the white man. Such is the home of the moose, the bear, the caribou, the wolf, the beaver, and the Indian."

 —Henry David Thoreau

Writing vs. Blogging

Writing novels, I mean. E-publishing wunderkind Amanda Hocking tweeted recently that she tweets more when her novel writing is going well. For me, it's just the opposite. My online writing of all sorts (Twitter, Facebook, my blog) fades steadily into the back of my mind when I'm engaged with a book. It's tough, because in this era novelists are expected to be tireless circus barkers for their own books, and authorial silence is viewed with suspicion, dismay, or disdain. I'll take my cue from the Book of Ecclesiastes and assert that to everything, including self-promotion, there is a season. A time to write and a time to write about writing. And for me, now is a time to complete my third novel, especially with my book tour for Trespasser looming on the horizon.