Let me first say that I am thrilled to have you here. For me, writing is sweet sorrow. I truly enjoy every step of the process but one: publication seems to elude me. And publication is important, because I write with an emotional need for my stuff to have readers. Ultimately, writing is expressing. So writing without publishing is, well, de-pressing.
I want to be sure you understand that Letters to Momma is a novel. It is a creation from start to wherever it finishes. It is fiction. I make it up, and then I write it down. All those pictures? I draw them myself. They represent the absolute pinnacle of my artistic talent.
But why, you might ask, why in sam hill would a person do such a thing?
Let me address this issue in some detail. It is, after all, a valid question. Why would a person make up total lies and perpetrate them upon the fellow members of his species? But this question has two parts...
Firstly, let's contemplate why anybody would write stuff that is made up. Later, we will contemplate why a person would go to so much trouble only to put it up on a website for all to see with no monetary reward in sight.
Fiction has been in existence for a very long time. Experts hypothesize that it may have originated the first time a fish was caught, or perhaps the first time some cave man's favorite rock got broken accidentally, leading to a fictional tale of a berserk woolly mammoth running amok through the cave. While God knows the truth, down here on the ground us humans sometimes sidestep it, and this, as we all know, is the root of all sin. But it is also the root of all life. I mean, God saw blackness. It was all He had for company. Blackness was His eternal reality, His truth. It must have seemed cosmically boring, so He made up a white lie, and by speaking the lie, He brought His falsehood into being: light! If blackness is the truth, and the truth is unchanging, then everything, folks, EVERYTHING else is fictional.
Nothingness is the eternal truth. It is the black chalkboard, and everything that is has been written over that blackness. The trees, the air, the clouds, they all oppose the black truth. They are fictions, created to give darkness some competition, to liven things up, you might say. Speaking personally, there are large sections of my head where the light don't ever shine. By writing, I try to express--to bring out-- what is going on in there. I create these fictional people, stick them in a world that I also created, and then I just watch them, typing as fast as I can to record what happens. If there is some deep moral meaning or universal truth in my stories, it wasn't me. They did it. I just wind them up and let them go and start typing, and when the story is done, I seal the bottle.
Why write fiction? It is a way of bringing more light. More light and more life. Through fiction, writers and readers can discover things that might not otherwise have ever come to light. It gives glimpses into other hearts and minds, into other times and then back again to apply this second sight in our own hearts and minds and times. As a writer, then, in order to discover what Margaret Givens will do next, I have to place my heart into her mind and time, and find what I would do next. When it is written, I know myself better. But this process works both ways: For me as a reader to understand, for example, why Jim, in Conrad's novel, does what he does, I have to put my mind into Jim's heart for a moment. I watch the talisman roll, until it touches my foot. I watch the old man fire the shot. And then I think I know why my hand comes up to cover my lips.
Now let's proceed to the B-side of our question: why put my story up on the internet for free?
Shakespeare spake, "Let there be Hamlet!"
Dashiell Hammett quoth, "Let there be Sam Spade!"
James Steed says, "Let there be Margaret Givens!!!"
I have spake before. Anybody out there ever heard of William Broken Antler? How about Shadow Man? Or Cloud, and his daughter Starfire? Mrs. Amanda Harkins? There is a brick of publication under the springboard of my creations. The vault of print has yet to bounce them (to speak gymnastically) onto the big cushy mat of bookstore shelves. Through the present book/website, I am sidestepping the black truth of ink by just going ahead and putting this book out there on the web. While the result is not as solid as a bound volume, neither is it as totally invisible as a candle of manuscript hidden under a bushel of other manuscripts waiting to be read by an overworked editor in a far away publishing house where...well, you get my drift.
But I've drifted away from the question. Why post it for free? Don't I want to become rich and famous?
The answer is, "Well, heck yeah!" But I have a personal problem. The more I think about editors and publishers, the more my creative muse chokes. My mind, when troubled over literarily irrelevant questions of whether or not some future hypothetical agent or editor or publisher will like what I am writing, stops freely associating, stops living in a dream, stops creating, and stops writing.
Here's the way I look at it. If light is a fiction that lets us see in the dark, then anything that switches off the light is evil. As a writer of fiction, I fight evil. A mind that is stuck on the gloomy realities of the market is an unenlightened mind, and I don't have enough spare brain that I can afford to waste any of it in the dark. Like Goethe, I want more light. So, when I first heard Margaret Givens talking in my head, I decided to choke the inner editors, and let her speak her mind freely. That occurred at ten in the morning on Memorial Day, 2010. I've been listening to her ever since, typing as fast as I can.
Letters to Momma is a work in progress. As I write, I update the site. It is a novel, an illustrated novel. Use of the text or images is not permitted without written consent from the author.
So read on, and come back next week to see what trouble Margaret has gotten herself into. I promise, as soon as I find out, I'll tell you.
James Steed
Little Rock
June, 2010