BFTP: Sisyphus

A weekend Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. Original post January 24, 2006 Original post April 22, 2007. As I spend this weekend updating presentations for MACUL on Thursday and Friday (while the LWW plays with a grandson in Minneapolis), the sentiment remains true...

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on - Omar Khayyam

Then the Moving Finger comes back,
And re-writes - Doug

You remember old Sisyphus from Greek mythology. The poor guy in Hades doomed to roll the big rock up the hill only to have it roll back down just as he reaches the top. Condemned for all eternity to keep pushing that darned rock. I'm thinking about him this weekend as I  look over the handouts and slides for my upcoming workshops and presentations.

Little did I realize when I signed on as author, as speaker and as consultant that nothing I wrote or prepared for presentation would stay written, stay prepared. A talk I created what seems like only moments ago, turns out to be two years old - ancient in Internet years. (If one dog year equals seven human years, one Internet year must equal at least twenty human years.) This basically means that every handout and every set of slides and every bit of content needs to be reviewed, revised and updated every single time I go anywhere. Once in a while I will miss something in my talk that is a couple years old and really embarrass myself. I hate it when that happens.

Where was the warning that once one has written a book, one has a life-long obligation to keep cranking out revisions? My books came out in 1997, 2002, 2003, and 2004*. And they all need revising again. I've been putting this off for years now to the extent that my publisher isn't speaking to me any longer. If you pride yourself in being a lazy person like I do, writing books is not for you!

Or write fiction. Now there is writing that once writ, stays writ! I just finished Cormac McCarthy's allegorical The Road. No names, no dates, no technologies mentioned - only a bleak landscape populated by starving survivors of some unnamed cataclysm, all described in gorgeous language.  Depressing enough that every 11th grade English teacher will slap it into his/her curriculum for years to come and royalties will flow into perpetuity. McCarthy is a smart guy.

If you want to write a book, write a potboiler or a "modern classic." Trust me on this. 

* Yes, I am working on a revision of The Indispensable Librarian.

Cartoon source unknown, but I like it.