Friday, December 14, 2001
Not much tonight. I spent most of the afternoon catching up on my other journal, the one I keep on paper, and there's not a lot left I feel like saying just now. I'll finish Bast: Eternity Game Part 2 this weekend and begin the novel on Monday. Today I received page proofs for "Stratigraphic Distribution and Habitat Segregation of Mosasaurs in the Upper Cretaceous of Western and Central Alabama, with an Historical Review of Alabama Mosasaur Discoveries," which will be published in the March 2002 issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology and have spent the evening proofreading.
But I did have a thought that I wanted to put down somewhere. I have come to believe that the point at which writing ceases to be art (whether it be good art or bad) is that point at which the writer ceases to be God - the god or gods of his or her fictional universe. If another voice is allowed to significantly interfere, to change the course or interject, then a certain necessary purity is given up, and whatever remains is another sort of enterprise, non-artistic, perhaps validly commercial or political, but non-artistic. And all authors who wish to make a living from their work (all artists, for that matter), run the risk of losing the essential artistic integrity of their endeavors to the doubtful best intentions of an industry (first), and the book-buying public (second).
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