Arts
The dinner had been a delight, much to my wondrous surprise. I didn't know what to chalk it up to. My personality was not one apt to sudden, positive change. It was as if The Cravendorfs were never really there. Obviously, the deafening squalor of aardvarks in heat had something to do with it... Had my birthday always corresponded with the aardvark mating season? It certainly didn't feel like– "Ya gotta lose the aardvarks, Mer. You're killing me with these aardvarks. It's bad enough you're not developing these characters, my man, but these... what is the obsession with these–" "Not developing my characters?" I said to my editor. "How... Where do you get that idea? Henry is the unreliable narrator, unsure of himself, on a quest but only he doesn't know he's on a quest. Margaret is the wildcard wife, ceaselessly and needlessly adventurous. Marjorie is quiet, pensive, a potential victim, a seeker of truth, the shadow to Margaret's feminine light. And Josef is the lurking evil, your classic antagonist. Or is he." I wasn't so much asking the question not because it wasn't a question but because I wasn't interested in what my editor had to say about it. Over one thousand chapters in, and only now he was piping up about the damn aardvarks? The working title of the book had been 'Aardvarks in America' all the way through Chapter 600 and something. Where did he get off. He sat there, smoking his cigar, looking out the floor-to-ceiling window of his penthouse office. He wouldn't bite on offering a non-answer he knew I wasn't looking for. "Ah, fuck it," I said. And turned back down to the page. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/myspace/support