My brother shot me a link this morning. He noticed it on his Google news. Thanks brother.

This is from the Sunday LA Times, an essay by Dani Shapiro entitled "A writing career becomes harder to scale." She talks about the blockbuster model in publishing, but also the process of writing and perseverance:

The writer's apprenticeship -- or perhaps, the writer's lot -- is this miserable trifecta: uncertainty, rejection, disappointment. [. . .] My internal life as a writer has been a constant battle with the small, whispering voice (well, sometimes it shouts) that tells me I can't do it.

There now exist only two possibilities: immediate and large-scale success, or none at all.

Writers now use words like "track" and "mid-list" and "brand" and "platform." They tweet and blog and make Facebook friends in the time they used to spend writing. Authors who stumble can find themselves quickly in dire straits. How, under these conditions, can a writer take the risks required to create something original and resonant and true?

In what may possibly be my favorite line of the entire thing, Shapiro calls publishing "the nerdy distant cousin of the rest of media."

But it's not all doom and gloom! Shapiro paints the room dark, but points toward the goal of writing: the transformation and transmutation of personal experience into universal truth. And, as Robert Frost once said, that makes all the difference.

Read it here.

I had a line of brilliant twinkling things to say. I had planted these seeds and ruminated, waiting, waiting for the right time to produce them. Today I sat down to harvest.

Some ideas grew slowly, ever so slowly, resisting any interference or attempts to fertilize, but beautiful and robust. Some ideas sprouted new growth at a tremendous clip, then shriveled. Some ideas became spitting violets, snarky and cranky and crass. I was proud of my garden, swollen with import and paternity. I was planning to share.

Then I received a call from a coworker. This morning she had to put down her oldest friend, a pit named Chomp. But she refused to have her shift covered. "I need to be there."

The slight whisper of death saps brilliance and light, steals the blush from the rose and stills the laugh in out throats.

But even before I heard about Chomp, I'd found myself dwelling on death lately. A new life beginning forces us to a recognition of that dirty little secret we do our best to forget, that lives also end. Provisions must be made. Wills and insurance and grandparents and godparents, what if I, what if I, what if we die?

That is, today I checked out a pamphlet and 7 books about grape production in Mississippi, American wines, fermentation and muscadines.

Why? Because I have a wild hair about wine for a new short and I don't know wine country real well. Grapes grow on vines over trellises, right? Something about soil? We'll see how this goes.