Quite the Hiatus!

I wonder if anyone will happen to read this blog, it has been so long since I gave my readers the option of dropping the habit, summer of 2913, to be precise.  Why did I stop?  Because I thought that I should be doing writing more deserving of my talents, like writing a novel, although my history of fiction writing is studded with rejections.  Unlike most aspiring writers, I cannot claim to be the "unsung Milton" or whatever that phrase is, since for the past three decades I have formed friendships with editors, agents, publishers all of whom at one time or another have generously read my storytelling efforts, and all of them have come back with "close, but no cigar."  I've had better luck with memoir writing, and friends sympathetic to my writing craving, have suggested a memoir of my teaching years, something I had begun and abandoned when I concentrated on what became "My Husband and My Wives," where a reader might notice I have larded in lots about the teaching.   So I have been alternatively writing my teaching memoir and an ambitious novel of events largely taken from my life starting with a young married couple with two sons living in some place not unlike Palo Alto and ending with their marital despair played out against the suicide of a favorite student.  On the way the husband discovers his inner penchant for male sex when he is seduced by a young Sicilian waiter one summer whilst working on inscriptions at Selinunte.  That last event, having nothing to do with the real life of the author, though crucial for the narrative arc, is a lavish verbal statement of the author's wishful fantasies, and one of the major reasons he took his hands permanently from the computer keys. Sex fantasies for this eighty four year old male, rather than exciting a flutter, make the psychic eyes scrunch up at trying to make out the dim and completely out of focus bit.  Suddenly converting bits of reality into fiction to make a story seemed like too much work, and the author stopped work on his memoir because, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn (gives you some idea of his originality).  Still and all, I love to write, I love to talk and, because I live in venues where most of my auditors, stare at me quizzically with an explosive "hunh?" as their considered response to my words, I guess doing a blog may resolve all "my issues" (God, I love that phrase!).