Another writer besides Chandler who also inspires me - a scene in my next book takes place in his old rented quarters - is Honore de Balzac. I'm speaking now of the man's sheer volume of work and writing ethic.
This a bronze cast of his hand. He wrote every day, all day. Sometimes all night
at this simple desk.
The window you see behind his desk leads to the back lane where Balzac would escape when he was broke and his creditors pounded on the front door. He wrote as fast as he could to try and pay his bills.
But no hack writer, as you can see from Monsieur Balzac's extensive copyediting
Balzac himself even made a geneaology tree for his characters in his almost one hundred books.
But to write so much he drank about fifty cups of coffee a day. From this pot.
He died at fifty. But a man who wrote classics and defined a part of French literature, even today we refer to things as Balzacian, from this simple wood desk in this small room with only coffee and a quill pen gives me hope. We've got it easy.
But in a less Balzacian mood caught in Minneapolis the other night - that's our Stan and me muscling Kent Krueger in between us to get him to guest blog about his Cork series in Minnesota with the Ojibwe tribe. He promised in September.
Cara - Tuesday
