I could list off about a hundred reasons why a smarter writer wouldn't even think of attempting to write on the subject that I've selected for one of the novels I'm currently working on (or rather, not working on and writing this blog post instead!); however, a certain specter looms just over my left shoulder as I type each and every word, and this is new to me. I am unaccustomed to having such an unexpected guest reading and criticizing my work as the words appear on the screen.
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| 1st Ed. Moby Dick. |
Whaling.
The owner of the ghostly shadow hovering over my shoulder?
Melville.
Perhaps, I am have chosen a voyage, not unlike Captain Ahab, that dooms me to the same fate as the Pequod: sunk.
Hopefully, this ghost will get tired of haunting me and I'll be like Ishmael and live to tell the tale. (Though, if Ishmael's experience, post-white-whale encounter, was anything like the horrors the sailors from the Essex endured, the true story of a whale bark destroyed by a sperm whale, the one that Melville modeled his epic on, I am not so sure I want to survive!)
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