Ah, gentle reader, what of our written legacies?<\/p>\n
As you know, I have some published works that have not been scattered widely–it has sold only, what, 100 copies, and mostly in Kindle? John Donnelly’s Gold<\/em> was so narrowly distributed that I could easily determine who traded them in at a used book store. <\/p>\n It’s kind of like how I know you’ve visited my blog, gentle reader. There’s not exactly a lot of noise in the stat counter to obscure you personally.<\/p>\n I was quite the letter writer in college; I sent out reams of letters to family and friends in those lonely years before the Internet. Although I have kept electronic copies of each, migrated as is my wont all the way up from the 286 PC clone I was running then (and another although, although I probably still have electronic copies of letters I produced with Bank Street Writer) on floppies in the store room. I have all the letters my friends and family sent me in hard copy, though, and I have electronic copies of letters I have written since, with modern computers, but I am pretty sure that the printed letters I’ve sent to my correspondents are in the landfill by now. They’re almost all dead by now.<\/p>\n The short stories, novel attempts, and recent poems (not included in Coffee House Memories<\/a><\/em>) are on the computer in electronic form. I will carry them forward, computer to computer, and back them up, but.<\/p>\n Like this blog. I’ve used it as a running commentary on books, politics, life, and humor for almost twenty years. It has some good stuff on it, a lot of detritus, but when I pass on, it like the electronic copies of things I’ve written will be forgotten, hundreds of thousands of words unread, turned off<\/em>. I will not even be ephemera in someone’s basement or an antique mall somewhere.<\/p>\n\n