Fool's Gold; Or, The Admonition

How good is the book in your head--if it isn't on the page?
What book?
I don't see a book.
In the head or in the heart?

Page, page, page--that's what matters.

Story of my life.

Read less; write more.
Keep on reading, but write more.
Get it down; revise it.
Do the thing that needs to be done.

Voices in my head.

I'd quote my father, but then I'd just be looking for pity or mercy or something.

Right now the book in my head is a mixture of Homer and Robert E. Howard, John Fowles and Robert Stone, edited by Hemingway. All of which ought to make very little sense at all.

Not on the page.
Doesn't count.

I picked up a new used copy of James Lee Burke's Heaven's Prisoners from Pegasus Downtown yesterday, and now the book falls open to the exact page I was looking for--the previous owner/reader had my same hang-ups, I'm guessing--page 262:

"But I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel."

Ouch.

As one of my students once said when faced with this same passage: "No mercy."