Never Say Love Is "like" Anything... It

Miracles Prove Nothing Except To Those Whose Faith Is Bought Very Cheap, Sir.

Rueful, Bittersweet, Funny, Written With Tenderness And Bite, Merrill Feitell's Stories, Like So Many Classic Short Stories, Are Made From The Plain And Painful Stuff Of This World, And Haunted By The Possibility, And The Impossibility, Of A Better One.

I Hate To See Great Works Of Literature Ghettoized, Whereas Others That Conform To The Rules, Conventions, And Procedures Of The Genre We Call Literary Fiction Get Accorded Greater Esteem And Privilege. I Also Have A Problem With How Books Are Marketed, With Certain Cover Designs And Typefaces. They're Often Stamped With An Identity That Has Nothing To Do With Their Effect On The Reader.

I Might Spend 100 Pages Trying To Get To Know The World I'm Writing About: Its Contours, Who Are My Main Characters, What Are Their Relationships To Each Other, And Just Trying To Get A Sense Of What And Who This Book Is About. Usually Around That Point Of 100 Pages, I Start To Feel Like I'm Lost, I Have Too Much Material, It's Time To Start Making Some Choices. It's Typically At That Point That I Sit Down And Try To Make A Formal Outline And Winnow Out What's Not Working And What I'm Most Interested In, Where The Story Seems To Be Going.

A Story Begins With This Nebulous Feeling That’s Hard To Get A Hold Of And You’re Testing Your Feelings And Assumptions, Testing What You Believe. They End Up Turning Into Keepsakes And Mementos –like Amber In Which A Memory Gets Trapped.