COVER -> RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT
A PUBLIC PERSON - Until recently, my wife and I lived simply and privately. If I wrote something, it was a private hobby practiced by an isolated amateur --- a labor of love with no guarantee of publication or payment. Most writers live and work like that, at the beginning of their literary careers. And for good reason. It takes a while (in my case, more than twenty years) to develop a degree of skillfulness and a measure of daring. Our initial experiments as authors are usually lame and tame. The confidence to dawdle with a sentence or a story, to wait for the right word or paragraph, to edit and tweak and illuminate a complex expression in language is an elusive, acquired skill.
So that I was fully prepared to soldier on (perhaps forever) in pursuit of good writing and a voice in print that was distinctly my own. I was not prepared to be a public person. In fact, it was the last thing I expected. Fame fell on me rather suddenly, and it took seven months to accept the predicament of being "public property" --- like Hillary Clinton, Tiger Woods, the Pope, or Madonna. We all recognize those names without reading footnotes because they refer to famous people. On a much smaller scale, Wolf DeVoon got noticed --- and boy, do I hate it! There's nothing worse than being the center of attention, nonstop 10-12 hours every day, three days a week, week after week, welcoming a stream of admirers who traveled five or ten thousand miles to meet me.
I've had visitors from South Africa, Australia, Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, Britain, Italy, Russia, Poland, and every region of the USA. The last bunch almost drove me insane --- two mathematicians, an Objectivist computer programmer, a French scientist, and a lawyer who meekly asked exactly two questions during his two-day visit. They were incredibly hefty questions. It was my job to answer without hesitation or satire: (a) what is justice? and (b) how can we eradicate corruption? It requires some chutzpah to hold forth for a hour or two on topics like that. It burns calories and brain cells at a prodigious rate, and I always end up dead tired, stumbling off to bed at midnight.
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I got into this "public person" racket by mistake. I thought it was a duty. Rod sometimes speaks of his personal concern, both as a writer and as a man of integrity, about the legacy he will leave on this earth. I understand his concern --- but I'd use slightly different terms to describe the problem. It's a glass house and the legacy builder is buck naked in the bedroom (right, Rod?)
Amazingly, six out of ten people want to read and talk about sex, love, and intimate relationships. It gives writers a embarrassing headache to chat about these topics in person, in front of an audience. Literature is supposed to be a secluded, introspective process of discovery --- not a dog and pony show on the patio.
The good news is that I don't have to live this way forever. My globetrotting houseguests are part of a well-oiled publicity campaign that terminates in June. Hooray! Wolf DeVoon can return to private life and write from a safe distance again --- with a moat, a drawbridge, and an alligator swimming between me and the public. I'm not kidding. We started pouring the concrete foundations today, sixty centimeters deep, nestled on solid rock, like Edinburgh Castle.
The bad news is that, until July, my sex life will continue to oscillate between hopeless and frustrating. Almost half of my visitors have been stupendously foxy babes with brains, and I'm dog tired from running my mouth all day and night, instead of exercising a more interesting section of anatomy. The bottom line is that book tours, TV appearances, and cocktail parties are fine in theory, but happy writers are reclusive for an obvious reason.
They get to actually have sex once in a while, instead of fielding questions from an admiring and titillated fan club.
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