Showing posts with label Gone With the Wind. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gone With the Wind. Show all posts

Friday, September 8, 2017

Doing the Curly Shuffle Off This Mortal Coil

Do you have a literary executor named in your will? What would you like (or loathe!) to have happen to your work when you've shuffled off this mortal coil?

by Paul D. Marks

Hmm, I’m not sure what there is to execucute (is that a word?). A bunch of stories, some books, hopefully more of both to come. Right now, I don’t have a literary executor for a bunch of reasons. First and foremost is we, I anyway, plan to live forever. Second, it’s really just not something I’ve thought about and I figure Amy will outlive me, hope so anyway, and she would take care of my expansive literary estate. Or we could leave it to the dogs, literally.

But maybe it’s a good idea to leave a few words about what I’d like to have done with my properties when I do the Curly shuffle off this mortal coil.

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Of course, I gotta go but my work doesn’t have to, especially not in the digital age so I’d like to see it stay alive even if I’m not. It’s nice to think that future generations would want to read it and that it would have something to say to them. Maybe a bit of a message and hopefully just a lot of entertainment. But it seems that many younger people today aren’t much interested in anything that happened before they were born for the most part and I’m not sure how to get them to be interested in something like that. They’re missing out on a lot because of that, but as to how to reach them, I’m just not sure.

And while I’d like my work to live as well as live on, I’m not sure I’d want it to get the sequel or continuing treatment from another writer. I mean, our work is like our children and look at what happened with Gone With the Wind and Casablanca, where a sequel book was written to the movie and some of Chandler’s works. Some of which are good, some not so good. It’s hard to find someone to carry on an author’s work who has the same sensibility and tone and life experience that makes a work or a body of work what it is. So any continuations of my characters might not be my vision but being that I won’t have any vision at all at that time I guess there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it. And, that said, wouldn’t it be nice for the work to be that popular that someone would want to continue it? There’s something to be said for that.




And maybe after I’ve done the slip and fall off this mortal coil my work will even increase in value (to someone anyhow), the same way an artist’s work surges after his death. There’s a movie from the 1960s with Dick Van Dyke and James Garner called The Art of Love. In it, Van Dyke is depressed because his works aren’t selling so he fakes his death to increase their value. Now there’s a thought. If I fake my own death everyone will be clamoring for my stuff and my assigns can sell it for much more than the normal rate. Of course, they’ll be living high off the hog while I’m in hiding somewhere pretending to be dead and probably wishing I was.


But the ultimate answer to the question is yes, of course, I’d like my work to live on and be enshrined in the canon forever to be read by future generations, who look like this:


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And now for the usual BSP.

I’m happy to say that my short story “Bunker Hill Blues” is in the current Sept./Oct. issue of Ellery Queen. It’s the sequel to the 2016 Ellery Queen Readers Poll winner and current Macavity Award nominee “Ghosts of Bunker Hill”. And I’m surprised and thrilled to say that I made the cover of the issue – my first time as a 'cover boy'! Hope you’ll want to check it out. Available at Ellery Queen, newstands and all the usual places.




My story “Blood Moon” appears in “Day of the Dark, Stories of the Eclipse” from Wildside Press, edited by Kaye George. Stories about the eclipse. Twenty-four stories in all. Available on Amazon.