Episode
A Notorious Dark Horse
- Published
- Oct 15, 2024
- Duration seconds
- 450
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://javiertruben.substack.com/p/a-notorious-dark-horse
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/don-t-you-dare-to-think-out-loud-6458124/episodes/a-notorious-dark-horse/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/don-t-you-dare-to-think-out-loud-6458124/a-notorious-dark-horse.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
In my very long mailing list—which this platform insists on distributing a newsletter instead of leaving the reader alone at his own free will—I also have writers whom I admire. One of them, Antonio Muñoz Molina, a well-known Spanish novelist and columnist, wrote last month in El País that he is fed up with unsolicited emails. Twenty years ago, in the early days of the blogosphere, there was no newsletter at all. If one wanted to add the blog he loves to read as a bookmark in his browser, he just did it, instead of this nuisance of a newsletter that equals targeting the craft of a prolific author along with all the pounding commercials written by a robot that clog everybody’s email inbox. I write between five and seven thousand words a day, given that I am a graphomaniac. I use most of them for my manuscripts-in-progress, of course. But I also devote a small part of my output to other needs, that is, journaling, correspondence, and finally these installments, where I always try to be as succinct as possible. The reality is that I cannot help myself; I love pounding away at my keyboard, as a virtuoso pianist does, and it’s the life I choose, at tremendous personal cost, since being a fiction writer leads to giving up a lot of things, like raising children and the kind of security that makes ordinary people happy. Precisely for this reason, when this author whom I always admired so much once gave me immense joy when he was kind enough to respond to me with a few lines. Since then, I’ve dubbed him “Maestro” because his disarming humility hid an astounding literary talent. I wrote to him a long mail in one of the darkest times of my life, sixteen years ago, when I tried to keep the warrior's morale afloat amid rejections. I had lost the silent company of my books, then sto…