Nathaniel Rounds

March 28, 2007

Dear Mr. Pinkwater,

I used to read your books like kids drink Coke while a kid. I’m still a kid. A 36 year old, bald kid with kids of my own. When they are old enough to read, they will be required to read Lizard Music and write a ten page essay. I will rate it on a bell curve. So I wrote to you, like all puppy-faced fans did then, and you sent back left-of center, Xeorox letters, and then I interviewed you on the phone for a small newspaper, and I still read you, including the big book due in April, which I will add to my collection, although I have read it online. I have published poems in which odd quirky things appear–not your pickles or chickens or people from space, not the salami snap or shoelace tycoons, but odd enough–thanks to you. Now I am writing a book that has odd elements, very odd. I owe it to your cool work. If you would read a page or two, and I mean a page or two, I would send it to you. I am shamelessly asking my favorite author to do what most authors don’t want to end up doing–reading stuff written by their fans. It’s a bullet that needs to get dodged. So will ya, if I send, say, a bribe?

Doughnuts on the way,

Nathaniel Rounds

Nope. I don't read unpublished work, I don't care who you are or how artfully you broach the subject. It's not that I don't want to encourage you, just that opening that particular door would be a mistake. Also a mistake to show partial work to anyone, and unless the thing is written with me in mind as the reader, (a truly preposterous thought), what would be the point of me looking at a little scrap of it? Naturally, I'm happy if reading my stuff makes someone feel like trying to write something too, but that would be somewhere around the very last thing I had in mind when I wrote whatever stuff it may have been.