Readlink: "I Tried to Finish a Dead Man’s Novel"
Richard Kelly Kemick
All of this—the notebooks, the loose leaf, the worlds—is gathered in the briefcase. The paper is brittle in the open air, and such frailty gives each sentence a sacred weight. Because with every storming of a castle and boarding of a starship, with every flourish of calligraphy and strikethrough of red pen, there is an unspoken yet deafening declaration: I will write a story, and I would sooner die before I let it be incomplete.
A battered briefcase has been lurking in the backs of closets for decades. It contains the construction of a made-up universe, bound tenuously to our reality by notebooks, scraps of paper with hastily-written notes, dot-matrix printouts, and floppy discs rendered unreadable by the unrelenting forward nature of obsolescence.
It's the novel that a man named Jim started writing in 1973. He was trying to quit smoking. He thought that writing would give him something to do with his hands. He kept adding scenes and ideas for forty years, before cancer took him away in 2013.
His widow passed the briefcase along to writer Richard Kelly Kemick. He agreed to try to finish Jim's novel, sort of as a mitzvah. No contracts, no deadlines, no expectations. Just a briefcase, in his closet, that's always there. ⓘ