The Great Writer's Fate, Part I

My name is Bedford Schiller-Smith, and you’ve probably seen it before on the book racks in airport shops, usually just inside the doors. I’ve made a career of writing, tech and spy thrillers are my bag, but if you don’t’ recognize me, you’ve certainly heard of my dad. Robert Earnest Schiller-Smith, yes, the great one that millions have read, who was so driven by his art that folks hung on every word he said. The critics claim he ‘changed the game,’ he even won the Nobel Prize for his most acclaimed novel, The Angels with The Lying Eyes. Ten other books, also big, got critical, popular acclaim, they study him on campuses, since him writing’s ‘not been the same.’ He has so many imitators his name has become adjective, some claim he was the greatest writer that ever drew breath and lived. Maybe that’s why they’re hard on me, always give me middling reviews, can’t help but compare me to him, they’re expectations are skewed They saw I’m nothing but a hack, that I ‘only write to entertain,’ talent skips a generation, I’m ‘work-a-day, stilted, and lame.’ They can’t understand why I will not strive for the masterly and sublime, but if they could see my memories… If them could peer inside my mind… They’d see my father, drunk and rambling about the ‘inner reaches of man,’ secluding himself for whole weeks, executing literary plans. They’d see him swinging to extreme, one day jovial, the next enraged, see him chain-smoking cigarettes while staring blankly at a page. Forgetting his children’s’ school and sports because he was ‘defining the world.’ couldn’t be bother to tuck us it whenever his ‘vision unfurled.’ Always mumbling about ‘his muse,’ how he followed where it dare take him, usually to a woman’s bed… again and again and again. Cheating so much, my mother left, sued the ‘great man’ for a divorce, on which he based a best-seller, A Love-song Written In Court. They don’t see the missed Christmases, the parade of new step-mothers, or the fact that I do not know half of my sisters or brothers. And they don’t know the madness that was lurking just behind his eyes, it was a ‘tragic artist’s death’ when my father chose suicide… They still praise him as some hero, but I sadly know whole truth... I myself felt I should create, I’ve known this ever since youth. But from what I’ve seen most ‘great writers,’ all the others besides dear old dad, seem to fall prey to the same vices, half of them were just as bad... CONCLUDES IN PART TWO.