Maud Newton had an interesting post up recently about her fears of being a "one book writer" and how it might be preventing her from writing faster. Here's a bit:

Many writers who take their own experiences and twist them into fiction only have one story in them but publish many more, of ever-diminishing worth, after their first book appears. I'm deeply afraid of becoming that kind of literary natterer-on.

The trouble is, though, if you decide you're only going to write one novel, you will want that book to be the best it can possibly be — not just for right now, but for all time. Down this particular obsessive-compulsive road lie many interesting developments. A completed manuscript is not one of them.

On one level I guess those of us who have not yet had a book published (be it our only one or not) shouldn't be worrying if it is the only thing we will ever write. And yet when one has written a first book that is extremely personal you can not help but be concerned that is the case. Once I tell the world about Alaska, will I have anything else to say? This is something that has become steadily more worrisome to me as the years go by as it is the only subject I have garnered any interest in from others, so I certainly feel Maud's pain. It's also why I was so relieved to sell a short story to Strange Horizons recently (it will not run until Octoberish). This also helped for another concern I've had, that of writing only one kind of thing (heavily nonfictionish literary fiction) which is something Jenny D. has lately been posting about. To wit:

My life would be easier if I just stopped writing novels - but I have been writing a novel, one way or another, since I was about nine years old, and I think it may be a necessary part of my life!

(I do recommend all writerly types read her entire entry as it is about what one wants to write vs what one can actually adequately write and also if what you want to write can find readers.)

I initially was thrilled with the SH sale because it is a short story but more importantly because it is a haunted house story set during high school and not at all about Alaska or flying. But upon reflection, I realized that as much as the AK book is about AK it is also far more about my father then I ever planned (I can't stress this enough - there are several passages about my father that literally wrote themselves into that book) and as much as "What We Left Behind in Jacksonville" is about a haunted house it is also about my mother and father. The western book I have been researching so much and was supposed to be about people going west, going into the wild, climbing mountains, etc and a rumination on our innate need for getting AWAY has become....again about my father. Because oddly, while writing about Jack Kerouac (because of "On the Road" - the ultimate leaving home for the west book) I found that not only was he from a mill town in New England but he was Catholic and French Canadian and basically, he's one of my people.

Not that my father ever would have gotten stoned and drunk and run away with Neal Cassady but you get the picture.

And all of this means that while I do worry that I have only one book in me and I do wonder if I'm writing in the format that best fits the story I have to tell I have determined (at least for now) that the story is far bigger then I could ever fit into one novel or one essay or one short story. At its most mundane it is the story of my life and my family but it is not entirely, not really. I certainly didn't fly the routes I write about in Map of My Dead Pilots; I am just retelling the stories I heard. The story I am working on now, "The Patron Saint of Woonsocket, Rhode Island" is an imagining of what my father's childhood might have been - what I know, what I think, what I wish. And it's also about what really happened in the 1955 flood of his hometown, something I've wanted to write about for years. Even the western book is a combination of what I know (leaving home) and what I don't (why Kerouac and many others did it).

It's all one story but told in many formats. We'll see if it's enough to carry me (and some readers) along.