If you follow our comments (each to his own taste) you’ll have noted an exchange following Phil’s “Questions” post, in which I talk about my personal emotional problem with shame. It’s an awkward sort of conversation, as I no doubt appear partly self-pitying and partly just perverse, responding to everything with a one-size-fits-all, “That makes me feel ashamed.” Although I can see how it might look as if I was playing a game, let me assure you that I’m dead serious. That’s what it’s like to have a shame problem. Whatever you think about anything, good or bad, helpful or worthless, shame is always there, in some different form. It’s a ubiquitous, protean enemy.

Thinking about it this evening, it occurred to me that that would make a great theme for a fantasy story. I could have a villain who was a shape-changer, who follows the hero wherever he goes, and confronts him again and again in different disguises.

And then I realized, with a shock, that I’d already written that story. My new book (which, in case you’ve forgotten, is called West Oversea) features a villain who’s a shape-changer. He follows Erling Skjalgsson wherever he goes, even in a voyage to North America, and confronts him again and again in a variety of disguises.

I wrote an allegory on my own condition, and didn’t even realize it.

I’ll figure out a way to feel ashamed of that, too….

Frank links to short story blogger Charles May, who reviews a book by Robert Boswell in a post called, “Robert Boswell, Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards and The Half-Known World.” Charles notes that author Boswell teaches writing and that fact seems to come through in this book of stories.

In the story “A Sketch of Highway on the Nap of a Mountain,” Boswell uses the point of view of a woman who seems to have had a stroke, or maybe she is just a modern Mrs. Malaprop” who makes numerous language errors, such as “I get irrigated with my life,” “He begins happily dissembling our past,” “I’m at the car, divulging a black boom box.”

They are funny, and Boswell seems to be having a great time inventing them, but the story seems to be mainly an excuse for demonstrating his cleverness in inventing them.