The door slammed, echoing down the long hall. My fate as a writer is being decided in that tiny room where my manuscript is being read.
I immediately feel panic. Anxiousness comparable to the split second after shutting a car door and seeing the keys inside.
Do I have artistic talent? Can I write an interesting book? What is really artistic talent?

On one hand is inspiration and originality and on the other hand the mastery of simple, certain techniques of expression.
Being an artist in a world that highly-values analytical thinking is no walk in the park; it requires navigational mastery of socio-economic order, as well as an arsenal of weapons against the mediocre and the monotonous.

The reader today gravitates to the movies faster than to the book store. The movie, feeds the need to have a visual setting for anybody's inner revelations or dreams. Trendy novels like "Harry Potter," "DaVinci's Code" or - Tolkien's books are all movies. Tolkien, Rowling, and Dan Brown have that "something" making it to convert files directly into celluloid fantasy satisfying millions of otherwise very good readers. In a movie, the message is delivered without the "ballast" of the text, provided the director and scenarist are very good.

So literature and films are two arts interchangeable nowadays. The movie is a syncretic form of art, summarizing the production of several types of arts and I appreciate it as much as anyone with a Liberal Arts background could and should. But, literature in its old classic form, the one I fed off in my youth, completely engulfed in the books from my parents' library, seems to be a relic and that in itself breaks my heart.

My work is the result of eerie nights spent reading Chekhov, and Pushkin, and Balzac, Hugo or Flaubert Almost everything written today is in a celluloid format and as I wait for the fate of my manuscript I cannot decide if it is a good thing or not.