Q: Why are you trying to breathe new life in an outworn form like the newspaper column?
There’s no outlet for it.
And a collection of them is even less commercial.
A: In an interview in Locus, Brian Aldiss writes,
If you want to make money, you don’t attempt anything new. You start a series that can go on and on, whereupon the publishers don’t have any crisis of decision to resolve. I don’t want to work like that. It always seemed to me that one of the principles of writing is you should enjoy the actual writing, the feel of something evolving under your fingers, under your keys. You must try to please yourself, to be your own judge Often you fall flat on your face. But there’s such pleasure in trying something that is new, or passes for new.
I’m just pleasing myself. Watching the form evolve, under the cursor.