Homer: The Ninth Life Of A Blind Wonder Cat

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I’ve been wrestling with the idea of writing a sequel to Homer’s Odyssey for nearly two years now—feeling, on the one hand, that there were certainly more Homer stories to be told; but, on the other hand, that to make something “book length” would require adding an awful lot of padding. Homer’s Odyssey was published in 2009 and covered the first twelve years of Homer’s life. Homer lived to be sixteen, and so a new book would have significantly less ground to cover.

What you are holding now is the solution I eventually reached—what I like to call a “mini-sequel,” roughly one-third the length of the original. Not as long as many books, perhaps, but (I think) exactly the length it needs to be.

Length wasn’t my only concern. I can’t speak for other writers, but for me, to write about something is to relive it as vividly as I did the first time around. I don’t know how to make a reader see and feel things that I’m not seeing and feeling myself at the moment I’m writing about them. There were many, many wonderful times with Homer during those four years after Homer’s Odyssey came out, and you’ll read those stories here. But there were also some hard times when we lost him, and I wasn’t sure I could bear to go through them again.

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