Title: Starling

Author: Elizabeth Knox

In: Sport 28: Autumn 2002

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, March 2002, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 28: Autumn 2002

April 1982

April 1982

One Too Many Lives was an uncertain venture for me. I had no idea what would happen to it when I wrote it, but it had to be written. Still, I wrote it under its own level. I can't tell now if I only think that because I've grown up in these last two years. Now that I've experienced some of the difficulties of getting fiction published here Salamander seems not an uncertain venture, but destined to failure from the start. I might as well page 128 say it's doomed.
I must get to work nevertheless. I keep feeling as if I'm being punished for being proud.

(I hardheadedly finished my second novel, Salamander, hating it the whole time I was writing it. I gave it to my father to read. He said that it was a more mature work than One Too Many Lives, but needed cleaning up. I felt relieved, but when we sat down with it I told him I didn't like it. He said that, although it was a more polished effort, he thought One Too Many Lives was a better novel. He asked me what I wanted to do with it? Did I want to put it away for a while. I said I'd rather put it away forever, and did. It was after I had consigned Salamander to Dad's filing cabinet that I went to university.)