Every Author's Worst Nightmare

Poor Michael Crichton. Not only is he dead - a state I'm not particularly looking forward to myself, except for when I've eaten much too much - he now has to put up with the indignity of this. Yes, somebody has been kind enough to go through his computer and dig out his half-finished novels, and now they are going to publish them.

Hideous. If, by some terrible happenstance, I was to go out today, eat far too much pudding, and then die, and somebody was to go through my computer, they would find at least five half-written novels, sometimes including (as the Crichton piece says) notes for how to finish them, but that doesn't mean that I actually (a) ever want them to be finished by me or (b) anyone else, and certainly (c) ever want to be read by anyone, especially (d) actual readers. There is a reason why these novels are not finished. It is not because I am (theoretically) dead. It is because they are terrible.

The fact is, writers start and don't finish terrible novels all the time, and sometimes they even write and finish terrible novels, but some kind of sanity / vanity / responsible feelings towards the well-being of the world kicks in and instead of publishing the damn things you keep them on your computer just in case one day you wake up knowing exactly how to make that terrible novel into a good novel. Here's a hint: the day that you wake up with that knowledge is highly unlikely to be after you are dead.

Aha, you might say. Michael Crichton did not know he was going to wake up dead. Therefore he might have been working on something that was actually good. Novelists might die halfway through writing something good; in fact, I bet they do all the time.

I would reply: firstly, you have a very sweet and elevated view of how much of a writer's time is spent working on something good. (I would suggest: not very much.) Secondly, you might be right. But there are *two* books that have been salvaged from Michael Crichton's, and so I would wager that one of them is a grotesque embarrassment which he'd rather was put in the coffin with him and buried.

Shall we hazard a guess as to which? Is it the "technological thriller" that he was a third of the way through writing when he died? Or is it "Pirate Latitudes, [which] is set in 17th-century Jamaica, and follows the plans of a pirate called Hunter and the governor of Jamaica to raid a Spanish treasure galleon?"

I rest my case.

Meanwhile, on a similar theme, The Onion.