"Acceptable Losses"

Where do great ideas for a novel come from?

From Inspiration? Perspiration? Or the gift of a friendly Muse?

"Acceptable Losses" began on an Air France Caravel flight from Lima to Caracas when I recognized the pilot's name on the cockpit door. After I sent him my card, Claude Xual, a Free French Naval Aviator who trained with me during the war came to my seat and although we didn't hug and kiss, we shared many happy memories.

An old Catholic Priest seated beside me, witnessing our happy reunion, abandoned all desire to sleep as he told me of the tragic fate of his missionary work with his beloved Columbian Indians ruthlessly slaughtered to build a road to a Uranium mine soon abandoned as unprofitable.

Years later I met a courageous Maryknoll Nun who upon suffering a nervous breakdown and loss of faith in South America, returned to the United States to confront the daunting challenges of civilian life.

And after a twenty year marriage irreparably damaged by my wife's alcoholism and the tribulations of a writing career, I also experienced my own loss of love, a defeat as devastating as the death of friends during the war.

Three experiences of loss haunting my imagination. Were they accidents of fate? Or do they contain a greater meaning?

In writing "Acceptable Losses" I learned that for every loss there can be a redeeming gain enabling us to go on living.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson explained: "Thus the Law of compensation operates. The dice of God are always loaded. For everything you have missed you will have gained something else".

As long as the power of love returns the love that made it. Enduring love.

"There is a land of the living and the land of the dead and the bridge is love," Thornton Wilder said.

And certainly a novel is a bridge built by love... from the past to the present.




Norman Weissman
Author of:

"Acceptable Losses"
"Snapshots USA"