"I have rewritten -- often several times -- every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers." - Vladimir Nabokov

I am now at the stage where I am (finally) done rewriting my next novel. Hence this entry on my blog.

Anything is better than wondering (yet again) whether a particular metaphor for the color of blood is sufficiently precise; whether an exchange between two of the characters is plausible; or whether the opening is powerful or the is ending is satisfying or why anyone who doesn't share my last name would ever bother to read my new book.

I get this way whenever I finish a novel.

The truth is, I have never reread any of my books once they are between hard covers. It's too painful.

The new book, "The Double Bind," will be arriving at bookstores and libraries this coming winter.

It's hard to imagine winter right now, even here in the Land of the Polar Tomato where I reside, (a hill town in central Vermont). I have crocuses and daffodils in my front yard. (Granted, like all Verrmont crocuses and daffodils, they have a death wish. They emerge from beneath piles of thawing, moldering leaves, only to be hammered by spring snowstorms.) But winter -- and my new book -- will be here before we know it.

The new book is about a 26-year-old female social worker, an elderly homeless photographer, and the photographs he leaves behind when he dies. The book will include 12 actual photographs, woven into the text, that were left behind by a homeless photographer whose work impressed the hell out of me.

The novel is also, I hope, a bit of a page-turner -- not unlike Midwives. But I hope the characters are as authentic and real as the folks some of you met in Before You Know Kindness.

I'll tell you more about the book in the coming weeks. In the meantime, thanks so much for reading my work. I am more grateful than I can tell you.

First there was James Frey and "A Million Little Fibs -- er, Pieces."

Then we learned that young male novelist JT Leroy is not in reality an HIV-positive former teenage truck-stop prostitute and drug addict who turned his nightmarish childhood into searing fiction. Instead, we discovered, Leroy is actually a 40-year-old San Francisco writer named Laura Albert.

And now we have the curious incident of the plagiarist in the nighttime. Or, perhaps, possible plagiarist. Perhaps Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan really did copy somewhere between 29 and 40 passages from two books by Megan McCafferty by accident. Or maybe it was all a tragic coincidence. Haven't we all been told there is a statistical possibility that with enough monkeys and enough time and enough typewriters, one of those chimps would eventually rewrite "Macbeth?"

In any case, I have to ask: Is there anything more book writers can do to make absolutely certain that readers never trust us again?

We are constantly bemoaning the state of literature -- yup, me too -- and how beleaguered fiction has become. Everyone is perusing their mail at myspace.com or scanning the Web for the latest gossip on Lindsay and Britney and Paris instead of (for instance) reading "Silas Marner."

Okay, that was a bad for instance. I wrote the introduction to the Modern Library edition of "Silas Marner," and even I would rather read some good dish on Lindsay Lohan than "Silas Marner."

Insert (for instance) Andrea Barrett's "The Voyage of the Narwahl" for "Silas Marner."

My point? If literature is to remain vital and vibrant and competitive with the myriad entertainment alternatives available in the digital world, writers who give a damn about pulp and ink need to be honest. We can't be fabricating our memoirs or creating patently false personae or stealing whole passages from one another.

After all, that's what the Internet is for.

It's one thing to lie about your age on myspace.com; it's quite another to lie about your background in a book.

And perhaps that right there is the crux of the problem. We are allowing the ethical sloppiness that on occasion marks the digital work to encroach upon pulp and ink. And that can only hurt novelists and memoirists and historians in the long run.

After all, digital data is easily deleted. But books last forever.

Yup, even Kaavya Viswanathan's “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life."

Sure, it has been pulled from bookstore shelves, and amazon.com and bn.com are no longer selling it. But the book is just a few clicks away at e-bay.

And now that the writer is enduring a horrific moment of disgrace, you can buy a copy for a mere $49.95 -- or twice the book's cover price when it was new.

Perhaps we can thank the Internet for that, too.

Hey, kids, if you want to make your mom really happy this Mother's Day, flush a carton of her cigarettes down the toilet.

Actually, don't. I once did and I lived to regret it.

Instead, flush the cigarettes down one at a time. But whatever you do, don't put an entire carton of them in the bowl together and then flush. And certainly don't try this trick at home in the hours immediately before your parents are about to have a dinner party. That is precisely what I did one Saturday during Mother's Day weekend when I was a boy. I did it because I loved my mother very much, and nothing says love like human excrement on the kitchen floor while elegantly dressed party guests are arriving at your house.

I wish I could say I was making this up. But I can't.

I was 7 years old, and I wanted my mother to quit smoking. I did not convince her to give up that nasty, killing habit that Mother's Day weekend. But I did manage to clog the pipes so effectively that when the first guest went to use the bathroom that Saturday night, everything came back.

And I mean everything. I had chosen to flush the cigarettes down the toilet in what we referred to with uncharacteristic decorum as the "powder room," and this bathroom was right off the kitchen on the first floor of the house. I don't know precisely how this guest did it, but it was if he had vacuumed the entire contents of the septic tank up through the pipes and onto the kitchen floor and the house's front hallway.

My mom actually may have smoked more that night.

Now, turning the first floor corridors of our development replica of a colonial home into a river of raw sewage was not my intention.

I think I expected that my mother would discover at the party that she was all out of cigarettes and realize that she didn't need them. The fact that virtually every single other person at the soiree still smoked like a steel mill in Pittsburgh and she could have bummed a cigarette from, well, anybody was apparently lost on me.

But my mother handled the disaster with her typical grace. Aware that a part of our house was now a Super Fund cleanup site, she herded everyone onto the back porch and served dinner there. The dinner party simply became yet another line item on the endless litany of eccentric events that seemed to occur at the small bashes my mother would host. There was time she celebrated her Swedish heritage with a Santa Lucia party and wore a crown of lit candles: Her hair started to smolder and so in her chic white gown she dove into the swimming pool. Another time she simply forgot to serve dinner until, as midnight neared, her guests started expressing their hunger. And there were the parties with the flamenco themes and the harem themes (yes, harem) and one party in which a group of guests was instructed to bring goats. (They obliged.)

Meanwhile, at that Mother's Day weekend party where the downstairs was starting to smell like the Love Canal, I remained upstairs, mortified. I was sound asleep by the time the party ended and my parents went to bed. The next morning, Mother's Day, my brother and I brought our mom the requisite breakfast in bed, (which, inevitably, included an ashtray and a couple of Virginia Slims).

Years later my mother would die of lung cancer. But she was in remission her last Mother's Day on this earth, and by then she had stopped smoking. Lung cancer will do that. We talked that last Mother's Day of many things, including the time I tried to convince her to quit by flushing her cigarettes down the toilet.

Her recollection of the evening? "Was that a great party or what?"

Happy Mother's Day.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on May 14, 2006.)

Ian Freeman, 17, has spent a lot of time alone in his living room lately, singing, spinning, and twirling in a conservative black tuxedo emboldened with a red velvet cummerbund and a matching red string tie. Is this a young man preparing to dazzle his classmates at a high school prom? No. (Quick confession: Years ago, this might have been me if you replaced the words "preparing to dazzle his classmates" with "hoping he won't humiliate himself.")

Rather, Ian is rehearsing the song he will perform at this week's annual two-day showcase for entertainers with developmental disabilities and their friends, "Thumbs Up." Ian has Downs syndrome, but that has never led him to shy away from the spotlight. As his mother Grace Freeman, an elementary schoolteacher, observes, "Ian was born extroverted. He works a crowd like there's no tomorrow."

This is as true in a pizza parlor as it is in a theater. There are few waitresses at Nicco's Cocina I haven't seen him charm.

"Thumbs Up," the brainchild of the Catalyst Theatre's Veronica Lopez, is now in its eleventh season. The inspiration for the show was Lopez's sister, BeBe, now 43. BeBe, like Ian, has Downs syndrome, but loves to perform. The show was christened "Thumbs Up" because BeBe would cheer even her gutter balls while bowling.

In past years, I have watched Ian walk the boards in a variety of Broadway guises during the show. He has done an uncannily accurate imitation of the Elvis Presley-like pharaoh from "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat;" the regal and imposing monarch from "The King and I;" and, most recently, the handsome and charismatic prince from "Cinderella." This coming Thursday and Friday at the University of Vermont's Royall Tyler Theatre, he will be the Cat in the Hat from "Seussical" hence the tuxedo.

And, once again, he won't be alone. Rachel Wollum, 17, who also has Downs syndrome, will be singing "Not for the Life of Me" from "Thoroughly Modern Millie," with choreography she created herself. (Rachel's mother, Nancy Wollum, is the founder of Addison County's Can Do Dancers, a dance troupe of adults with developmental disabilities.) There will be Emily Anderson's inspired -- and inspiring -- Awareness Theater Company, hip hop dancers, poets, pianists, and the always amazing Joel Bertelson with a new piece he has written, "How Junk Food Saved My Life."

I don't know most of these performers any more than I know the vast majority of the actors who grace the stages at the University of Vermont or the Flynn Center. But I do know Ian. He is the only person on the planet with whom I will sing (always in the safe confines of my car as we drive to the movies or Nicco's Cocina) because he is the only completely nonjudgmental person I have ever met. There is no such thing as off-key when you sing with Ian: It's all good.

Likewise, there is no stinging sarcasm in Ian's world. Or cutthroat competition. Or mean-spirited schadenfreude. I don't doubt there is unhappiness: None of us are exempt from those dark days of the soul, none of us goes through life exempt from disappointment. But if you are Ian Freeman -- or Rachel or Joel -- I don't believe it ever crosses your mind that there is something to be gained from someone else's failure.

Ian remains one of the few teenage boys on the planet who hug the way most people wave. He embraces you -- literally and metaphorically -- as soon as he meets you. And that is, perhaps, why Ian is fun to be around. When you're with Ian, you let down your guard and lose all pretension. In some ways, I may actually be a better person around him: More patient. More tolerant. More willing to sing in the car.

The irony, of course, is that much of the world is mighty uncomfortable around people like Ian, and put their guards way up. That's why Lopez cherishes "Thumbs Up."

"The audience leaves the theater with a different take on the world. They tell me they've never known people like this before, and they relate to the pure joy of performers who are creative and live entirely in the moment," she says.

And, best of all, they get to see what makes a kid like Ian so ... special.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on May 28, 2006.)