I saw this quote today and thought it captured something any author ponders but will never know for sure: How will your work be perceived after your gone? Will it be read? Will it be dead? Will it survive time and the changes of our world? I like to believe in magic. I like to believe when I do get my work published (notice the “WHEN”) that I will putting a story out there that, at the very least, will make people feel something, anything (whether I’m dead or alive when they read it).

I copied this quote from another site, not the book, so I apologize if the wording is inaccurate in any way.

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. –Margaret Lea”

— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel)