Doc is now insisting I take dictation for his blog. He says, by God, if I don't do it he will sell his big computer and I won't like that. I thought well, it is better for a whole bunch of people to blog and only have 2 or 3 followers than it is for only one person to blog and have 1,000. This is the way book publishing has always worked. All the would be writers send off their novels and the publisher picks one and rejects thousands hoping to convince them they can't write, so they will quit sending novels, and will buy the one they do publish so he can sell a lot of books. The published writer will then get awards from all kinds of august book critics, like the PEN/ Faulkner Award here, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Orange Prize (never heard of that) which is what happened to a writer named Ann Patchett who first went to the Iowa Writers Workshop which I hoped I could attend back in college. She had to work as a waitress before she made it, but once published, her first novel won a bunch of prizes and she was on her way to fame and fortune (at least as much as a writer ever makes). If you can win awards all the sensitive intellectual readers will keep you in clover more or less for the rest of your life.
You can't come out of a psych ward like I did in college barely walking, going numb and about dying all over again everytime there was a big stressful moment. Sure knocked my aspirations to be a published novelist in the head for a while, I can guarantee, and ten years of barely earning a living waitressing for me, when I finally was well enough to work, and publishers returning every novel I ever sent them.
I highly recommend Ann Patchett's memoir Truth and Beauty, one of her latest I am reading I got for Xmas. (I don't wait to open parcels) It is about her touching friendship with another aspiring young woman writer who had Ewing's Sacrcoma at 9 years old, which after heavy treatment of chemo and radiation left her with her face caved in and badly distorted. I mean this memoir is a heart breaker. Beautifully written.
Did I say Ann Patchett didn't deserve to be published? She is a born writer, but dammit so was I. I finally knew I was destined to stay with the main stream, a bunch of people who appreciate born writers only so so. Their parents didn't send them to college. Some dropped out. Some had bad things happen to them.
My neighbor Daniel ( in the Christmas Apt tour video) had a brother who graduated from college as a computer engineer, invented programs, made mucho money, who was the one who severely molested him as a child, threatening to kill him if he told, and stressed Daniel out so bad, he became mentally ill by the time he went to school, failed first grade, did not do so well in the second, never learned to read very well or write. I asked him if this monster genius brother was still alive who was never charged with any crime since he was only about 4 or 5 years older when he was doing this to Daniel. He said, no, the SOB is dead, thank goodness. Daniel has promised to talk about all this on camera after the holidays are over and he has had time to think about it.
I relate because molestation at 5 stressed me out so many years, along with being messed with at 10, too. Plus my suicidal dad's alcoholism, well you get the picture.
Daniel and I were lucky to survive our childhoods. Let alone become rich and famous.
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