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Well, it's a new year, time to reflect and assess and, in my case, dry out a little from all the holiday boozing I've indulged in. I don't know what the rest of you freakos contemplate at 4AM on January 1st every year. Maybe you promise yourselves you're going to be nicer to your Mom. Maybe you swear to yourself you're never going to drink again, your words echoing off the porcelain. Maybe you have entire conversations with Voices only you can hear-who knows. Who wants to know, is the real question. As for me, I can safely assume you want to know what I'm contemplating at 4AM on 1/1 every year, lying in the dark, listening to my stomach gurgle and growl alarmingly as it struggles to process sixteen shots of tequila, because you're still. . .reading. . .this. What am I contemplating? Usually I'm trying to remember the last time I cleaned my toilet, since my stomach is invariably telling me that a reckoning is coming, and coming soon. That, and how I can fool more people into publishing my writing in the coming year.
I mean, fuck, man: We live in a world where Jessica Simpson is considered somehow entertaining and interesting. How am I not a God of some sort? It's all very puzzling. In 2003 I have so far managed to sell 3.5% of the short stories I submitted to the hungry Universe. There are about 15 submissions still out there, so that may improve, who knows-stranger things have happened. Now, for an unknown and marginally talented writer from New Jersey, this ain't too bad. Some of those sales even paid American Cash Money. But in the grand scheme of things, this blows whale dick. 3.5%? Jesus, I think maybe fifteen people read those stories, while Tama Janowitz published an entire novel this year. Ever read Slaves of New York? God, I wish I hadn't. I'll never get the foul taste of those words out of my head-never-and yet she is rewarded with more publishing opportunities. Does no one care about my mental health? Like I said: All very puzzling. The purpose of a writer, I believe, is to have their work read by as many humans throughout time as possible, infecting future generations with their thoughts and words, meming their way through history. You might argue that it's okay to write for your own pleasure, but that would make you a Communist, so I wouldn't advise doing so. Writing for your own private pleasure is, as the metaphor might suggest, literary masturbation. If no one reads your work, your work might as well not exist, so you could save yourself a lot of time by not actually writing it down and simply imagining that you wrote it, dig? So, I feel it's required of me to struggle to get my work out there as much as possible. Towards this end, I do a lot of shucking and jiving: I submit an average of 90 short stories a year to magazines; I self-publish my little zine and its associated crap; I always have a novel out there in the wild, trying to be sold. I do what I can, bubbas. Someday I hope to be able to leave the shuck and jive behind. When I am a rich and successful author, I will be able to sell things I scrawl on cocktail napkins in the local bars instantly, for real American Cash Money. I will be able to sell my next six novels before I even write them. Ten years after I am dead they will discover all the wretched manuscripts I instructed my Executor to burn but which he greedily hid away, and publish them as my "lost manuscripts" despite their obvious crappiness. Until then, I shuck, and I jive. Writers who don't do this, who let their manuscripts turn yellow in locked desk drawers, who never make any attempt to get their work out there, who must imagine that some Angel of Literature is going to appear unto them and gently bear their inky pages away to great acclaim in heaven-well, they must be Communists. Or morons. You're only given a very short time in this world. You might as well self-publish. Of course, there are other ways to measure my writing. I wrote 14 short stories in 2003, at least one of which may be a slice above trash. I completed two novels and began a third, put the finishing touches on my plan for world domination, bought some monkeys, and, of course, published four issues of The Inner Swine-which, to be honest, those extra monkeys had a lot to do with. And once I get that world-domination plan in motion, lord knows I don't expect to have much trouble getting published. Or getting more monkeys. Jeff |
Feburary 26, 2004