Whiplash, Part I

WARNING: THIS IS A LONG BLOG POST.  If you get tired, please move to the rear of the blog, where cake will be served.

People have had occasion to ask me what the hell I’m doing, working at a law firm.  Why aren’t I a great fiction writer or something, swapping yachts with Stephen King for the weekend or partying all night with J.K. Rowling.  Well, firstly, I get seasick.  Secondly, you might not believe this, but it’s actually very hard to get a novel published, especially if you’re not Stephen King or J.K. Rowling.  (Who owes me five bucks, now that I think about it.)  I’m speaking as one who has tried.  And one who currently isn’t trying.  I dunno if that means I’m done trying, exactly.  Come back in a year and ask me again.  And yes, I’m Working On Something right now, even if it’s spasmodic weekend work at the local Half Price Books while my idiot neighbor is throwing a birthday party for his twelve-year-old granddaughter and the dance tunes are making my house vibrate.  (My house vibrates all the time.  We have a trainyard nearby.  But still, kinda different when it’s vibrating to Can’t Stop Till You Get Enough.  Michael Jackson, unlike the Burlington Northern, is usually in tune.)

But here’s the thing.  I actually like working at a law firm.  I’m good at it, for one thing.  Litigation is a strange and hairy beast, but I’ve gotten to know it pretty well and at least when I’m around, it only bites occasionally.  There are certain things that need to happen in a certain order and certain problems that are bound to crop up needing to be solved.  I’m good at solving problems, and the larger and more complicated, the better.  I also know a lot of stuff about the law.  Not necessarily the theory of the law or why such and such judge did such and such thing (though I know a little bit about that, too), but other stuff.  Important stuff. Like, for example, if you’re electronically filing a document in the state courts of Texas, you have until midnight to do so, not just ‘til five o’clock.  Like if you need to file anything with the appeals court, you need to send paper copies to the court as well, one for each justice.  Yes, it may sound like useless trivia, but its important stuff, folks.  This is all about getting your case heard or not heard, and if you want your case heard, you need a good paralegal.  I am a good paralegal and I will get your case heard.  And these skills, nifty as they are, just really don’t have a place outside a law firm. 

But that’s not to say I have always worked at a law firm.  Au contraire, I actually worked in a law library for ten years first.  And before that I was in music school (!).  The plan at the time was to become one of the great bassoonists.  (Have you ever met a great bassoonist?  No?  How about you?  No?  You?)  So, okay, great bassoonists don’t exactly set the world on fire. They don’t do solo concertos in front of the orchestra very often and honestly, I don’t think many of them make like Kenny G and record New Age albums. I have never seen one win a Grammy or shake hands with Nelson Mandela or get invited to North Korea to play for the despot-in-charge-at-the-moment. But they do have nifty jobs playing with major orchestras.  Because who wouldn’t want a job playing music all day long?  That would be a great job.

Where you run into trouble here is that there are only about 17 major full-time orchestras in the United States, and each of those probably have three or four bassoonists apiece. There are something like 1,200 other orchestras, which makes up another 4800 jobs, but those jobs are part-time and usually don’t have any benefits. So maybe 4,868 jobs for professional bassoonists of any sort in the United States.  And when you figure that most of those jobs are already occupied to begin with, and there are probably at least another 1,000 brand-new bassoonists graduating from music schools every year, you can see how the math might maybe start to work against you there. In short, if you’re not one of the very, very best, you’re not going to be able to swing it professionally.  And I was not one of the very, very best.  I was good, though.  I won awards and stuff.  And a college scholarship.  Ask anybody.

The reason I bring all this up is that I just saw “Whiplash” with Joan and a couple of friends. As it turned out, three of the four of us had been to music school.  There are two kinds of music students: The very, very best and everybody else.  Everybody else are the ones that eventually get ground down by the machine and pitched out to find other careers as librarians or district managers or, I dunno, paralegals.  This could have led to a fascinating discussion, but all four of us were so stunned by the movie that nobody really talked about it afterward, except for saying how accurate they thought it was to his or her experience of music school. And for the record, I think it’s pretty fucking accurate.  I never had a teacher as bad as Fletcher—nobody ever hit anybody, or threw things at people, as far as I can recall--but I had plenty of instructors who did their share of yelling in people’s faces and hurling insults as fast as they could think them up. And, I mean, I could tell stories all night long.  Here’s two.  There was this one piano teacher that we called the Dragon Lady.  She had this thing about people with long nails—girls, mostly, but I knew my fair share of male guitar players with long nails on their right hands.  Anyway, if she thought your nails were too long to play the piano properly, she would chop them off.  With this pair of industrial-strength sewing scissors she kept in her purse.  I am cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die serious. And the scene where each kid got to play exactly one measure to prove they belonged in the ensemble?  That happened daily.  I saw people sent from first chair to the bottom of the section—or worse, out of the room for all time--because a reed squawked or a string broke or something, and I mean to tell you I saw it more than once. 

So why do it at all, you ask.  Why go to all the trouble and expense and take the abuse and spend four years cutting the throats of your fellow students in any way possible only to get out and start cutting throats all over again to find a job, any job, while trying to keep your own throat in one piece in the process?  I mean why does anyone do it?  Well, I’ll tell you why.  Ask a mountain climber why he climbs mountains.  Ask a paramedic what it’s like to save a life.  Ask a lawyer what it feels like to put the perfect argument to the perfect court on the perfect day and come away from it knowing not only that you won but that everything is going to change now, today and into the future, because of the words you just spoke.  The answer is that you can’t help it.  The answer is that it takes you over.  Because every now and then everything all comes together and everybody spectacularly plays the right note at the right time and the sound just detonates around you like a hydrogen bomb, and you and the group and the audience and the music all turn into one single organism, and people, if you’ve ever been there, you will know what I mean when I tell you that it’s better than drugs, it’s better than sex, it’s better than true love’s first kiss.  And once you’ve had that, all you want is more of it.  And so it’s worth all the abuse and the backstabbing and the constant sniping. 

I regret to inform you that, although I like being a paralegal and what I do is sometimes pretty cool, I have never had a moment like that at a law firm.  Nor do I ever expect to.  The best thing that ever happened to me as a paralegal is when a judge quoted one of my paragraphs from a motion in his ruling.  I had the ruling framed.  But was it the same as being at a Ground Zero detonation of sound and light and the entire meaning of the universe coalescing into one final E-major chord?  No.  It was not.  And while I personally never had a choice between staying in music school and finding something else to do with my life (they really, really don’t like it when you fail piano), I sometimes wonder if I sold out.  Gave up.  Took the easy way out, though it wasn’t easy then and it still isn’t now.  I have a steady job and a regular paycheck, which especially with my Delicate Medical Condition is probably the best possible outcome.

But still.  That whole detonation of sound thing. It’s pretty awesome.

Glasses, Horror, Particle Physics and Book o'the Decade

It's official: We are living in the Jetsons era.  I still don't have a flying car (Detroit's working on it, right after they finish filing for bankruptcy) but I have just done something unprecedented in the lives of modern human beings.  I have ordered glasses through the Internet.  Not sunglasses but actual glasses.

Seriously, I don't know if they had a parade when this service first became available but if they didn't, they should have.  The only thing worse than shopping for glasses is shopping for shoes.  (And no, I've never successfully ordered shoes from the Internet, but if SAS ever makes them available, it'll be time to break out the credit card.)  By the time I've eliminated all the frames that won't work with my prescription and all the ones that are butt-ugly, I'm usually stuck with one, maybe two choices, both of which make me look like a librarian.  And there's nothing wrong with looking like a librarian if you are one, but I'm not one.  The last pair of glasses I got new made my boss's boss call me "Darth Vader" for a week.  (Or was that the temporary shades I had to sport because I had posterior iritis?  I forget.)  Anyway, I was able to pick out a nice pair with plastic frames and springs, with a scratchproof coating (I've had bad experiences with those, but hey, try and try again) and UV protection for only about $150.00.  That's cheap, when we're talking about glasses.  I believe my last pair was about $250.

Anyway, that's one of the danger of ice storms: Online shopping.  Never mind traffic accidents and frostbite and ice-laden trees crashing through your roof: Beware Amazon.com.  You can't leave your house without risking a fall on your butt (I've fallen twice now) so you stay in your house, and if you have a credit card and an Internet connection, the siren call of merchandising is hard to ignore.  Especially this time of year, when you must express your love for your fellow beings through lots and lots of commerce.  If Christmas gifts were good enough for Baby Jesus, they're good enough for everybody else on the planet.  So bring it on.  Let's go to Wal-Mart and get Maced over a cheap Blu-Ray player.

That said, however, I also bought a book for my Nook.  (I love my Nook.  Have I mentioned lately how much I love my Nook?  I love my Nook.)  Barnes & Noble shells out a free Nook book every Friday, and often they're not that interesting but sometimes they are (ie, Kameron Hurley's "God's War," which, at least for me, created a monster). Last week's selection wasn't particularly interesting, so I bought a different one: Edge by Koji Suzuki.

Koji-san is known as the "Stephen King of Japan," but that's kind of a misnomer.  His books are scary but they're suspenseful first and, if I may say so, cerebral.  Koji-san is responsible for Ringu, remade in the U.S. as The Ring and starring Naomi Watts--one of my top five horror films and one which scared the pants off me, broke my heart and scared the pants off me again. (And there I was outside the theater, just after midnight, waddlin' around with a broken heart and no pants.)  So naturally I would be curious about Edge.

Unfortunately, it suffers from a rather clunky translation.  I'm of the opinion that if you're translating something from Language A to Language B, Language B better be your native language, and you ought to be able to write a little, too.  Because seriously: "Life in the name of all things that have shells separating them from the outside, the ability to sustain and reproduce themselves, and the capacity to evolve." (Page 356.) Is that even a sentence?  Given the fact that one of the main characters is a publisher who specializes in translations, the clunky language is doubly ironic.

Apart from that, though, this is a hard book to put down.  It starts off slowly, like Japanese books sort of always do, but then it picks up speed until you're struggling to keep up with it, turning pages as fast as possible.  (Or clicking pages, in my case).  Mathematicians across the world are discovering that, inexplicably, the value of pi has changed.  The value of pi, by the way, is used for calculating everything from the radius of a circle to the mirrors on the Hubble Space Telescope.  If pi has changed, then there's something fundamentally wrong at the quantum level.  And it doesn't help that large numbers of people--from whole families to about a hundred people visiting a public garden--are disappearing without a trace. Throw in weird phenomena like a giant chasm suddenly opening in the earth in California and you can see how we might have a serious problem.  But what is that problem?  How did it start?  Where did it come from? What's going to happen? And on a planet where the only thing we've been able to do at the quantum level is start a nuclear chain reaction, how in hell are we supposed to fix it?

Truth to be told, we've done quite a bit of research at the quantum level (which is all about subatomic particles and how they move around and behave; not only are they unpredictable but they seem to move when they know you're watching them).  We know, for example, that since atoms are mostly empty space, it should be theoretically possible to put your hand through a solid wall.  The fact that for the most part, we can't is one of the great mysteries of physics.  And get this:  All these subatomic particles moving around seem to create time itself, and time theoretically should move backward as well as forward on its trek.  So why don't we have memories of the future?  Well, I'd posit that some of us do, and at the end of Edge, it seems that some of us not only remember the future, but act on it.  And about that I'll say no more because Edge has not just one but two twist endings.  I'm not the easiest person to surprise, but I never saw either of them coming.

So anyway, Edge by Koji Suzuki.  Book o' the Decade.  Check it out. And stay warm.

It's My Birthday! And On June 12...

...Joan of Arc leads the French army to victory in the Battle of Jargeau.  (1429)

...Death warrants are issued for Samuel Adams and John Hancock by British general Thomas Gage, who also declares martial law in Massachusetts. (1775)

...the United Irishmen fight the Battle of Ballynahinch. (1798) 

...Ulysses Grant pulls his troops out of their positions at Cold Harbor, giving the Confederacy a victory. (1864)

...The Phillipines declare their independence from Spain. (1898)

...One of the deadliest tornadoes in U.S. history kills 117 people in New Richmond, Michigan. (1899)

...The Baseball Hall of Fame opens in Cooperstown, NY. (1939)

...German troops liquidate the Jewish ghetto in Brzezany, Poland, and kill 1,180 men, women and children at the city cemetery. (1943) 

...Medgar Evans is murdered in front of his house by a Ku Klux Klan member. (1963)

...The United States Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia declares all U.S. state laws which prohibit interracial marriage to be unconstitutional. (1967)

...and then I come along.  Pretty cool, huh?  And since I've been around...

• I played in a bagpipe band for eleven years.  Well, okay, I was in one bagpipe band for six years and the other one for five years.  Booze, drugs, wild sex, constant travel, loud music--it all kind of runs together, ya know?
• I bought a condo in San Diego, California with Joan, and then sold it for twice what we paid for it, after I exasperatedly told our real estate agent that there was no way on earth anybody would shell out that much money for an 800-square-foot space with high ceilings. 
• And so I was rich for about five minutes.  After which student loans and cars and credit cards and moves to Texas got paid for, and I was no longer rich, but that was okay.  
• I went to England one summer and followed Big Country around.  And here it is, twenty-something years later, and I'm getting ready to follow Big Country around...three dates in Texas.  (Well, hey, I'm not a wide-eyed kid anymore.) 
• Despite several attempts, I never got arrested for civil disobedience.  For some reason, by the time the police showed up and said "You have five minutes to clear the area," I always figured the point had been well made.
• That, and there were maybe ten liberals on campus where I went to school.  And they weren't very good company.  If you're going to be locked up overnight, you need good company.
• I went to music school for two years.  It's John Lennon's fault I didn't graduate. 
• I've been through ten-plus cats.  There must always be cats.
• I worked in a public law library for seven or eight years, during which I contended with:
• A guy who was sure that the copy machine was reading his mind and transmitting his thoughts to the government.  He came in every Tuesday.
• A man who stated that the CIA had bombed his town with nerve gas that caused everyone in the town to forget that this had ever happened, and that he needed to file a Freedom of Information Act request but he couldn't remember the name of the town, and the CIA kept denying that this had ever happened.  
• A sweet little old lady that would come in, walk around the whole building and sprinkle holy water on everything while whispering something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like "motherfucker."  
• A guy who'd been ticketed for having a dog at the beach, and was trying to prove that since he was actually in the water at the time, he was not "at the beach," and if that failed, that he was in "international waters," where the police had no authority.
• I was born in Texas.  I live in Texas.  I want to die in Texas, and have my ashes buried under a live oak someplace because I ought to provide some nourishment for something, after all those trees went through all that fruit growing to nourish me.
• Okay, I was born in Laredo and left almost immediately, but I still count as a native Texan.  That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.
• Since we moved to Texas I was unemployed three times in five years, and never once did we fall behind on the mortgage payments.
• Why? Because we bought a house we could effing afford, that's why. Imagine.
• I wrote a trilogy of thriller novels that are called the Mindbender books while I was unemployed, and they're really good, so if you're a literary agent or a publisher or something, or if you know a literary agent or a publisher or something, drop me a line so we can both make a few bucks. Thanks.
• I was a little manic while I was unemployed. Just a little.
• I have a Garfield bowling ball that's bright orange and says, "Let the Fur Fly."
• I can't bowl. Well, I can throw the ball down the lane and occasionally hit something, but so can your average chimpanzee.  
• Bowling is a lot of fun, though.  I like it a lot.
• I play on the law firm softball team, the mighty Law Dogs.  We are the worst team in the league by a comfortable margin, but we have a good time. 
• I took a writing course once from the mighty F. Paul Wilson, which is kind of like taking a painting course from Vincent Van Gogh.  Totally awesome.
• I've been married to the lovely Joan for the last 18 years.  Yep, that's long enough we could've had a baby and raised it to adulthood.
• I have no interest whatever in having a baby and raising it to adulthood.  
• I sometimes have dreams I have a son, though.  And he's a teenager, and he's taller than me. I have to look up at him to shake my finger under his nose. 
• Joan and I actually got married three times.  I think the third one was "legal."  At least it was at the time.  What's the Supreme Court said lately?
• I was really kind of disappointed that we couldn't get married in the church, but the pastor didn't want to get into a fight with the bishop and Joan didn't want to get married in the church anyway. 
• The next same-sex couple that the pastor married, got married in the church.  About which I have no comment. 
• Since October 2007 I've been dragging myself awake at five a.m. to swim a mile in the morning before work.  
• If you added up all those miles I bet I could've swum to Hawaii by now.
• I enter a swim race every year, a 2k distance race, which I sometimes manage to finish in under an hour. Dead last, I might add. 
• Joan's ex-husband and his wife are friends of ours. It's very Noel Coward, no?
• Just this afternoon, Joan scored us tickets to The Book Of Mormon. Sweet!
• Joan got me a meditation cushion and mat for my birthday. Best. Gift. Ever.
• I paint a little.  My favorite painting is one of a school of fish, swimming through the air in a desert landscape.
• I used to have dreams that my fish could swim around in the air, that it did them no harm.
• I miss my fish, but I think aquarium fish are incompatible with one of my cats.
• Someday I wanna go tornado chasing.
• I have a bad feeling I might actually catch one, and then what would I do with it?
• I became an "official" Buddhist about two years ago.
• Who ever thought that Buddhists would dig tornadoes?
• Despite my occasional bitching, life is actually pretty good.

Cheers, all!

Mopey Midlist Authors, Buddhism and the Cessation of Suffering

Okay, I'm not often one for picking on other people's blogs. I mean, blogging ain't easy sometimes, even if it is cheap (and remind me to speak to The Network about doubling my salary again soon). Nonetheless I have a bone to pick with Jane Austen Doe, whoever she is, who wrote this article (way back in 2004, but it's circulating again on Twitter as a warning to aspiring authors everywhere) about the woes of not being one of the Stephen Kings of the publishing world. Go read it, or the first and last couple of paragraphs, anyway.

A lot's happened since 2004, but one thing hasn't changed. That thing is this: There are lots of writers, very few of them are published, and even fewer of those make kajillions of dollars doing what they do. (Okay, that's three things. It's Sunday and I don't have to count if I don't want to.) I read the article, and I didn't feel at all warned. What I felt instead was pissed off -- not at publishers, which is evidently at whom I was supposed to feel pissed off -- but at Jane Austen Doe. Honey, I hate to tell you this, but whining doesn't benefit your career any more than repeatedly telling your agent, "My career as a writer is over." Oh, wait, that's kind of the same thing, isn't it?

I'm sorry, but I just can't get past this fact. People out there have paid for what this woman writes, and she's complaining. So she has a day job. Don't we all? I do, and I love it, and even if I were one of those writers making the kajillions of dollars, I can't imagine quitting it. For one thing, my manager would probably kill me. For another thing, I need the health insurance. For a third thing, I'm not stupid. There are no certainties in life. Buddha even said so. Everything changes. Nothing stays the same. I'm on my third job in five years, and luckily this one's a really good one even if they're not paying me as much as I wanted. I'm not published, still hope to be, and I would be perfectly fine with midlist authordom. Yes, you can write that down and refer back to it in case anything major happens. Meantime I've been pondering slightly more practical things, like how I can get enough time off to go on a book tour on the off chance I ever have to.

Granted, there's a whole lot wrong with the publishing business model. It's undergoing major changes and I imagine in five or ten years it's going to look very different. Still, we're never going back to the days of the family-owned, literature-loving publishing houses that nurtured writers along from the cradle to the grave. Publishing houses aren't like that anymore, and what's more, people don't read like that anymore. Like lots of other businesses, publishing houses are churning out a product that sells as much as possible at the lowest cost possible. That's how corporations work. They exist to make money. If you're going to deal with them, you might just want to accept that fact, because it's not like they're gonna turn around and change just because you don't like it.

Look, writing commercial fiction is a job. It doesn't pay very well. (In my case, it doesn't pay at all, but hopefully that will change; hey, stranger things have happened.) The risks are high and the odds against ever making any money at it are pretty staggering. I can't imagine doing it for any other reason than love. I guess that is my beef with Ms. Doe. She's getting paid for it, if not making a living at it. She has a day job, she still writes, and while she doesn't mention it except in passing, she has kids and a significant sweetie who loves her. Yet what she's focused on here are all the things she doesn't have. The hundred thousand dollar advances. The big publicity tours. The lifetime book deals. People like that drive me crazy, which doesn't stop me from feeling sorry for them. They make themselves and everyone around them miserable.

Remember, kids, there's a difference between pain and suffering. Pain is the negative stuff that inevitably happens as a consequence of that whole being alive thing. Suffering is what happens when you dwell on that pain and nurse it to the exclusion of everything else. Buddhism is into the cessation of the suffering of all beings. If there's a core statement of Buddhist faith, it would probably be this: LIGHTEN UP, ALREADY.

Okay, I've spewed enough. I'm going to shut down my three-year-old laptop and take my significant sweetie out of my 58-year-old postwar box house to meet some friends at a cheap restaurant and dish about our jobs. (Yay, we're all still employed!) And then, tomorrow morning, I'll start doing something else about my hopeful future potential midlist authordom. It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it.

A Week Past Deadline And She's Writing This?

Playing in the background: The air conditioner, punctuated every so often by the tympani roll of thunder in the background. It's going to pour like a sumbitch any second.

So where have I been for the last two weeks, you ask. Well, firstly, rumors of my having a bad cold have been greatly exaggerated. In actual fact I've been (gasp!) working. Not just at the ol' law firm, that would be too easy. I've also been working on the manuscript. It's been a massive time sink, but progress is being made. And, yeah, I was supposed to be done by July 1, but Rome wasn't built in a day and even if it was, my manuscript ain't Rome. Herculaneum, maybe.

Remember that writer's conference I went to? The one where I was in New Orleans for four days, having spooky coincidences left and right and hanging with F. Paul Wilson? Oh, yeah, and learning all this stuff about commercial fiction? Well: I left with a set of marching orders. Go thou home, take thy manuscript, go over it with a fine tooth comb, take out every single last darn extraneous word (like how I put four of em in this sentence just for effect?) and then send the thing to the literary agents who expressed interest. All three of them. (And one editor. We liked the editor actually. He was cool.) I also had the task of getting the thing down to something remotely resembling a normal word count. Like something under 120,000. I won't tell you how much over 120,000 it was, but let's just say it was up there.

So how does one take a manuscript one's been working on since roughly two ought ought six and make it into a salable product in two ought ten? I started out by reading over all my notes and typing them up. Hey, I'm a paralegal. It's what I do. I take notes and I type them up. I've tried not taking notes and I've tried not typing them up and believe me, they're both highly unnatural, to say nothing of overrated.

So I typed up the notes and I read them over and came to believe that I had not one, but two things to do here:

1. Take a look at every single scene and decide if it's actually germane to the tale.

2. Line edit - that is, take a look at every sentence in the manuscript and decide if it needs to be there in that exact configuration, with that number of words, and in that very spot.

All together now: "That sounds like a lot of work!" Uh, yes. Which is why I'm a week past deadline. But I can see the end from here. I know my screaming fans (both of them) are getting impatient, but it Just Has To Be Done.

See, I've kind of been in the habit of lackadaisically editing whatever I felt like editing. Starting on page 305 and just going backward and forward until I got tired. I've never actually sat down with a piece of work and gone over it with a certain methodical, scene-serial-killing callousness that I've now come to believe is essential. In short, I used to edit like I wrote. No. Can't do that no mores. Writing is writing. Editing is editing. Editing is hard. But it has to be done.

I will say, though, that line-editing is possibly the most tedious, frustrating, unrelievedly dull work I have ever done in my life, and I'm including my stint as a CSR at Bank of America's credit card division. But here's the thing. It's working. My word count is down by almost 25,000. That's not only significant, it's a freaking miracle. So I'm not begrudging the extra week (though I'm bemourning the lost sleep).

All right, I have to get back to it now. Everybody remember where we parked.

I'd Write This, But...Oh, Look! A Cloud!

Playing on the iPod: Ray Lynch, something from "Deep Breakfast"

I was gonna translate the Ten Commandments from the original ancient Hebraic today, but after yesterday I think I'm burned out on religion for the moment. Instead let's consider something near and dear to my own heart: Procrastination.

Oh, look! A cloud!

What? Oh yeah.

If you read the Absolute Write bulletin boards (and I do, man, I do), you'd be quick to come to the conclusion that most writers have Issues with this thing. Generally, though, they seem to have trouble actually writing. This has never been an issue with me; most of the time I can't hardly stop. (As I once told an ex-boss, "Hell, no, I'm not working on the book at the office! I go to the office to get away from the damn book!") Where I get stuck is in actually doing something with the stuff I've written. You know, like trying to get it published and all that.

Okay, I had a tragic experience with this as a youngster; my agent dumped me to run for Congress. For a while there I thought I had a new agent but that Didn't Work Out (getting an agent is like getting someone into bed; you make promises, send presents, go to dinner, develop wild crazy expectations of the other person that neither of you can ever fulfill...) Still, that was quite a while ago and I've done batshit nothing about finding a new agent, or publisher, or--or anything, except write more. I've somehow come up with the idea that somebody else should do this for me. Like, I dunno, an agent or something. Now there's a concept. Get an agent to get an agent.

It's better than it was, I guess. I used to get this terrible crippling fear even when I sat down to write letters to agents. Back when I drank, I was in the habit of knocking off a few cold ones before I even sat down at the computer. Which worked, after a fashion, but it played hell with my digestive system. Now I just sit there, shake like a leaf, tell myself "this too shall pass," and it does, and I write the letter. Or I would if I were writing letters instead of procrastinating. Which, uh, I'm not. Oh, look! A cloud!

Seriously, this has the potential of going on for years, maybe even the rest of my life, if I don't Do. Something. About. It. Immediately. I'm just not sure what. I mean, there's no point in randomly writing to agents and publishers. You gotta do market research and figure out who represents/publishes the stuff you're writing. You gotta know people who know people who can introduce you to other people who can tell you to whom you're best off sending letters. So of course I have to do all that before I can start writing letters. Except I haven't done that, either. Well, I have, but I don't feel like I've done enough of it. I don't feel like I have my finger on the pulse of the great throbbing vein that is Media. If I don't write to Exactly The Right People I'll be wasting my time and, worse, theirs. I need a nice tidy list of exactly to whom I should write so that when the rejection slips start rolling in (as they always do) I'll have a Next Option.

It ever occur to you that perfectionism might be another way of procrastinating?

Oh look! A perfect cloud!

Okay, okay. I've done some research. I can do more research until the cows come home but in the meantime I gotta crank out a letter to somebody, somewhere, asking if they wanna read my stuff. So here's my solemn pledge: I, Jen Ster, do hereby promise to write to at least one agent and at least one publisher on or before Sunday of this week, that is, the 25th. If I fail to do so, I will immediately post a list of everyone I've ever slept with, including dates, incriminating details, sex toys used (if any), angry significant others involved (if any), and whether or not any mind altering substances were used and if so, which ones.

Now that'll make dull reading. I'll do it, though.