Wednesday 11/2/22 The New York Times has a rule not to review my books. It's part of the blackballing. Does this matter? No. Ultimately, it won't. A time will come when there won't be a choice, and/or the people behind the discrimination are gone, because leverage changes, and one way leverage changes is with work that is better than any other work. Another way is when there are pressures from the outside. The truth--when enough people know it--has a way of applying those pre

Wednesday 10/13/21 Publishing actively targets people based upon their skin color, sexuality, pronouns, and typically nothing else. Not on the writing. Not on quality. Writing is often not even secondary. Writing is often irrelevant, except insofar as it is preferred to suck, bore, and match other work that sucks and bores. The white male writers being published are usually boring dinosaurs who have repeated themselves now for forty years, whose "prime" was the 1970s, or the

Wednesday 10/7/20 My book Meatheads Say the Realest Things: A Satirical (Short) Novel of the Last Bro is published on 10/15, and can be pre-ordered. It's a funny saga of an overstuff man-child in a #MeToo world that has passed him by. I see these works of literary fiction billed as hilarious six times on the back cover, and then you dip in and you realize why you had to be told something again and again--because you'd never think it on your own and there's nothing even slight

Friday 9/11/20 Copy and pasting more of these journal entries into the single stand-alone document. I have scarcely made a dent--about two months' worth of the earliest entries. One eye, even in copying and pasting, cannot help but fall on certain lines and sections. What stands out to me--and you tend to see/read as an impartial viewer, a third party, almost--is the staggering range of the writing. I know it it is like that when I do it, but it does not feel like that to me

Thursday 4/16/20 Yesterday I wrote an 1800 word essay. This morning I composed a 900 word short story called "You Don't Believe in Fate," which will wreck you. So much meaning and depth from so few words, plethora of length from a kind of mirage brevity. Most of it is second person. I haven't written a second person story before, unless one counts "Clam Sliders" from the end of Buried on the Beaches, which isn't really second person, first person, or third person--it's a narr

Thursday 4/9/20 I walked seven miles yesterday. Wrote an op-ed for the New York Daily News which I would assume will be out Sunday on what I call the Easter Challenge. It's good. Wall Street Journal assigned a sports op-ed. Short story "That Night" will be in the June issue of London Magazine. I did the final edits on short story "Post-Fletcher" for F(r)iction--unique, clever, touching ghost story. Learned who The Atlantic's fiction editor is and they now have "Six Feet Away.

Wednesday 3/27/19 Who is a worse person, Jussie Smollett or Michael Avenatti? Is there white privilege? There is wealth privilege. There is victim privilege. There is mob privilege. It's remarkable that Smollett and Avenatti are not in prison. And also that the latter is retained by people, and it's not really questioned. It's a given. That says something: almost anyone will completely void morals or values when money is at play. I wonder what the percentage of people is who