Thursday 12/22/22
* Litany of posts about publishing people coming. I'm not taking the discrimination, the abuse, the bigotry, from anyone. And I will also be exposing the incompetence, theft, grift, and the insanity. There has never been anyone worse than these people--or easier to reveal as such. They need to be ended and they will be. And there will not be a single thing that I reveal that is in any way defensible or not plain as what it is.
* I have worked more on "Best Present Ever." It's 5200 words now. Probably one or two more reads tomorrow morning and that will be that. I talked with someone yesterday about maybe putting the entire story up here on Christmas, and they said don't. That it would be better to wait until I will get everything I have coming to me with that story financially and in terms of audience size, and not to waste it on ungrateful people who won't even say anything and publishing people who hate-read this journal and will hate me more because the story is so unbelievably good. And also because it was clearly written by someone who is a good person, and these people hate anyone who is a good person.
* I worked more on "Banged Up" as well.
* I will be doing a feature on Wes Montgomery's first album for his centennial in March.
* Here is a new piece in The Smart Set on the Suspense radio episode, "The House in Cypress Canyon." The piece is in And the Skin Was Gone: Essays on Works of Horror Art, which I am presently bringing to completion.
* I will also be making a push here at the end of the year to have this site entirely updated. This means adding hundreds of links to the Music writings, Film Writings, and Literature writings sections, among other things. That will help in the war that I'm going to win against these bigots, cowards, frauds, liars, and fools.
* I watched some of 1949's Holiday Affair last night, a piece about which will be in this first volume of my film criticism. Along with the Johnny Dollar Christmas five-parter, it's become a staple for me during these excruciating holiday seasons. That scene when Mitchum is having dinner with Janet Leigh's fiance and her son and her dead husband's parents and Mitchum tells her she's making a mistake and that he loves her. I like that. He goes for it. She turns him down and it was still worth it to him. Then he still has to talk after. And he's in control. He isn't humiliated. He's polite and dignified.
* Got off my ass at last. Ran 3000 stairs, did 100 push-ups. Did ninety push-ups yesterday to loosen the arms up again. A set of forty, a set of fifty. First time I've done fifty on hard ground. Hallway tile in this case. Push-ups are harder on hard ground than grass.
* I was thinking: you make "Best Present Ever" into a stand-alone mini-book. Gift-sized. Have it be, I don't know, four and a half inches tall. Could even fit in a stocking. Get someone to do some really nice illustrations, which the story lends itself to. I'd oversee what they should be and how they should look. Price it at $6.99.
* I feel like I felt when I wrote "Fitty" with "Best Present Ever."
* Listened to a two-hour BBC radio version of Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows," and another BBC version that has just come out. I plan to write about the story for And the Skin Was Gone.
* I was explaining to someone last night what so much "writing" now is. Here's a good example. Tom Brady gives an interview with venue X. He talks about how this Christmas will be different for him, being on the road alone in a hotel room. Sixty other places--which is to say, sixty other "writers"--then take that piece/interview, and they write a piece off of it. They credit the first place--as quickly as possible--and then they paraphrase what someone else who also routinely does this themselves already wrote. So if I click on that first piece when it comes up in my feed, I then get inundated over the next few days--because of the algorithm--of fifty other pieces that rework that first piece. They just do synonyms for some of the words. It's barely not plagiarism. This is "writing" now. That's what editors assign. "Go copy that piece." That's what people brag about doing. Can you imagine that being your life? You're a writer, huh? And that's what you do? I would go on Google and try and find a sword to buy so I could fall on it. I'd be so ashamed of myself. I'd feel like such a loser. I wouldn't be able to look anyone else in the eye and tell them what I did.
* Christmas will be awful. I will be alone, as I have been for the last ten Christmases, this being the eleventh. That someone that alone--pretty much as alone as anyone has ever been--could still write a story like "Best Present Ever" is going to be something people talk about for a long time if I get out of this situation.
* This is a radio adaptation with Mitchum--minus Janet Leigh--of Holiday Affair from December 1950, so a year after the film came out.
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