Fight

Thursday 9/8/22

Little bit better fight today. Worked more on "Museum Worthy." It's now over 3000 words and I should be able to finish it tomorrow. I went through the Elvis Christmas piece and the Carnival of Souls piece for Halloween again, and fixed various portions. Then I took those two pieces and the one on Snoopy Come Home and sent them to an editor. That's 11,000 words' worth of work. That is a huge amount.

I had offered the Snoopy Come Home piece to this one venue that sucks, as well as a story. It's beneath me to go there. I saw today that they didn't even respond. That's how far the blackballing goes. I'll follow-up. And depending on how that goes--I have a pretty good idea--I'll call them out on here. That can be what follows them around. Explain it. Explain yourself. Justify your actions and behavior. I'll do that thing where I put the writing from a nobody side-by-side with mine. We can do the compare and contrast quality thing, and the compare and contrast track record thing where it's me vs. a first-time writer who is also bad at writing. It's not defensible. It's bigotry. There is no other word. Straight up bigotry.

I worked on assembling Watching Back: Writing on Films that Light Us Up. Obviously there were the entries on here. That's a lot of work. I ran 2000 stairs and did 100 push-ups. The reason it was 2000 and not 3000 was because Queen Elizabeth died and I raced home to write an op-ed on why no one should care about royalty as a concept--because it's just blood, and not who you are. I hadn't exercised since Monday. I cannot let these people beat me. I can't give in. Listen to me. This is worse than hell. But when you are in your house in Rockport and it's a Saturday in mid-October, and the Harvest Festival is happening later that day in the village green down the street, this is how it's going to be.

You're going to be up early and the windows will be open and you'll smell the ocean and the smoke and the decaying leaves in the air. You'll be in a clean space, with everything as you want it, a beautiful home. You'll have your coffee and listen to a bootleg of the Beatles at the BBC, and you'll delight in the knowledge that you just created yet another work of art and invented a new form of narrative the day before, and come Monday, you'll be getting that work to where it needs to go and shortly thereafter millions of people will see it and we'll see what it does in the world and how it impacts it. But for that Saturday, you're just going to have fun. You'll walk out to the Headlands, and look out over the ocean. You will be able to do so, you will have all of that, and more, because you did not give in when it would have been so easy to end your life when anyone else would have. You didn't, though. And as you stand there looking forward to so much, you will know exactly why you are there. Why your impact is what it is. It will be because of days like this. All of them. That you didn't give in, and you found a way to keep going. Let's go run some more stairs. You do not give in.