Saturday 4/1/23
It's been a fairly intense day.
I've written 10,000 words in the last twenty-four hours.
Just back from working out. Walked three miles, did 100 push-ups and three circuits in the Monument. Need to get better. Have to improve the wind. Get inside the Monument and grind. The Monument of life.
About to shower and get out of here. Go to the cafe and make notes. First, for entries on here about publishing people. I'm going to be systematic. And I am going to keep hammering and hammering and hammering until this changes. I will go through everyone if I have to.
Will also read from a Civil War diary written by a private from Maine. It's part of my Civil War reading for a big project.
Will also determine where to put the new pieces in Just Like Them: A Piece by Piece Guide to Becoming the Ultimate Beatles Fan. I'll clean up said pieces, then insert them, and begin the process of going through the book and fixing. As I do that, I will working on Giving You Everything: A Hard Day's Night and the Artistic Zenith of the Beatles. In the Beatles section--which is not even complete--we have proof of how well this man writes on the Beatles, and how much better he is at it than anyone else. The excerpts of late on here of the new pieces also prove that. So, when I take these books to publishers, or follow-up with publishers who have them or partials, and if it comes back in a negative way, we're going to go through the checklist. Was the writing the problem? No. Did this person lack the platform? No. Was their track record on the subject lacking? No. These presses will have done other Beatles books by bad writers, books that weren't needed. And I can show how bad the writing is, I can show how poor the books were, I can show that these people were not close in qualifications, so where will that leave us? As I said, I am going to be systematic with everything. And I'm going to let that play out and not stop until things are where they should be.
Soon I will also finish "Big Bob and Little Bob" for The Solution to the World's Problems: Surprising Tales of Relentless Joy; the revised "Net Drive," a story about a gay hockey player and asserted identity that plays out within a single play within a high school hockey game; "Finder of Views," which is 4200 long and will be most likely be in Become Your Own Superhero: Intrepid Exceptions to Modern Fiction; and "The Ghost and the Flame," which will be in The Ghost Grew Legs: Stories of the Dead for the More or Less Living.
I have yet to document in these pages what, exactly, comprises the big change of direction for me. I will get to it. I am in the process of it happening. I will say that it involves novels and moving forward and also moving back.
What does it say that I was surprised the other night when the Bruins actually started their eventual Vezina-winning goalie in back-to-back games? Kind of a weird thing to be surprised by. I didn't think they were good but they were playing a bad team, so they were able to do what they needed to do--just--to win.
Going to pitch something on Lucinda Williams and something else on M.R. James.
I'm not going to list everything or anything close to it. A lot is happening at once. There are also the thousand links or whatever it is to continue to separate so I can upload them to the various pages of this website.
Last night I was at the cafe reading Keats' letters, and was struck by this, which he wrote to Benjamin Bailey on August 14, 1819:
"One of my Ambitions is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting--another to upset the drawling of the blue stocking literary world--if in the course of a few years I do these two things I ought to die content--and my friends should drink a dozen of Claret on my Tomb--I am convinced more and more every day that (excepting the human friend Philosopher) a fine writer is the most genuine Being in the World."
Been listening to this a lot: the Rolling Stones' 1963 unreleased cover of Arthur Alexander's "Go Home Girl."