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How deep is your well?

Saturday 11/4/23

Up early working on a Saturday as always. Wrote three op-eds, worked on two stories, a novelette, and wrote a feature. I am creating and completing so much that I'm not mentioning a lot of it in here. The thinking has been that I'll do an entry itemizing the works that have been done recently. It's north of thirty complete works now. I'll have to do it soon.


I was talking to someone last night about how there is no talent anywhere in the world of publishing. No one can write. No one does anything of any value. What goes on goes on because no one cares, no one reads, and no one knows that this system exists and everything within it. So bad people with no ability just do what they please.


I'll see one of these people--and really, they're the exact same person with the same absence of talent that all of them are--write pretentious pieces about pretentious books. They all went to the same schools. Harvard, Yale. Probably an MFA at somewhere like Iowa. They're all broken, they usually come from money. They have no intelligence, no knowledge. They're typically odious, creepy human beings. The latter label feels too charitable.


You'll see that pretentious piece about the pretentious book written by someone just like them. You'll know they were hooked up and that's why the piece ran. It's the only reason why anything of theirs runs. At some point they lived in Brooklyn or they live there now. And you will never see anything else by them--they can do nothing else--that isn't exactly like what you just saw. It's all they do. All they can do. And it's not even something that they can do capably for starters.


They might write a similarly bad pretentious novel or story collection if what they write about--and can only write about--the same. People just like them will do on its behalf--that is, they'll lie like it doesn't suck--which is also what they spend their empty, meaningless lives doing. It's inconceivable that they'd know anything about anything. That they'd have range. If you don't have any range in the shitty nonfiction you write, you won't all of a sudden have any in fiction. It will just be that vapid, entitled, toxic bot of a person writing about their tiny little world that no one cares about, and in the most tedious, narcissistic, empty way possible. That they would write a sentence--so much as one--that anyone will ever actually care about. Even mildly.


I look at these people and I know how they got what they got. I'll see they have five pieces in wherever this year, and I know the reason why. And it's never supposition. Never, "I bet they..." No. I know with specificity. The names. How it happened. The dots of the cronyism are so close together it's like they're superimposed. Nothing matters more to these people than someone else being the same talentless, broken, odious, boring, clone that they are. There's nothing else here.


My well is bottomless. Every day I create art that will always exist. The range represented within a single week is scarcely believable save that it exists, there it is, he did that. I don't know what I will invent next. There are always new discoveries. New modes created. New forms.


Then I see these people, and not one of them has a well at all. None of them have more than this vague puddle. It's like this piss puddle. A drop. And round and round the piss puddle they go, servicing each other.


The thing, too, is that for all of their hatred and fear of reality--which is why they've made this system of theirs--each of them knows what I am saying is true as much as I know it. That's one reason they have to hate me when they see what I am always doing. On some level, reality breaks through. It's not always at the forefront of one's thoughts or consciousness. But it is in there. The kind that nags, that lurks, that always tugs at a person from the shadows they wish to keep at bay, can be the most haunting kind. Further wrecks already broken people.


If you're going to write, you need to ask yourself how deep is your well. A person always knows the answer, and that answer, one way or the other, conveys a notable degree about what needs to be said.



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