Tuesday 3/26/24
I'm about to be all done with "Friendship Bracelet." If I'd done nothing else in my life, this would have been enough. More than enough. Going to run some stairs now, then come back and read it back another time or two, and that should be it.
I'll ask a question and answer it, because I've seen where people wonder about these kinds of things. Do I know how special something like this is? Yes. I know that it's an all-time masterpiece. I know how important it is and the good it can do. I know that it's timeless and there's no one else who could have done it. I also know what the the publishing industry is as presently constituted.
I was on Reddit the other day, and I saw where someone correctly stated that you have a few major publishing houses, and they pick what are akin to these flavors of the month (often based on skin color, gender, who that person knows), and then the big media outlets--your New York Times, your Washington Post--essentially run promos for those books. It's open whoring.
All of it is rigged to the hilt. No one is looking at the work as what it is and what it might be able to do as the work. And everyone writes the same way.
There is really only one person impacted by this, and that's me, the guy doing things that no one else is doing or can do, who has work after work like this story I'm talking about here. You don't have an industry set up to handle that kind of product or that wants it or that cares at all about it. You have an industry that doesn't care about work at all, except insofar as it hates the person who creates work that puts all of the rest of it to shame.
When everyone writes the same trumpery, the awarding, bestowing, gifting, trumpeting, backing is going to be about other things. I have this amazing work in this story that the world needs and would profit by. I wish I could just share it with everyone right now, because it will blow your mind when you do get to see it. I look around, and it's this pink-haired woman with the door-knocker nose wring and the she/them pronouns and what? I send it to her? It's an industry of people like that. Even when those specifics change--the hair color--it's a kind of person.
People look at what I am, what I do, the range, the expertise, and even the goodness of that person, and it's like they want revenge. But revenge against someone who hasn't done anything to them. Revenge because of who he is. What he does. The work he is able to produce. It's like they're trying to settle this score, but there was no act or acts committed against them.
That's what happened with someone like a J. Robert Lennon. I come along with this masterpiece in "Dead Thomas." He knows what I am and what he isn't. So he's going to get off on telling me to pay him money to have that story form rejected by an underling. Pay him to go through these motions--with the deal sealed beforehand anyway--with my story. Pay him. If you started your writing life today, because you were a retired history teacher and you took a writing class at the adult learning center, and you wrote a story, you'd be standing there in line next to me, and that's how it should be, according to J. Robert Lennon.
Obviously that was discrimination, born of envy. He was trying to belittle me. You've seen his work in these pages. He knows how bad he is at writing. You think if I say right now, "I think tomorrow morning at nine o'clock on the dot I'll do another prose off on here between something of J. Robert Lennon's and something of mine," that he'd be sitting there thinking, "I'm pretty confident! I bet I'll look great here! Can't wait until tomorrow morning!" Clearly not. It was like he tried to extract revenge. You're not going to do that with someone you're not threatened by, who is a system person, who sucks at writing like you do, who looks like you do, depends on cronyism and the hook-up like you do, knows nothing like you do, etc. But they're almost all like this. That what I awake to every day. Knowing that everywhere I turn, that's who I'll see.
But wait until you see this story in full. Whenever you do. I hope it's soon.
