THE BEATNIK CONTINUES ON HIS NASTY WAY

Twelve days have passed since my last entry. According to authorities, if one keeps a writer's blog, he ought to make a brief entry every other day in order to keep readers interested. Brevity and frequency are the hooks, but there's little to report. At this time, four novels are out to agents or small press publishers, and I dispersed another 56 dollars to enter 3 short story contests. Currently, I'm reworking The Porn Writer for a 3rd time. I like the book better each time I work on it. It's truthful, but will unhappy material sell in our current culture? For my own guidance, I've reduced its theme to a single sentence: The Porn Writer explores the dysfunctional dance of sexual addiction between a man who grew up without the nurturing love of a mother, and a female victim of sexual abuse.    

 The first person narrator of my tale isn't particularly appealing, and the female is written as a lost soul. What troubles me in all such tales is that, usually, the lost woman gets all the sympathy while the male protagonist is frequently cast as a villain. The truth is that each chose the other in order to work out his and her issues with the opposite sex. The fact that I use pornographic writing to intensify the struggle between them will probably also turn off more delicate readers.

The photo above is my own of the Spokane River in Spring as it runs through downtown.

THE BEATNIK BEAT UP, CRIES CROCODILE TEARS

Last Thursday (May 14, 2015), just before I went to bed, I discovered two rejections of my novel, Ghoul World, among my emails. Though I went to bed and slept okay, next morning when I awoke I had to struggle mightily to keep myself writing. I seriously imagined this book would be scarfed up fast. After some thought, I found a piece of silver lining stuck to one corner of the emails. One of the agents who rejected was one whose agency link said she didn't respond to queries and if an author didn't receive a rejection in 4 or 5 weeks, he/she should take his query as rejected. The fact she took the time to send me a friendly form rejection told me that my story idea had caught her attention enough that she read the 5 page sample. That is a good and bad thing. The idea is dynamite as I knew it was, but my writing isn't carrying the weight to clinch the deal. As I plan one more rewrite, I'm okay. As soon as I finish the rewrite on The Porn Writer, I'll get back into Ghoul World. 

THINKING LIKE A WRITER ABOUT THREE NOVELS

I'm making changes. I hate changes. I don't want to do the work. I want agents to flock to my novels as written. After all, they're completed. Why do I need to do more work? Probably because I see weaknesses myself. I've decided two of my novels need better starts: Angie's Choice & Ghoul World. Angie's Choice once had an agent, but Ruth Cantor couldn't place it. She sent it to the very largest and best publishing houses. She liked it. It's first and second chapters are used to introduce characters. I've decided to get to the moment when Angie and her husband are taken as hostages more quickly. In a flashback, I'll put the info in later. I see the movie scenes.

I've already made an improving change in Ghoul World, dropping completely Chapter 1. Fortunately, it could be dropped with no other changes necessary. Instead, I'm starting it at what was Chapter 2 when my protagonist, Charley Manning comes into view, sitting at a McDaniel's eating a couple of McNugguts, waiting for a client. As a movie, I'd start in either one of two other locations. Action scenes. I intend to rewrite this one more time for more style changes if someone doesn't pick it up sooner. Meanwhile, so I don't feel as if I'm doing nothing toward publication, I'm sending Ghoul World around with the one major alteration. 

Immediately, because it'll go faster, The Porn Writer is already getting a third rewrite to make every line as simple and forceful as I can make them. It's structure is fine. I just want to take all the fancy writing out of it. This will go fast while I send Ghoul World around. I get lots of erections, working on it. Let us celebrate the miraculous powers of the creative imagination. It can create an erection as easily as it creates god!

BEATNIK IN THE ALLEYS OF LIFE

Okay. Three weeks to complete a rewrite of The Porn Writer. I wanted to run through it quickly so as to feel as if I'm just reading it for fun, for the first time. The book is loaded with pornography from beginning to end. It's meant to be a story about a man with sexual hangups. It's as if I wrote it to release him from pornographic ideas about relationships with the opposite sex by re-experiencing the fearful horniness itself that underlay his contacts with women all through his life. I might take a scene I wrote in another novel about a man puking in an alley—having an existential moment—and add it to the novel. I've already put it in in an abbreviated form. Perhaps, I'll open the novel with it, then write him back to that moment as the novel ends. I've such mixed feelings about the pornographic nature of the book. Who knows? In my old age, I don't much care what agents think. After all, it's my book as I wanted to write it when I wrote it. Who knows why? Why look at the motives that caused me to write it? People might enjoy it, be shocked or not by it, independently from my writing it. Some may only masturbate to it. 

SILENT BOOMER FEELING BEAT SLOGS ON

The first rejection of a query letter has arrived for Ghoul World. Last night, before I went to bed, I checked my email account and, there it was, my first rejection. It was not the rejection that was so bad, but what the rejection suggested. My single page blurb did catch the agent's attention. She liked the story idea, but she said she was disappointed. What she read didn't keep her interest. That would be the five page sample of the novel. Then, of course, I read the 5 pages, and I agree with her. I see all sorts of errors or better ways to write those five pages. I catch the blunder of using the same word in two successive sentences to describe an action. I see too many adjectives. Man oh man! What a let down. Before the rejection arrived, I did begin talking to my wife about some short comings I feared were in the novel. Not enough tension, maybe, and how do I fix that? I don't see my way clear to do one more rewrite. I don't. The fun has gone out of writing for me, I fear. Anyway, I'm going to finish the rewrite of The Porn Writer, and begin to send that around while I commence another run through of Ghoul World to see if I can tighten it up, even as I continue to send it around. Damn it all to hell!