Nothing could be more boring than hearing about another damn Booming rewrite. Right? But that's all I have to report. I'm rewriting Ghoul World.
I've had a couple more rejections come in of work I'd submitted only to the most prestigious and paying markets. What do I expect? My work is nothing like what passes for writing these days. It's not young enough and it's style, of necessity, does not ring true in a youthful mind. As
I think of the style of my writing, I realize how cosmopolitan most
young writers are. I'd class my story as appealing to a Richard Hugo or
James Welch audience of old. One of my best stories, and I know it's well written, is from the pov of a drifter and blue collar dude who finds himself working in boom town Gillette Wyoming. He befriends a naif young veteran who gets himself involved with a very troubled and promiscuous female. How it works out must remain a mystery as the story is a mystery that never gets solved.
Another writing problem is how to finish the poetry book [more likely chapbook] Up Your Ass about the 8 month cancer bout I just finished dealing with. I have no interest currently to write a concluding poem, but I feel the series requires one. It's almost a disappointment that it won't end in my death. I know...how could I say that? Well, writing requires a conclusion, and I'm not ready to conclude yet. Happy trails to you...so Roy Rogers would say.
The number of days remaining to me for the pursuit of my lone bucket list item, i.e. to get someone other than myself to publish one of my novels, has increased hopefully. My first PSA [prostate-specific antigen] test measured at 0.02 at the three month mark following the radiation treatments. The test measures the protein produced by both cancerous and noncancerous tissue in the prostate. As the prostate grows so does the protein content in the blood. Five point zero [5.0] is the high limit for safety. I'd be ecstatic save for the outcome of the presidential election, my natural tendency to imagine the worse and the fact a small amount of blood is oozing from the head of my penis today. I wonder what that means? It's got to be bladder or kidney cancer. Right? After all I was told secondary cancers sometimes result from radiation treatment of the prostate.
I'm reading a poetry chapbook Duwamish Head by Richard Hugo put out by Copper Canyon Press in 1976. That's the year I got sober in Cheney Washington and, sober, attended a party celebrating the end of a two week writer's workshop at Eastern Washington University to which Richard Hugo and James Welch unexpectedly arrived dead drunk after a long dark spur of the moment drive from Missoula Montana. Welch's Winter in the Blood had not long ago come out in 1974 and Hugo was at the top of his game. Just the sort of drunken shindig writers have been famous for since the days of Homer and Dionysus, and there I was a sober observer of the doings of what to me were the immortals who were driven to drink by celebrity and the suffering that informed their writing. Ah yes, to suffer is to write. Ahem.
Nothing could be more boring than hearing about another damn Booming rewrite. Right? But that's all I have to report. I'm rewriting Ghoul World. 
