OH, THE FEAR/PAIN/JOY OF SUBMITTING

Odd things happen with writers and their submissions. Currently, having finished another rewrite of The Porn Writer, I'm not trying to submit it, believing no one will want to publish my disturbing glimpse into the lives of desperately troubled people, and I'm also suffering writer's block. I clearly expect if I sit down to my computer, nothing will appear to write about. I'm too old and et cetera....

Then, an email arrives from the prestigious Prairie Schooner with the editor's message, "Although we have decided against using 'Buffalo Wallow,' we were interested in your work and would be glad to see more of it during our general submissions period, which will open again on September 1, 2021."

The creative urge fires up again, but my problem is the story "Buffalo Wallow" is an old story, written years ago, and all my recent stories are empty of the style I attempted back then. What to submit? One of my old stories or a new one?

A PUBLICATION PLAN

Time sure disappears. Last entry in this writer's blog was June 22. I'm more than 4/5 done on 6th? 10th? rewrite of my novel The Porn Writer. I'm reworking poetry constantly as they straggle home bedraggled and d(r)ejected from the fields of literature.

The August issue of Better 

Than Starbucks is here, 

online or ready to be bought 

and printed at Lulu. My poem Afterthought sits inside, a lüshi in the 8 line form of Chinese poet Hanshan.

Read the other day, the "publication plan" of a fellow writer. He said his goal was to get 100 rejections next year. Do you know how hard it is to get 100 rejections? I'm lucky to get 2 or 3 a month.

"Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?" from a Ronald Reagan campaign speech, 1980. And we wonder why the Republican Party has deteriorated so badly.

 

BOOMING ALONG, FISHING FOR REAL

Me and some cousins

Big breakthrough. I'm writing at home on my desktop computer. Rewriting a novel called The Porn Writer or Reprogramming Frank Singletary or who knows what? Happy to unblock. I hadn't thought of it as writer's block. I considered it an inconvenience created by the plague. I'm certainly much happier to be writing or rewriting at something. 

My newest short stories are being rejected by literary magazines, but two more rejections were very positive. One wrote, "We were very impressed with your work, but unfortunately will not be able to include it in [...] this year. We hope you'll consider submitting to us again in the future." I must must wait till September to try them again.The other wrote, "We'll be happy to consider any new work you care to submit in the future."

Nice to feel so close. Like they're swimming down there, tempted by my bait. I've put together a collection of stories too, but I need to bring those tales into line with latest revisions. Maybe the impact of all of them in a contest might get a publisher's interest. Who knows? Maybe try The Iowa Review contest. 

The photo? Yep, that's me, the tough guy, first born of cousins, on the top right. Top left, my cousin Edward. Both of us Navy vets, but he died of complications of alcoholism while I survived. He was a powerful personality. Booze life? It's so much fun until it isn't. I'm sad thinking of him.

DE NIRO, SCORSESE, AND A BEATNIK MEMORY OF DESPAIR

I'm on page 288 of remaining 402 pages of Ghoul World. With only 113,812 words remaining, I'm sure to get below 400 pages and maybe below 100,000 words before rewrite is completed. The publisher I intend to send Ghoul World to says they prefer novels to be above 80,000 words.
  
As is obvious to anyone reading Silent Boomer, I've been on a tear for last year. Inspired by Han-Shan, I wrote many more than 100 lüshis. Now back at novel rewrite. Have in back of my mind writing another screenplay but subject matter is cloudy. Could be based on Ghoul World for all I know or another novel of mine, The Porn Writer.

Watched one of my favorite movies last night. Taxi Driver. Before I quit drinking, I often had moments when I felt like Travis Bickle [minus murderous thoughts], alienated, angry, alone and despairing. I used to call it existential angst. Was it so philosophical or was it merely feeling sorry for self? No matter what I call those moods, I was driven once to crash my car on purpose, accelerating while going around a corner so fast I knew I couldn't make it. The act was totally unplanned,  happened in an instant on the spur of that cornered moment. I'm so far removed from those days I can't bring the feelings up anymore. Sometimes, for the sake of my art, I'll wish I could, but do I really? My thought as I accelerated was, "They'll be sorry." The women in my mind at the time shall go nameless. That's everything I know about suicide. How many times have I told this tale?

BUSY AS A BEE-ATNICK WRITER

Do I look as tired as I feel?

This morning, I finally got around to doing something once more toward achieving the first item on my bucket list. I worked on another cover letter to send to potential agents for my novel Ghoul World.  I've put that off for much too long and have not been sending out agent queries for any of my novels. I foresee another rewrite of my novel The Porn Writer too.


I've also been working through a rewrite of the poetry that was inspired by my encounter with prostate cancer last year. I intend to send it around to small publishing houses and to various contests. The title may be morphing from Up Your Ass to Cancer Doesn't Sing ... a reference to the prosaic rather than lyric nature of the poetry. 


The sci fi film script I now call Distant Enemies has been sent its merry way along with 50 dollars via the internet to the BlueCat Screenwriting Contest and, now, I'm preparing to send the first 30 pages of the same script to the Willamette Writers Screenwriting Competition. Deadline is June 15. Fee 10 bucks. A man could grow poor with his writing, eh? Still if feels good to be sending stuff out.

Outside this Starbucks where I write, the sun is shining and the birds are singing and there is a presence in the air that hints of a return to rain and daytime temps in the 60s and nighttime lows in the 40s. Thank you to anyone looking in on these blog entries.

BEANICK BOOMER FINISHES A TASK AND TALKS ABOUT INSANITY

Yesterday I finished the 7th rewrite of The Porn Writer, but the doubts are back, a swarm of squids on the sea floor of my imagination. Today I'm reading at the Black Rock on 164th Avenue, Vancouver. Twelve ounces of soy chai for $3.75. At Starbucks it's $4.39. I found a shiny dime on the floor just now. I'm making the mistake of reading Plimpton's book on Truman Capote: in which various friends, enemies, acquaintances and detractors recall his turbulent career. If you read it you'll conclude that you must be alcoholic or bat shit crazy to be creative. It's a picture of how I tried to behave and talk during my drinking years. I thought craziness equated to genius. At least two women in my past told me that the way I used language in those days was a sign of a mentally unbalanced mind. A psychologist who was leading a weekend group encounter session in the Huckleberry Mountains north of Spokane once told me I had a "quicksilver mind". I was quite proud of that, then he asked me if I was there to learn something. When I said, "Yes," he asked me to shut up and listen to what the others had to say. I kid you not, I fell over on my side and went immediately to sleep. That first session he'd put out bottles of wine to loosen us up. I was quickly very loose. The second time I showed up I'd quit drinking. During a walk down a mountain road, the psychologist told me he hadn't liked me very much that first weekend. He said I was now a very different person. I was, but for all my trying to behave like a creative person [my output is immense], I'm 78 [79 on October 20] and have little financial or public acclaim for my efforts. Sometimes I wish I could grasp even a fraction of the way my mind shot between metaphors and linked them in mad clusters of language when I drank. I can't even come close. 

SILENT BOOMER BEATNIK BOILS SOME SPUDS

Had a good day of rewriting The Porn Writer yesterday and all the doubts that I expressed in the previous blog entry had disappeared. Yesterday's writing is okay today and the story is meaningful again. My doubt today is about agents and what they want. Serials for one thing. Also two women, not agents, have told me they wouldn't read a novel about a dysfunctional relationship between a controlling male and an incest victim in which the male begins to understand that he needs help while the woman goes on to [censored/spoiler]. Most agents these days are women, so that's a potential problem. Watch Lifetime movies if you want to see that limited viewpoint in all its crabbed glory. I don't know how a male author can deal with that mindset. Why must the woman nearly always be the victim? Aha! That statement ought to make the pot boil. It's a hot potato for certain. Also, I must warn that porn passages  my protagonist writes are included in the novel, and for good esthetic reasons. Some readers, of course, won't accept my explanation and will daintily hold the novel between thumb and forefinger as they extend it above the trash heap and release.

BULL DOGGING A DISAPPEARING BULL

Another short story rejection this week from Boston. Missed that gol-dang bull again and, currently, I'm experiencing a

This photo may be better than words....

period of doubt. At my age, after a lifetime of doubt, why should it be any different today? 

Lately I've been dealing with several mental states or attitudes that are hard to describe. Picture the flying cowboy above. That's my inner state ever since I got the prostate cancer diagnosis; my psyche suspended in an emotionless state of peril. Ain't that photo something?

I realized lately that another mental state has altered in me when it comes to my writing. Always before when I was actually writing, a sort of indistinct futuristic attitude accompanied the writing effort, a wordless and unperceived sense of anticipation that I am only able to recognize now because of its absence. It kept me going. My current writing is neither accompanied nor relieved by that indistinct attitude of "something ahead in the future". It's not a wall exactly; it's a disquieting fog. The bull has disappeared from the photo I guess.

However, I am bound and determined to finish the 7th rewrite of The Porn Writer. After that, who knows? Back to algebra or continue the pursuit of my single bucket list item?

THE ROOTS OF THE SILENT BOOMER'S "THE PORN WRITER"

The following paragraphs remain to this day as relevant to me as they did when I first read them decades ago. All my discoveries came from understanding our painful human experiences in those terms. I can't remember from which of many books I took it. I see the influence of Alice Miller in it, but I'm certain it's not her writing. These paragraphs are at the root of my novel, The Porn Writer. 

"Those who think they can will themselves back to health with the trick of forgetting only trick themselves. The trick of forgetting is the denial which kills them. We think we’ve come to terms with our pasts when we learn not to feel the feelings associated with our memories. Our feelings, specially if they’re rooted in severe childhood abuse, seem overpowering and too huge to face. So we refuse to feel them and pretend they don’t affect us.

"But hidden memories take a secret toll on us because we hide them under addictions. We control them by not acknowledging their powerfulness in our lives. We control them by getting drunk or getting laid or getting high or getting power in high places, or by working seven days a week or by losing ourselves in another person, by watching seven hours of TV a day. On and on. Control is addiction.

"Then we lie to ourselves and to others, thinking we’ve put our memories behind us because we are not able to feel them anymore, except in little flashes. We say to ourselves and we tell others, ‘A person’s got to get on with their life. You can’t dwell in the past forever.’ Yet everything we do, everything we speak, everything we are is influenced by the secret we try to keep.

"Of course we’re never aware that our whole present is but a reflection of our past. We think we’ve neatly escaped our memories, but it’s plain as day they haven’t gone away once you make the breakthrough from addiction to acceptance.

"The secret is, was always, a big billboard on the top of our heads which blinks the truth to everyone around us while only we are unaware of it. It’s like that card game in which each player places a playing card, face outward, to his forehead so that everyone but himself can see the card, then tries to evaluate the strength of his card by the cards he sees that the others are holding to their foreheads. We don’t know what card we’re showing, but to the others, it’s obvious.

"However, there is better though more uncomfortable way. We can choose to dwell from time to time in the past, to face the awful truths, to grieve our losses and accept them and, specially, to accept and embrace the wounded person inside us who needs our love and acceptance rather than our denial. We have a choice to be courageous and admit our pain or to spend the rest of our lives running from the truth in every deed we do and every thought we think.

"Sadly, if we deny the painful truths of our pasts, we deny ourselves and team up with the abusers of this world. We become self-abusers and, finally, abusers of others too. Abusive people are often the ones who most want us all “to quit crying and get on with our lives!” Then he or she can go on about their business of abuse without interruption.

"In the end, you have to lose control to get control. Eventually, you must give up and surrender to the pain. This surrender is no easy task. Re-feeling the pain, you become, for a time, helpless as the child you once were, the child who is being traumatized. All your defenses come down, and you are as vulnerable and naked as you were at the time when the wounds were inflicted on you. It’s a frightening and painful experience, but only then can you experience the magnitude of the damage done to you and begin to grieve and relieve your loses.

"Though recovery is actually practical and sane, the path back to a moderately-successful, healthy frame of mind feels frighteningly irrational and painfully emotional as you walk it. The way back is through pain and darkness and, at times, does not feel like the way to light. You may think you will drown in darkness, alone and unloved, but let me assure you, you won’t. You only think you will. However, it does take real courage to do this work, to walk this path. It’s not a job for the weak. It is the weak who scream out, ‘Forget it and get on with your lives!’

"So we do have choices to make. We can shut down and never feel any true feelings, except terror or nothingness, or we can dive right into them and experience our true feelings, our true selves, swim through them and come out on the other side. There is hope. Every time we honestly get in touch with our childhood experiences, we cry and take pity on ourselves and get a little stronger. The feelings get a little less blind control over us and we become a little more conscious in our choices.

"The process isn’t a clean, neat scientific work. It’s a magical work in a wonderland of seeming monsters and heroes, with princesses and princes, villains and good guys. It’s all within you. Many things are inexplicable, things happen as a result of re-experiencing them that are completely magical and very real. Reason will never get us there but fearlessness and feeling will."

BEATNIK BOOMER SILENTLY EXPOSES SELF

Short and sweet. Six more radiation treatments. They will end next Wednesday, the 31st of August 2016. Got back two more rejections. One for a set of three poems. The other for a short story. Bright spot? Both invited me to send more material. The task of rewriting The Porn Writer leaves me cold. Have I rewritten it to death?

Picture is of one of three marks on my body. One on each side and one in the middle of my body. They align these marks with laser beams for first rough alignment of my body to the radiation device. 

That's all folks. For now.

BEATNICK BOOMER INSIDE THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

This is me in the external beam irradiation machine at PeaceHealth. I got Deana one of the techs to snap the photo. The big round head looking down on me is the piece that shoots me with radiation. To its left on the diagonal is one of the arms that takes x-rays. The other x-ray arm, a square, is peeking out below the table. The x-ray arms are retracted at the moment. The techs go into another room and extend those x-ray arms. The entire unit circles my body, then the x-ray readings of the location of my prostate with the implanted fiducials is fed into the computer and the table I lie on makes the final adjustments, then I'm zapped. The process takes about 20 minutes. Compared to the 40 minute Cyberknife treatments, it's fast. I tell the techs with a laugh it's a "zip... zap... zoom..." process. I'm hopeful and tranquil enough about everything. 

Mertie and I went into Portland to see Cafe Society, Woody Allen's latest. We weren't as impressed as by Paris Nights. We aren't alone in our judgment, but the film was interesting enough. 

The rewrite on The Porn Writer still moves along nicely, but as I said in an earlier entry, I'm giving myself permission to let the writing go hang if I feel stressed. Mainly I need to stay rested and get in some exercise and run necessary errands and prepare or serve [already made meals] when Mertie comes home from work. Nine more treatments. Will be done a week from this coming Friday. Though I haven't been sending out many things, I still have about 15 items out being looked at. The queries for my novels are falling behind because they require more work. I try to make my query letters fit the agent I'm sending them to. I imagine I sense things about them from looking them up on Google and from the presentations on their websites.

BOOMING BEATNIK'S MIND COMES AND GOES

Twelve more days of radiation treatments under this machine to go. Dr. Siddiqui tells me we'll wait three more months [time for the prostate to normalize] to take a PSA test and find out where we stand, i.e. did we get it in time before the cancer spread elsewhere in my body? A PSA of zero would be great, a 2 is not so bad. 

I wrote a new cancer poem yesterday, "Tabled Memories", and I've had three good days of work on the 7th rewrite of The Porn Writer. From time to time the fatigue caused by the radiation treatments make my mind feel like a pool full of slugs. Everything I write during those times seems awful, then a light comes on, the slugs slip away, and I know I write as well as many others who have been published. This morning I'm awfully tired again and uninspired, but I want to finish this last rewrite of The Porn Writer so I can get queries about it into circulation once more among the agents. Of course, it's been some time since I sent any of my novels out on query status. I'm starting to feel guilty again when I walk into the office where file cards are strewn about on a card table next to the outdated 2013 Writers' Markets book. 

Lastly I had a moment of self awareness yesterday while lying on that narrow table above, waiting for my irradiation to begin. The kind of moment when you see beneath the obvious and get a glimpse of some synaptic setting that underpins your personality at a fundamental level. The techs had stopped the process because one of the computers fell asleep and had to be reawakened. They requested, as they always do, that I lie very still. As I lay there clutching the ring they give us to hold so that our elbows don't fall off the table edge and ruin the process, I caught myself feeling quite proud to be lying so still and proper for them, the obedient little boy part of me. Smug it was and proud as proud can be. I didn't necessarily like what I saw, but our deepest selves, our un-mirrored selves, are just the sort of things that trip us up. I was watching a documentary tonight about Richard Nixon. I just realized he was like me too in his deepest self.

WRITING UNDER THE CYBERKNIFE

Today in a couple of hours, I get my first treatment with the Cyberknife. Exercised early today at Firstenberg Center and have tried for several hours to get some writing done on poetry collection Up Your Ass and later on my novel about dysfunctional relationships The Porn Writer. I see that I'm unable to concentrate very well so I'll just go home and get a shower and take it easy until I have to set off for PeaceHealth Hospital in Vancouver. I'm told I will have to lie perfectly motionless for half an hour while the procedure is completed, but, even if I do move, the roboticized arm stops and recalculates the position of my prostate in order to continue to treat the cancer with high doses of radiation. I recall when we Americans were all in a tizzy about Strontium 90 drifting into America from Chinese atom bomb testing. Now, I'm hoping that radiation will kill the cancer cells that threaten to kill me. Nothing ever changes except change.

BEATNIK BOOMER BEGINS 6th [or 7th] REWRITE OF PORN WRITER

Ten days I've let pass without an entry. Sorry, but I'm keeping busy. I just began the sixth [or 7th] rewrite of The Porn Writer, and I didn't finish the 5th [or 6th] rewrite. My friend poet Geoff Peterson is visiting from Tucson, and it was his comment that caused me to return to "go" and start again. He made some sense about the history of an MFA in my narrator's past that made good sense. So I began again, and I'm happy with it. I had begun the novel with the idea Frank held an MFA then took it out because I thought the idea was cliched. Now I'm putting it back in again. Geoff's considerations had to do with potential audience, then, for other reasons of authenticity, I saw a good reason for it's remaining in the novel, because the real center of the novel is "dysfunctional relationships" that are divorced from the MFA considerations. The MFA is in it only to add to his sense of failure and inadequacy that have plagued all his relationships. 

Reason for relief above. As for the aggressive prostate cancer that threatens to lengthen the odds for my succeeding in my lone bucket list item to get someone other than myself to publish a novel of mine: I finally begin radiation treatments this coming Monday, July the 18th when the Cyberknife will shoot a first heavy dose of radiation into my cancerous prostate. It's only taken from April 25th when my primary doctor found the nodule on my prostate till now.... 

KAISER PERMANENTE IS TRYING TO KILL ME

The photo is of my radiologist specialist, M.D. Faisal Siddiqui. 

 Hanging in there. Got only an hour of rewrite in yesterday, July 6, on The Porn Writer. Now midway into "Chapter 19 - The Tender Trap" after spending the morning and early afternoon getting a scan and an MRI in preparation for irradiation of prostate and lymph nodes. I've been tattooed...three red dots on my stomach for radiation machine alignments. I felt very vulnerable in the hospital setting yesterday. Usually, I have little trouble walking through tests and paperwork and listening to instructions, but I felt shaky old yesterday some of the time. 

As for my bucket list item. I think I've fallen down on submitting my novels to agents. Will have to knuckle down on that part of the process. I like the sound of that word, "knuckle".  

Yesterday also I put in an appeal to Kaiser Permanente to overturn their negative ruling on the Cyberknife. This morning I called Kaiser to see if they got the paperwork. Yes, they got it, but the appeal won't be looked at for 14 days. What? I'm sitting here with my prostate showing perineural invasion. [In pathology, perineural invasion refers to cancer spreading to the space surrounding a nerve. It is common in ... prostate cancer and....] Those little terrorists can and probably are escaping into my flesh and bones as I write this, and Kaiser wants me to wait two more weeks? I yelp loudly, then Kaiser tells me they'll have to see if my situation "QUALIFIES" for a 72 hour evaluation and it'll take 72 hours to make that decision. What the hell!! 

ODDS INCREASE AGAINST BEATNIK BUCKET LIST SUCCESS

POLITICAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS:

For all those Republicans who hate the Affordable Care Act and who also ramble endlessly about "death panels", I have an answer for them. My prostate cancer treatment option that includes the Cyberknife has not been approved. Kaiser Permanente declined the Cyberknife part of the treatment, even though my reading suggests the Cyberknife will more effectively and with more powerful and focused radiation add to the kill ratio of cancer cells in my high risk cancer prostate while causing less damage to surrounding tissue, thus increasing my chances of living longer. My insurance plan is not purchased through the ACA nor is it Medicare. Thus the Permanente doctors on Kaiser's "death panel" have spoken and their decision has nothing to do with the ACA or Medicare. It's a decision based solely on saving the Kaiser Permanente HMO money. As I've tried to explain to hate filled Republicans, "death panels" have existed all along. The poor have routinely been allowed to die and insurance companies make daily decisions that allow people to die, and those decisions have never had anything to do with the ACA. A good friend of mine watched his wife die because they didn't have the money to purchase the treatment that would have saved her, and their insurance wouldn't cover it. That was decades ago and had nothing to do with the ACA or Medicare either. My doctor will try to get the decision reversed. My fingers are crossed.

A story of mine was just rejected by Glimmer Train. Nice rejection letter though. On the other hand, the fatigue lifted today as I worked on The Porn Writer. You know? At the moment I'm troubled more by the Glimmer Train rejection. I do not understand myself at all.

EXCUSES, EXCUSES, EXCUSES HAS THE BEATNIK BOOMER

Writing has not been going well since I began taking Casodex as first treatment for the prostate cancer. [For loved ones, even though the "uses section" says Casodex treats "cancer that has spread to other parts of the body" that is not true in my case, but my doctor wants to keep the cancer confined to my prostate until radiation begins and this is sort of "the best defense is a good offense" type of treatment, I believe. Meanwhile I wait for Cyberknife insurance authorization.] 

As to the difficulty in writing I'm experiencing: if you look to the side effects listed on the attached document, you'll note that two of them are "dizziness" and "drowsiness". I already have some old age dizziness that comes and goes in the morning, but I've noticed now a slight fatigue as I stand over my laptop to write. The fatigue feels like a plexiglass shield that won't allow my consciousness to fully grip the dialogue and narration on the page. However I continue to work on 5th rewrite of my novel The Porn Writer for it keeps my mind on other things than the things I might find worrisome if I let them get all my attention. 

ps: I just now thought it might be a good idea to take the Casodex at nighttime, then I notice that "difficulty sleeping" is another potential side effect. Well damn it all to hell. What's a man to do?

PREOCCUPIED, ANOTHER FORM OF WRITER'S BLOCK

It's been 10 days since my last posting and that's too long a span of time, but nothing much has changed as far as my bucket list item and the forces of nature working against it. Am including two pictures I scanned. One of a poem I wrote several weeks past and the other of the nice illustrative drawings Dr. Siddiqui did as he explained my options to Mertie and I. 
 
Mertie and I had our second opinion meeting today with Dr. Faisal Siddiqui who performs radiation treatments at Peacehealth and also the more focused radiation treatment called the Cyberknife. His recommendation is against surgical removal of the prostate in the same terms as Dr. Jason Smith. The best looking option appears to be a two stage radiation treatment. First 5 weeks of irradiation of prostate and lymph nodes with 40-45 on the grayscale (power rating), then 5 treatments of a nearly double amount of irradiation on the prostate alone. After our talk with Dr. Siddiqui, Merie and I felt very hopeful about extended life expectancy. The details of the after care are too involved to put in here. Oh ... I've already commenced working toward my transition to breasts and hot flashes. Dr. Siddiqui prescribed Bi-ka-loo-ta-myd, one a day. He says it will immediately block or slow spread of cancer cells in prostate while Mertie and I decide on course of action. Will need to put plenty of vitamin D and calcium additives into play. 

As for writing. One rejection of 3 poems returned this past week, and the rewriting of The Porn Writer has been slow going. I'm sure there's a subconscious blockage between me and my imaginative powers. I feel, I think I'd call it, "preoccupied". Good beginnings for poems about the cancer come to mind constantly, but the impulse to complete them doesn't follow.