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starting to feel guilty again when I walk into the office where file cards are strewn about on a card table next to the outdated 2013 Writers' Markets book.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.

SILENT COMPLETES THE LAST REWRITE OF ANGIE'S CHOICE

A happy note! Wife Mertie did the final reread of Angie's Choice today. Five last chapters and only about six errors found. I will not look at it again, except to send it around to agents and directly to publishers. I culled through the 2013 Writer's Market and built a huge list of possible publishers. More of the kind of work that it would be nice to have an agent do for me as Agent Ruth Cantor once did for me back in the 1980s. 

Today I went into Portland to the Humanists of Greater Portland Sunday meeting. Then took an hour walk in downtown Portland and realized, as I enjoyed my walk, that under my original plan (to get someone other than myself to publish a book of mine) there lies another plan—to make enough money from one or the other of my novels to buy a modest condo in Portland. Well ... I'm 76 now and might just as well dream big as small. Eh? Of course the book I'm pinning my hopes on is Manning (working title). Also in the wings for complete revision is my most serious novel, Delinquent Lives. The Porno Writer could be a scorcher if I can write a final polished draft of it. It's done, but needs polishing. I think there's work enough ahead to carry me to the crematory but into a Portland condo...?

THE SILENT BOOMER LIFTS A HEAVY BURDEN

I now hold that Pandora's box, the 2013 Writer's Market, Delux Edition in my sweaty little hand. One and 7/8ths inches thick. A heavy burden. So many markets to try...I feel I'm a gem thief, looking for a fence. I'm in for it now with so many opportunities for rejection. I know the routine—50 out and 1 accepted. Maybe in my old age, the odds will improve. I'm also writing essays now. That puts me all into game...poetry, short stories, essays and novels. Maybe I ought to try my hand at greeting cards while I'm at it:

Paula Munier, agent extraordinaire

Jack be nimble.
Jack be quick. 
We hear you've scorched your _ _ _ _
On a candle wick.
Get well soon, old Jackson,
And, dad burst it, remember...
You're s'posed to blow it out first! 

Still and for all that...my goal remains to get one of my novels or a book of essays published by a legit publishing house before they all go bankrupt or I drop dead in the process. And, darn it, I've got that novel idea turning over in my hectic head.

The photo is off the internet of one of the two agents I'm currently querying about my feminist novel, Angie's Choice. Her photo reveals a puckish personality, don't you think?

THE SILENT BOOMER STILL PLOTTING ALONG

Each day my progress on Delinquent Lives slows as I recognize all the intricacies built into the original and all the connective tissue that will have to be laid down to make for smooth transitions. Currently as I cut and paste segments I have to hope I don't lose my train of thought right in the midst of a cut and paste. My mind is not what it used to be in following small details.  

Obviously, I'm approaching the reconstruction primarily to make the novel more readable for the lay reader who I imagine as very bright but not interested in a novel like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. The idea, remember, is to create a book that an agent might see his/her way to supporting, to write a book someone other than myself might publish. My friend Carl Tropea read Finnegan's Wake many moons ago, back in our hippy daze. I still recall how he enthused about it. I tried to read it myself but never finished it...as far as I recall.

I'm wondering how much my decade of not writing and working mostly on algebra has contributed to my seemingly clearer vision of the process of writing? Perhaps the alterations my brain went through to understand the schemata of the algebra problem altered my brain as far as it comes to patterning. Is that a correct use of the word schemata?

I'm so far back into the thorny writing thicket that I sent away for Writer's Market 2013 a couple of days ago. I also used Len Fulton's International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses in the past. I haven't mentioned those useful books because I was pursuing markets closer to home with the ambition to build local and expand later with a more recent record of successful publications of my poetry, short stories and essays. As I talk about these matters, I almost believe I'm going to succeed. I hope it's not like imagining I'm going to win the lottery whenever I weaken and buy a lottery ticket about every two years or so.

It's raining and 60 degrees outside today, and I'm writing at the Black Rock.