TIMEX AND PROSTATE CANCER THRILL THE SILENT BOOMER

The odds have just increased "against" achieving my oft stated goal to get someone other than myself to publish a novel of mine before I kick the bucket. At age 78, my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Early into his 80th year, it killed him. As he told me, sad regret in his voice, "I guess I got the aggressive kind." I'm 78 myself and on Monday April 18th, 2016, my primary doc felt a prostate nodule. Today, Monday April 25th, a urologist confirmed the lump on my prostate. He said, "I can always be wrong, but if I was a betting man, I'd say it's cancerous." After a stool sample is checked, I'm to go in for a biopsy. Going to be a lot of probing and sticking of things up my butt.

I don't understand all my emotions, but, driving away from the clinic, I was in some way energized by the thought of facing my own death. Don't know if inspiration will continue, but I've begun a book of poetry, called "Up Your Ass".  Here's the first poem in the series.

DIGITAL EXAM

Your doctor feels something,

Then you feel something.

After that, you and the grim reaper

Exchange cell phone numbers.

While your insurance company

Stands by for consultation, you

Hear your digital Timex ticking.

I can't help wondering how much more interested an agent and book publisher might be if I tell them they're racing against time to get me into print and the fact that more than 250 people—maybe more once the news gets out—are following my anticipated death? Will they race against my prostate cancer to see who wins? Will I have the balls to include this new fact in all my query letters to agents? After my publication and death, will all my fellow writers mourn, "Damn, I wish I had prostate cancer."

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. 

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. 

REWRITE OF PORN NOVEL COMPULSIVELY UNDERWAY

PORN

I could only stand one day without something to write at. I'm now rewriting an old novel about a guy who turns to writing porn as a way to get published since he's a flop in so many other ways. His writing and the new romance in his life with a mysterious woman lead him into a situation he doesn't expect. Yes, I've put real porn in it, but even the porn [you can easily see, if you've ever read porn] is not the kind of porn that porn dogs want. He's a flop even when writing porn. Only he doesn't know it. My wife doesn't like this novel, The Porn Writer, because of the porn in it. She fears, I fear, that it might get published. Then, her family would know what an outrageous nut she's happily married to. I'm kind of interested, also, in what a traditional publisher would do with The Porn Writer.

HAVE BEATNIKED MY WAY TO COMPLETION & NO PROSTATE CANCER!

Found image here....

Today is all happiness and joy. Two great things happened today. Just now, I finished the last rewrite of the novel, Ghoul World. Last night, anticipating the completion, I had already dispatched inquiries with ten page samples to three agents. One of them came back immediately. A form letter that the agent is too busy to look at inquiries at this time.

Today, an hour before I completed the rewrite, I departed the doctor's office with the knowledge that my enlarged prostate is probably not cancerous at this time. The PSA test revealed a smaller number than last time. Though still above normal range, my PSA declined from 6.1 back down to 5.5. It appears my numbers, when graphed, create a sawtooth, up and down, with a small increasing average. Plus my doctor put a blessed digit up my behind and proclaimed he could find no nodules or bumps on my prostate. Somehow, that digi-check and proclamation is more reassuring than bare numbers. 

SHORT ONE WHILE I CATCH MY BEATNIKING BREATH

Got photo here!

I'm falling behind in these entries, but the final rewrite is taking a longer time than I expected. Has it been 3 or 4 weeks, and I'm only on page 152? If 3 weeks have passed that's less than 50 pages a week. Or less. However, I'm still very pleased with how well the novel reads. It appears to be a very publishable novel. So, I'm halfway to my goal of getting someone other than myself to publish a book of mine. It's an interesting novel and it makes room for lots of sequels... probably one of the prerequisites for publishing these days. Now, a lady has sat herself down next to me at Barnes & Noble to talk on her phone at the counter where I'm working on this blog entry. So I'm done and out of here. Off to my walk at the Vancouver Mall. It's raining, you see. On and off.

GHOUL WORLD IS THIS BEATNIK BOOMER'S TITLE OF CHOICE

Just finished the penultimate chapter. I enter the last chapter, see the final scene before my eyes, at last. First draft, of course. Tentatively, I'm going to end the novel on a sad note, but if the team that makes my Manning novel into a movie wants to make it a happy ending there's plenty of room for that too. I don't care. Just pay me well. I'll happily go along. I'm easy after a lifetime of turning my nose up at writing profits. 

Seattle lost. Brady is among the best quarterbacks—if not the best ever. What a way to lose too. I didn't watch. I can't take the stress anymore. I identify too completely and my spirits rise and fall with wins and loses. I've tried to understand why some people so completely identify with sports teams while others don't. Like almost everything in life, self-worth plays a part. It drenches the sport follower's psyche with gloom or celebration. The less self worth one has, the more important the outcome of his favorite team becomes. I'm pretty sure I'm onto something there if I'm any example.  

Ghoul World is, at this moment, my chosen title for the Manning novel. 

PS: Just met Gabriel in Starbucks today, a young man with a Phd who has returned to US and PNW from Korea. I see much success ahead for him. He writes tech pieces at this time, with a book on his mind. 

FEAR AND LOATHING IN BEATNICVILLE

Source of picture here:

Call this segment in my writer's blog: the things that a writer thinks about. I haven't written for days. The holiday and an adventure came between. Some minds want to know more about the world or about themselves while a sociopath wants to know which of our buttons they can push to get the results they desire.

Last week I returned to Spokane for a party at the company I retired from. I ran into an old nemesis of mine and confronted the smile of a sociopath. It interests me to no end to try and understand why this particular man's smile can chill me like that. I swear to you, the smile of this fellow says to me, "I know you. I know your fears and weaknesses, and if I can't control you that way, I'll kill you." I felt that same fear once around an ex-con in a bar back in my drinking days. I departed that bar swiftly. 
 
Am I truly looking into the grin of a sociopath, or does his smile trigger some horrific unconscious memory from my childhood? I have a terrifying childhood memory, a memory so deep that I did not recall for 50 years. I am being held face down in a couch pillow. My memory is of the moment when I am released and come up gasping for breath. Just a single strong memory. Who was holding my face into the pillow, I cannot recall, but it was a near death experience.
 
I wonder if the smile of the person who did that to my five year old self is the same as the smile of that fellow from work? I watched a PBS show on sociopaths, and, in that segment, a family man who had been diagnosed as a sociopath was featured in it. His own family said they feared him at times, but he credited his parents with showing him a path to achieve what he wanted without becoming criminal. I believe he ran his own business. 

Many sociopaths aren't murderers. They achieve what they want through other manipulations. I have a strong suspicion that a number of politicians and businesspeople at the economic top are sociopaths. A friend of mine recommended the book, "The Wisdom of the Sociopath" which I think I'll read someday. The way I look at it through the lense of evolution...the sociopath is almost the perfectly developed survival tool. That's pretty chilling, isn't it? To imagine that some fraction of global culture is headed up by sociopaths?

A GOOD MORNING'S REWRITE AND AGENT MOLLY JAFFA

This morning I awoke to a productive morning of rewriting of Delinquent Lives, but after a time, I felt impelled to send off another agent query letter for another novel of mine, Angie's Choice. I resent the constant drain of writing time required to do all the "business" of becoming a published writer, so it's been awhile since I took the time to do that because Angie's Choice is ready for publication. In fact, once upon a time, Angie had an agent.

First I looked for potential agents. I used an October 2012 Writer's Digest. In that issue, several agents encouraged writers to send them work. They asked for it and I'll bet they were immediately overwhelmed by queries. I specifically looked for a female agent interested in women's writing since my heroine is a female. 

Next I went onto the websites of the agencies these agents work with to look for submission guidelines which I follow to a "T". Next, I brought up a master query letter for that specific novel, Angie's Choice, and worked it over to make it more exactly suited for the person I sensed on the other side of her written profile and comments, then, I copied and pasted the finalized letter into an email. Next I included ten pages of Angie's Choice (exactly as the agent requested).

Just to add reality to this post, I've included the name of the agent, Molly Jaffa...a nice name with a literary allusion in it. Think Molly Bloom!

The whole process took one hour and forty minutes of my valuable time. With a sigh of relief, I returned to rewriting Delinquent Lives after lunch with my lovely wife.