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.

BLOGGING BEAT BOOMER BEATS HEAD AGAINST WALL... AGAIN!

The query for Angie's Choice I sent by mail came back today, the one that reminded me of how much work it took to send off a query in the old days. I sent it off to the Zoe Pagnamenta agency. She answered within two weeks. NO! I had high hopes for it because of the methodology of the query. Don't know why printing out and mailing my query and sample felt more hopeful. Emotions are mysterious things even though they command our every deed and thought. I need to push the sci fi novel, Ghoul World, more forcefully. I let it languish, but it's a very interesting idea that ought to get at least a moment's attention somewhere.

On a positive note, yesterday, this writer's blog which also goes to a page I manage on Facebook , The Silent Boomer, received 221 hits. People are watching to see what might happen to me in my quest to "get someone other than myself to publish a novel I've written." Or "to produce a movie I've written."  Thanks to all who follow my journey. Many days now, I think it's time to fold up the writer's table and leave the dusty old bazaar to other scribes much younger than myself.

One very interesting thing about writing a movie script. The length of a 90 minute film takes from 90 to 120 pages. I've discovered that my elderly memory is able to keep track of 120 pages more easily than it tracks a plot and subplots through 400 to 500 pages of ms. I've already got several story lines in mind for films that I can't share because they are quite interesting. On my death bed, I'll tell all. 

SILENT BEATNIK BOOMER BANGS ALONG ON ALL THREE CYLINDERS

Find Photo Source Here

Currently reading The Moral Animal by Robert Wright for a second time while plowing ahead on my untitled sci fi screenplay. Nearly finished with first draft, I'm enjoying the process a great deal, and, I already have another idea for a film script. This is an odd trajectory because it's even harder to find an agent for a film script than a novel. 

A couple of days ago, I sent off a query for my novel, Angie's Choice, to a New York agency. But the interesting thing was how I felt about the query process since it was an old fashioned agency and wanted a hard copy query in the U.S. mail service. As I took out the two pages of auto bio and 20 pages of manuscript and tapped them on the desk to align their edges, I experienced a bodily sensation that returned me to the years when all queries and manuscripts were sent through the U.S. mail. I recalled putting together and sending out whole manuscripts, boxed up and carried to the local post office. I felt connected to all the past writers of the world, through all the most recent centuries of the world when manuscripts were ink on paper. 

My children, now all grown up beings in the world, suggested I ought to begin to make these "Silent Boomer" blog entries as videos. They say that many people have found multitudinous followers by doing blogs as video presentations. My oldest boy says that it seems the more awkward and unprofessional the video is, the better followers seem to like them. I'm intrigued and think about it from time to time. I ask myself if that would really help me to achieve the one item on my bucket list: to get someone other than myself to publish one of my novels before I kick it. 

Addendum: Or film script.

SILENT BOOMER EXCHANGES SPAGHETTI FOR TURKEY

Have been doing nothing for the last several days except play games and eat because it was turkey day for those who aren't vegans and spaghetti day for those of us who are, and Mertie and I had family over from Spokane and down from Seattle to feed and partly house. Looking forward to tomorrow and return to sci-fi script I began two [?] weeks past. But I also had the emotional energy for a novel enter my brain tonight and perk up my synapses. If it's still with me tomorrow, I might try to type down the beginning scene for it. It would open with a half-ass suicide attempt and continue from there, backwards and forward in time... maybe. Today, I sent out two queries for my novel The Man In the Mirror and a question about my novel Angie's Choice to a small film company, wondering if they'd like to read it with a movie in mind. Hope everyone had an enjoyable and dietary Thanksgiving. Jeez, we ate so many bagels and pieces of pie with ice cream made with almond milk that our dietary regime blew South with the wind. Current reading is Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask, basically a confessional novel about his homosexuality in the 1940s and 1950s.

FOURBYTWO ON BOARD THE GOOD SHIP BOOMERBEATNIK

Ten days between entries here. Sorry. Last night and this morning, this old writer got to work and submitted five short stories for consideration at five literary magazines. Also sent two more queries about my novel, Programming Frank Singletary. Feels productive. My reading at this time is the anthology, Cutbank 83, which I received as part of my unsuccessful entry into its recent short story competition. Some of the work within its pages fascinates me. A style I don't yet understand, but I'm willing to understand, at least as willing as Copperfield's Barkis ever was. I believe some young writers might be trying to write stories as robots might write them or by revealing their tales through the eyes of a person without free will. Not sure. Just a guess. I'd like it to be true as it's about time writers align ourselves with the facts. I may be too old to catch up or on.

Also, the most recent FourByTwo is in my hungry clutches. As usual, the look of the little magazine is classy and the poetry sassy. That word choice and rhyme are almost so awful they ought not be connected to the fine thing that FourByTwo is. I'm showing you a couple of poems that are by klipschutz. The other poet is Michael Earl Craig. Craig, by the way, hails from Dayton, Ohio, my own birthplace. Most of the time, I select for sample the poet who is not klipschutz, but this time I went the other way. This is not a comment on Craig's work. It's just that I thought klipschutz ought to have a turn in this blog. Money is becoming an issue for them. Doesn't it always?

SILENT BOOMER TAKES A LEFT UPPERCUT TO CHIN!

Thank you so much for your interest in Talcott Notch. While your project has much merit, I'm afraid I don't feel strongly enough to take it on in this tough marketplace. I wish you the best in placing it elsewhere.
Best, 
Paula Munier  Talcott Notch Literary Agency
 

Got photo at:

I always pay attention to a very interesting word in Paula's rejection letter. She writes, "I don't feel strongly enough...." From my own editing experience (and my reading in neuroscience), I assure myself that "feeling" is the only important element in every literary judgment. 

A guy like me (or a gal like Paula) reads something and likes it or not... period! Once the electrochemical computing system that runs the human body and is the human being has made that important feelingization (sic), it can generate an impressive set of  rationalizations for why I felt as it did or it felt as I did.

Of course, my feelings about each piece of writing I looked at when I edited Willow Springs, George & Mertie's Place or Heliotrope were informed by decades of reading the very best and the very worst of literature, and Paula's are based on, she hopes, what might be popular, and, later, the books that last will be the combined feelings of agents, publishers, scholars and readers...Dickens, James Joyce or Tolkien.

That's the situation as I feel it. Feelings are what motivates an agent and an editor, and the feelings of readers make a book a best seller. Feelings made a very poorly written book like "Uncle Tom's Cabin" a powerful tool in the anti-slavery movement that led to the American Civil War. Feelings!

It's the same old story,

A fight for love and glory,

A case of do or die,

The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.

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?