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.

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.