Q: If work promotes confidence, being out of work makes you insecure. You start doubting yourself. You get down on yourself. You blame yourself for your predicament.

A: Yes.

Q: Well, doesn't unrelieved rejection make you doubt your ability, as a writer?

Doesn't the suppression of your entire oeuvre make you suicidal, almost? 38 years of rejection?

A: Yes.

It's supposed to.

But that's what I have going for me.

To a certain, contrary set of mind, that's a goad.

Also, if my work wasn't good enough, it wasn't good enough.

But none of it was good enough? Something else is operating here.

This puts it in a different basket than not good enough.

Who says it's not good enough, and what are their motives?

Turn it around.

Q: Rejection gives you confidence.

A: Yes.

Q: Rejection makes you sure of yourself.

A: Yes.

If rejection won't stop me, what will?

Nothing.

I will go for 40 years, if I have to.

If I can go 38 years I can go 39 years. It's just a year.

If I can go 39 years I can go 40. It's just a year.

Anybody can go a year.

I can go a year on momentum.

If I died now it would take a year for my liver to stop working.

And 39 years might as well be 40.

39 years is close.

I'm getting close.

Q: Close only counts in hand grenades and horseshoes.

A: And courtroom creepers. Before they know it they are gagging and retching.

We're being hollowed out by termites. We're hollow. We've been eaten.

My book is a stealth bomb.

Where did this guy come from?

How did he develop?

Q: Pat Buchanan defends Hitler, says the Holocaust was caused by the British and the French.

A: They're delusional.

Why do you think conservatives are called the lunatic fringe.

Because they are nut-cases.

Q: The Green Jobs Czar was a Communist.

He said Republicans are assholes.

A: I say that to the TV every night.

You guys are assholes.

Do you think I'm buying that shit.

Omahaha writes,

Please don't stop. I loved how it's so really true to life...so relaxed...yet crisscrossed with real fears and frustrations...and real tenderness...and true love. Now that I'm thinking about it, that seems to be the true appeal of most of your work for me...that it's TRUE, so true, so different from reading the "news" or watching T.V., where I'm constantly asking myself, "Do they really suppose we're buying all this shit?" About your "whining" about not being able to find a publisher to print your work--I think it's probably worth whining about. In fact I sort of admire your efforts. It takes a lot of energy to keep that whining up, and frankly I wore out years ago. It's hard to be the only dog barking up the tree.

Q: Who's Omahaha?

A: A mail art correspondent.

Q: The correspondence novel. David Zack.

A: Letter from an Imaginary Friend.

Put it in my novel.

Q: Where will prople find it?

A: The Daily By-Catch (www.thedailybulletin.com).