In 1985, Anthony Burgess said the future held "work and television." In 1978, when Burgess wrote 1985, it did. Now it holds unemployment and television.

WORKINGMAN'S BLUES NO. 2. August 25 - September 21. 28,000 words. I celebrate my 38th year as a writer. And 70th birthday. My temporary technical writing job is running out. I prepare to give two presentations at Gulf Coast Writers Conference, one on publishing as a business, and one on self-publishing as a strategy. It's more a tactic. A means to an end. What's the end? A career as a mainstream commercial novelist? You can't get there from here. It's about possibilities not matching ambitions. The American dream turning into the Bush-Enron administration, its perfect flower. Newspapers are dying. The polar bear and the panda are endangered species. Bigfoot is extinct. Shit happens when you're fatalistic. I get my news from reality TV. From pundits shouting lunatic-fringe slogans at each other. Who's got time to read a good book anymore? I barely have time to write one. You can read my book on the worldwide web. At the library, if you're homeless. At work, if you have a computer with an Internet browser like Netscape. Ha ha, that's a joke. They probably have MS Windows Internet Explorer. The company I work for lost a mil spec tech manual contract. The whole writing group is superannuated, or made redundant. I still have some work left on my economic-stimulus-package trickle-down grant writing training programs for the unemployed. In whose number I will soon find myself, again. Once more. Audace, encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace. Audacity forever! This is my chance. I write a pamphlet called They, or dem. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one. I own The Daily Bulletin. I write and publish in real time. They, or dem is the best justification for publishing your own pamphlets since John Milton's Areopagitica, in 1644. Thoughts have wings, say the Rosicrucians. Go in a cave and think one true thought.

WORK. Projected. I am reverted to my permanent rank: yardbird. I stay at home and write a book called WORK. It's a sequel to BLACK HARVEST. 1985 was essays on Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and a novella. Househusband is WORKINGMAN'S BLUES NO. 2 and WORK. WORK will probably be a novella. I feel comfortable at that length. WORKINGMAN'S BLUES NO. 2 was 28,000 words. It was a memoir, or meditation on writing. Or a correspondence novel. A correspondence novel isn't a novel, it's something you get in the mail, or go to a writer's web site and read online every day. As it is written. If you write the author, he answers you in his book.