Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—Scrib was
an event-planner. The event he was
planning was his debut. As a mainstream
novelist.
An
underground writer learns his chops in little magazines and mail art. Then he crosses over into the
mainstream. He is born fully-developed,
like Zeus from Hera’s ear.
Planning
an event like that was like herding cats.
The cats had their own ideas. In
their little cat brains.
Meow,
meow. Tuesday Weld trying on sweaters in
Lord Love a Duck. Pago-Pago Pink. Pronounced pango-pango.
Bingo Bango Bongo
I don’t want to leave the
Red Buttons for
Heap, free-associating.
You didn’t plan things.
You couldn’t control anything.
Disaster preparedness. Catastrophe management. Damage control.
All you could do was be ready. Then, when your break came, you were prepared.
Scrib would be an overnight success. Out of the blue, he would come. Where did that guy come from?
Digging his toe in the dirt, like Benjy.
Jack Warden in The Sound and the Fury, riding in the buckboard, his forehead breaking the wind like the prow of a ship, a maidenhead.
The only wind Scrib would break was a silent one. A courtroom creeper.
That’s figurehead, not maidenhead.
Scrib was a stealth novelist. His plan was working. He would lay back and write a book like The Ginger Man, and spring himself on the unsuspecting public like Ignatius J. Reilly in Confederacy of Dunces.
Living with his mother. Looking for a job.
Scrib was a househusband. Writing in the bedroom of Brenda’s mother’s house. Working now and then.
Writing up a storm between day jobs.
Don’t quit your day job, boys.
I didn’t quit I was fired for blogging. Then blacklisted.
Run silent, run deep.
Richard Stark named for stark, and Richard Widmark.
Panic in the Streets. Dr. Mary’s Monkey.
Film noir movies, paperback originals, late-night television. Hello, Ginzu Knives?
The Internet. Richard Pryor. That nigger crazy.
Conspiracy theories.
Richard Donner said Brian Helgeland was standing at the studio gate with a cardboard sign saying Will Write for Food and he gave him a chance. Et voilà—Conspiracy Theory.
Will write for
food, will write for free, will pay to write.
That was the motto of the Jack Saunders School of Fiction Writing, at
Breeder’s Rest Dog Kennels, off Highway 20, up by
Young Men and Fire.
Old Men and Firewater. Hemingway couldn’t finish his book. He got knocked on the noggin one time too many. Maybe it was having to break the airplane window with his head, then drinking, with a concussion.
Maybe it was the drinking.
So much pressure.
Are you a doctor? What do you know about it.
He was medicating himself.
It quit working.
It had always worked before.
You keep doing what worked before.
What happens when it doesn’t work.
Minor chord.
You have to fall back and regroup.
Or press on to
Faulkner puking in the bathroom in Barton Fink.
Judy Davis writing his books for him.
You fraud.
Poor old Norman Mailer, Doris Lessing winning the Nobel Prize, a science fiction writer.
Ancient Evenings was science fiction.
Bad science fiction, in my opinion.
It isn’t whether it’s science fiction or not, it’s whether it’s good science fiction or bad science fiction.