Out There

 

Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—

 

Q:  Imagine pitching an agent a book that was too out there for a mainstream publisher.

 

A:  You’re wasting stamps.

 

Q:  You have to find the publisher who is looking for a book like that.  Or he has to find you.

 

A:  That’s what happened with Bukowski Never Did This:  A Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family.

      I posted it on the worldwide web, daily, as I wrote it, and then a publisher reprinted it, as a book.

 

Q:  So it can happen.

 

A:  It did happen.

 

Q:  Once in—how many years was it?

 

A:  I don’t remember.  It was 250 books.  I had just finished my 250th book.

 

Q:  So it will happen again.  Around book 500.

 

A:  I don’t think I’ll live that long.

 

Q:  What book in CRITICAL FUDGE?

 

A:  380.  But some of them are short.

 

Q:  Balzac’s Comédie humaine was only 90 novels or novellas.

 

A:  He didn’t have the Internet.

 

Q:  Balzac Online.  It turns a publisher’s bowels to ice water.

 

A:  Not if you’re a publisher.

      I’m my own police, Harvey Keitel said, in City of Industry.

 

Q:  What is Scrib Online?  Imagine Balzac Online.

 

A:  CRANK is slang for methamphetamine.  Crank labs are a problem in Northwest Florida.

 

Q:  You’re a one-man crank lab.  Cranking out the books.

 

A:  Online.  Where nobody fucks with me.

 

Q:  They can’t cut you off because they don’t know where you’re getting it.

 

A:  Bill said that to his wife once.

 

Q:  Costly mistake.

 

A:  Turns out it was.

      Marriage, it’s easy to make a mistake.

      You want to get laid.

 

Q:  There are other reasons to get married.

 

A:  There are other reasons to become a writer.

      It ain’t all science fiction conventions.

 

Q:  Trekkies.

 

A:  I’ve been to small press conferences.

      SCRIB is about small press conferences.

 


 

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