Again, no. Sorry but no.
Janet Reid, JetReid Literary Agency
I went out to the pork-butcher, for
sausages. On my bicycle.
I had a casserole in mind, with white beans. A
cassoulet, I guess you'd call it.
I was going to cook it in one of
those French casseroles with the bisqueware outside and the dark-brown terra cotta
glaze inside, with a fitting lid, and a hollow handle, like you get at Maison Blanche,
on Canal Street.
* * *
So we've got a gourmet cook, who gets around on a bicycle. How does he make
a living?
Emerson said the first thing we ask, when we meet someone new,
is, "How does that man earn a blameless livelihood, without dishonest customs?"
He's a writer.
Does he live in the French Quarter, and write vignettes and
feuilletons? Or is he trying to write something he can sell? Something commercial?
Something he can live on, as a writer?
* * *
I was a student, and I was trying to write something I could sell. A murder
mystery.
I had stolen the last year of my NDEA fellowship in anthropology
at Tulane University to teach myself to write.
In fact, I thought I'd write
a series, like John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series.
I didn't know I'd
end up writing Black McGoon novels, after what Balder called The Creature From
the Black Lagoon, when the creature put his webbed hand on the gunwale of the
boat where Julie Adams was sunbathing, purple, twitching, hideous, and Balder cried
out to warn her. "Black McGoon!"
National Defense Education
Act. I had a three-year fellowship, with a stipend of $2,500 a year. I could
borrow an equal amount on a low-interest government loan I wouldn't have to pay back
until I got my PhD and started teaching college at East Jesus State. I had a tuition
waiver. I was in an accelerated, three-year PhD program.
Two years in, I
saw I wasn't going to get the PhD in three years. Minor chord.
What
to do? Become a writer.
Sign up for Thesis, to draw my stipend, stay at
home, and write.
I thought if I could write a book I could sell it, and use
the proceeds to write the next book.
That was 265 books ago, and I haven't
sold a book to New York yet.
This month completes my 34th anniversary as
a writer.