Q: May I make a suggestion?
A: Be my guest.
Q: Go ahead and finish this book. TWO ZINE FESTS. And post it at The
Daily Bulletin.
Write about attending Philly Zine Fest and Zine-A-Polooza.
Getting Bukowski Never Did This from the printer, and starting to drive around
Northwest Florida, selling it.
A: Yes.
Q: Forget about what you're going to write the last five years of 40-Year Run.
A: Yes.
Q: Forget what you're going to write your 35th year as a writer.
A: Yes.
Q: When you finish writing TWO ZINE FESTS, stop posting books at The Daily Bulletin.
A: Yes.
Q: Write a book about being an underground writer, a memoir. Call it UNDERGROUND WRITER.
A: Yes.
Q: When you finish writing it, try to place it with an agent.
Write
a book a publisher will want to publish. Because they think people will want to buy
it and read it.
If you want to cross over from the underground to the mainstream
you can't bear down harder on what's keeping you underground. It just keeps you underground.
A: Yes.
Q: Can you do that?
A: I can try.
Q: Any questions?
A: Should I leave The Daily Bulletin up, or take it down?
Q: You can leave it up. As a museum.
Hunter S. Thompson said you
could point back to where the wave crested, and began to recede.
You can
point to here. This entry.
Daily typewriting crested here.
You saw
the folly of your ways right here.
You saw that you were escaping into failure,
in Claudio Arrau's phrase.
You called your own bluff.
Put up or shut
up. Fish or cut bait. Shit or get off the pot.
You had a publisher publish
a book.
You were a headliner at Philly Zine Fest.
You met nice people
at Zine-A-Polooza.
A: Shut down The Daily Bulletin?
Q: New York won't publish a book that has been posted on the worldwide
web, they won't reprint a self-published book, or a book published by a small press,
unless it takes off like Gangbusters. You're wasting your time asking them
to do something they don't do. They want to publish something no one but they have
seen. Not something shopworn, or vanity-press. Something do-it-yourself.
You did it yourself. It took you where it took you. You have reached your peak.
Right here, proposing 12-book series, or a book written in a month, online. Or Guy
Lit and the Big Dick Syndrome, fighting it out.
That's lunacy.
A: What if I write UNDERGROUND WRITER and can't sell it?
Q: You can always go back to something like The Daily Bulletin.
A: Good idea.
Q: What?
A: All of it.
Q: You'll do it?
A: Why not? What I'm doing isn't working.
Rather, it worked, but
it won't take me any further. I'm in a rut.