I decide to drop the subtitle BY JACK SAUNDERS, VERNACULAR WRITER from READFEST 2006 and use the picture of me rescuing Miss Weekiwachee from the Creature From the Black Lagoon on the cover.

By analogy with Creaturefest 2003, when I drove to Wakulla Springs and wrote the pamphlet of poems Blue Ball Blues.

Cracking the cow whip of doom. A Florida cracker in a gimcrack culture. Bear down.

Get down inside the crack and push.

Journalists on Oprah saying publishers need fact-checkers.

Publishers need editors instead of business majors.

They downsized all the editors who care about books. Who know about books.

Our culture has been Oprah-sized, where a few blockbusters get the Oprah treatment and bookstores act like Wal Mart. If your book doesn't fit into that it won't be published.

We've got a fat lady telling everybody how to be thin.

Buy designer soccer shoes for pickaninnies in South Africa. That'll fix it.

I am rescuing American letters from Oprah Winfrey.

From Wal Mart. From business majors acquiring manuscripts. Not acquiring others.

Well, I spent 35 years trying.

I was doomed to fail.

I followed my destiny on out, even to the edge of doom. As Shakespeare says.

I tilted at windmills.

Travis McGee was a knight errant, who did battle with the forces of debasement, reaction, and decadence. He fought to maintain the standard, as it slipped away under his feet. He was a hero, in the mythical sense.

I'm just writing underground writer procedural novels instead of a series of conventional PI novels.

It's Travis McGee with a beer gut and arthritis, short-term memory loss and low sex-drive. Like the Old Dogs on the Shel Silverstein album: not too old to cut the mustard, just too tired to spread it around.