The theme I write about, again and again, is vocation and career in conflict.

Indeed, I even wrote a book with that title. VOCATION AND CAREER IN CONFLICT: AN ANTI-MEMOIR, which became the two-book series Vocation and Career in Conflict.

VOCATION AND CAREER IN CONFLICT: AN ANTI-MEMOIR. March 15 - April 7. 48,000 words. I finish writing the sequel to Bukowski Never Did This: A Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family, OF MAKING MANY BOOKS THERE IS NO END: A FORM OF INSANITY. I call the two books anti-novels, because the hero, Art "Home" Brew, compare art brut, is an antihero. LitVision Press prepares Bukowski Never Did This for the printer. I proof OF MAKING MANY BOOKS THERE IS NO END: A FORM OF INSANITY. I start writing a memoir, VOCATION AND CAREER IN CONFLICT, and decide it is an anti-memoir, which explores the relation between me and my fictional antihero Brew. I attend the homegrown folk art powwow at Big Chief and Swamp Rose's yard. I buy Gary Alan Fine's Everyday Genius: Self-Taught Art and the Culture of Authenticity. Owen, Jean, and Ella Blue visit, on the way to SpringFest. They go to Potterfest, at Neal's Landing, on the way down, and bring catfish with them. Owen sits in with Dread Clampitt at The Red Bar and at SpringFest, paying for their tickets to SpringFest. Charles Willeford says the autobiography of a writer should end when he just begins to write. That's when I end VOCATION AND CAREER IN CONFLICT: AN ANTI-MEMOIR, but it's only 48,000 words, so I combine it with the next book, LOG OF A BIG HAT, rename the two-part book VOCATION AND CAREER IN CONFLICT, without AN ANTI-MEMOIR, and write until I give myself a web site and start writing and publishing books in real time. March 18, 2001.

LOG OF A BIG HAT. April 8 - April 21. 45,000 words. I ask J. P. S. Brown for permission to use the title "Log of a Big Hat." He grants it, and wishes me luck. Think of Charles Willeford at Miami-Dade Community College, going on about Samuel Beckett going on about hats. The publisher of LitVision Press books us into Philly ZineFest, in mid-July, with a table for book-signing. I agree to do a workshop on small press publishing and publishing on the worldwide web. Eileen West asks to do a book release party for me at her gallery in Point Washington if she has a gallery in June, when Bukowski Never Did This comes out. I start planning my next book, a sequel to VOCATION AND CAREER IN CONFLICT called IN REAL TIME: WRITING, PUBLISHING, AND SELLING BOOKS ALONG THE REDNECK RIVIERA. How guy lit plays in L. A. (Lower Alabama). I asked Sonny Brewer, Over the Transom Books, in Fairhope, if he will book me for a reading at his bookstore. Haven't heard back yet. The Outlaw Bible of American Literature leaves me out. The real outlaw is the one left out. The ones included are, well, you figure it out. It sounds like sour grapes, if I say it. LOG OF A BIG HAT is my 260th book. Without selling one to New York or Hollywood. And "Log of a Big Hat" completes the anti-kunstlerroman VOCATION AND CAREER IN CONFLICT, a respectable 93,000 words. Anti- meaning not against, but instead of. Trying to become this, I became that. The ape who became man was trying to remain an ape, but natural selection doesn't work that way. When conditions change, there is variability to work with. Diversity. A multiculturalism that leaves out the Florida cracker isn't pancultural, it's strangely biased. It has a blind spot. And don't know it. How would it know?

Tim Hall, author of Half Empty, says, "I became a novelist because I am interested in exploring the truth. If I wanted to lie to readers, I'd write a memoir."

I sensed, in Waco, Texas, in 1957, that having a career as a writer would be hard, if I stuck to my guns. If I followed my vision where it led. Stayed true to my vision.

I would define the theme "vocation and career in conflict" as, "How do you write the best books you are capable of writing in a world that is hostile or indifferent to your best?"

What I did was put off starting.

I would not start writing until I had seen something of the world, finished college, found a soul-mate, and gotten married.

Until then, I would view myself as a writer-in-training, read critically, and widely, and write letters to friends.

A letter to a friend is not a book.

But my books would read like a letter from a friend, they would contain letters to friends. My approach to writing novels would be influenced by Jack Kerouac's approach to writing novels, which was influenced by the long letter he got from a friend, Neal Cassady, the "Joan Anderson letter."

Without Neal, no spontaneous bop prosody.

Without Kerouac, no Jack Saunders' Stack, no daily typewriting, no series of related novels written, and published, online, daily, as I wrote them.

But all that was 14 years down the road, in 1957.

As it turns out, I was right.

It was hard.

It was unbelievably hard.