Saturday, July 31 (cont'd)

Q: A reader writes,

Your writing is very, very good and deserves wide readership and critical acceptance to boot. You write too well, as you know too well; your stuff's too immediate and embarrassing for most people in publishing to handle. Fashion now is supposed to be slick, easy to snort, quick literary high. Who the hell wants to wade through 10,000 more pages of words? I do, if you'll send them.

A: I once called my stack The Great American 10,000-Page Novel. After Larry L. King sneered at the idea of a man writing a 10,000-word novel, as if it were the most stupid and self-destructive thing he could think of. In None But a Blockhead.

None but a blockhead ever wrote for money. In Larry L. King: A Writer's Life in Letters: or Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye, we see how much time Larry L. King wasted trying to get paid to write. He'd have been better off to just write.

Q: Indeed, to have put the letters in the books. Like you did.

A: I don't know about that.

Anyhow, The Great American 10,000-Page Novel turned into The Great American 20,000-Page Novel and The Great American 20,000-Page Novel turned into 40-Year Run.

There are people for whom the length is not only not a liability, it's an asset. A feature of the work. The length is part of its charm.

Larry and Hazel have read it all, in manuscript.

Jeff Potter has read most of what has been posted online, and some books that weren't, in manuscript.

Steve Vaughn reads it online. Duke Bardwell. Jim Garrett.

If you bookmark the site, visit it, daily, download and print out what I have written, and read it, at work, it's no different from reading a couple of columns in a daily newspaper, or a long-form piece in a magazine, or several political weblogs every morning, except it's more like reading a book by a favorite author whenever one comes out.

Don't you read every book by a favorite author as soon as it comes out? Or books about favorite authors, after they are dead?

Don't you wish they'd written more, rather than less?

J. R. R. Tolkien said you couldn't satisfy your critics, because what one man wanted taken out, another man cherished.

He said the only criticism he agreed with was, "It's too short." And he wrote long books.

Don't you wish you had one more Patrick O'Brian book?

Or how about giving someone a boxed set who'd never read him.

Q: Your set is too big to box.

A: Here's a blurb for O'Brian's boxed set.

These five volumes, beautifully produced and boxed, contain over 7,000 pages of what has often been described as a single, continuous narrative. They are a perfect tribute to such a literary achievement, and a perfect gift for the serious O'Brian enthusiast.

The series was 20 books, so each volume must contain four books.

I write an ouevre complète. It will be complete when I die.

If I drop dead in the middle of this one, it's not that the series is unfinished, it's that that is where the series ended. Arbitrarily, like a life.

It's a living thing.

The only thing different about it is I am the only person I ever heard of who wrote such a series without selling a word to New York, with nothing but rejection slips from agents and publishers, the stupid cocksuckers won't even look at a sample book.

Q: American Original: An Underground Writer Saga would make a nice boxed set.

For starters.

A: It would.

American Original is a single, continuous narrative.

My stack is a single, continuous narrative.

Of course my stack is long.

It's a life in letters. Or a life outside of letters.

I called a book BEST OF LUCK PLACING IT ELSEWHERE: A LIFE OUTSIDE OF LETTERS.

Christy Fletcher
Fletcher and Parry LLC
The Carriage House
121 East 17th Street
New York, NY 10003

Dear Christy Fletcher:

American Original: An Underground Writer Saga will make a nice boxed set.

It's three books. One finished, one almost there, and one to go. The one to go will take my stack to 250 volumes, a significant milestone, and natural publicity hook.

Imagine discovering an underpublished Charles Bukowski. It would be like catching a coelacanth. The whole typology must be revised.

There's a 750,000-word gorilla in our midst.

Enclosed find a synopsis and catalogue raisonné of American Original and a list of the first 250 books of my stack.

Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Box 10501
Panama City, FL 32404

Guy lit is a genre that asks, "Is it me who's crazy?"

It tests the null hypothesis that I ain't by sending work out and hearing back from readers. In self-published pamphlets and at a home page on the worldwide web. And in query letters to New York. Keep them cards and letters coming. Them form letters.

It's thus both written, and published, in real time, and interactive, as I respond to reader comment, in the books.

One-line pitch: A gorilla in our midst.

I dream of playing the swinette on stage, at Americana music festivals, selling my books at the record table afterwards. A swinette, you stretch two horsehairs across a hog's ass and pick it with your teeth. Brew mounts the steps, walks across the stage with great dignity, takes a stuffed Miss Piggy doll out from under his robes, lifts her skirt, presses her butt to his face, and squeals like a stuck pig. Great cry and little wool, as the Devil said when he sheared the hogs.

An album Owen played fiddle on and an album Balder played mandolin on both got good reviews in Bluegrass Unlimited. On facing pages.

The only thing better would be if they were all three nominated for a Grammy at the same time, Brew for writing the liner notes, laughing over the seven hours of shitty music they had to sit through, to get their awards. A clean sweep. The Saunders Men.

My Life Outside of Letters: The Liner Notes. John Prine called an album The Missing Years.

Underground Writer, Beneath the Underdog, Under the [Wakulla] Volcano.