Q: Did you really write those books, and post them online, as you wrote them, at The Daily Bugle, when you worked for Lucent Technologies, in Atlanta?
A: Yes.
It isn't bragging if you did it.
Q: Who said that? Muhammad Ali?
A: Dizzy Dean.
Q: If Lucent had found out you would have been sunk. You were flirting with disaster. Why didn't they find out?
A: I was working under cover of daylight.
The idea was so bold
no corporate bureaucrat could conceive of such a scheme. It was off the scale.
I didn't tell.
I expected to be discovered, exposed, revealed.
I
thought they'd rig a high sling for my ass.
But before that happened I got
laid off in the general economic malaise, along with everybody else. For lack of
work.
Which I had seen coming, and was writing about.
You can't call
it suicide if they're trying to murder you, and blame it on circumstances beyond
their control.
Q: No.
A: Where it was career suicide is I intended for New York to publish the
books.
I wrote query letters about the books to New York editors and literary
agents.
Writing honestly and openly, about subjects that matter, in plain
speech, is career suicide for a writer. New York won't touch it with a ten-foot
pole.
It's racist, sexist, libelous, and obscene.
Not a smart thing
to write. Career-wise.
Q: Why do it?
A: My goal was to get at, and witness to, the truth of who I am, through
daily typewriting. To test my observations and conclusions in the public forum.
To find out if I was full of shit, deceiving myself, crazy.
I heard back
from readers who said they felt the way I did, they saw the same connections I saw,
they had thought that they were crazy, and reading me was a revelation to them.
They thanked me for what I was doing.
One reader wrote,
Please don't stop. I loved how it's so really true to life...so relaxed...yet crisscrossed with real fears and frustrations...and real tenderness...and true love. Now that I'm thinking about it, that seems to be the true appeal of most of your work for me...that it's TRUE, so true, so different from reading the "news" or watching T.V., where I'm constantly asking myself, "Do they really suppose we're buying all this shit?" About your "whining" about not being able to find a publisher to print your work--I think it's probably worth whining about. In fact I sort of admire your efforts. It takes a lot of energy to keep that whining up, and frankly I wore out years ago. It's hard to be the only dog barking up the tree.