Yes, Tuesday is laundry day around here! So that’s already underway.
And it’s also the day I have to drive into town and get groceries. All I have left around here are arugula and tomatoes. Healthy as I am, even I need a little more excitement than that. (Well, a lot more excitement than that, but we’re talking about food right now.)
Sometimes that part of living in the middle of nowhere gets a wee bit old — having to drive 25 miles & back to get the food. Because I spend maybe 20 minutes in the actual market. Then an hour driving. And then about 20 more minutes putting all the groceries away.
And I’ve already spent a chunk of the morning going over stuff with the director again for Tell My Bones and our Christmas promotion. And so I’m just now sitting down to blog at an hour when the blog is usually already posted.
So my day’s gone.
I’m going to spend what’s left of it (after the shopping trek) doing some more tweaking on Letter #5 from Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse. And then, if I have the right headspace after that, I’m going to work some more on Thug Luckless: Welcome to P-Town. I just woke up in that kind of a mood.
Working with Thug takes a lot out of me, though, and if I’m not in the right headspace then it’s just useless. Writing that kind of porn (meaning the kind people wish to actually read) is like neurosurgery with words. Even though 99.9% of the words are filthy dirty & disgusting, they still have to be incredibly precise and in the exact specific place in the sentence; and then each sentence has to be precisely right. And then you can’t have too many words or it ruins everything.
So it’s a lot of work. However, it’s a task I’m willing to undertake for the sake of mankind (and good porn).
William at the A1000Mistakes blog in Australia (my favorite blog for learning about cool music I’ve never heard of before!), commented here yesterday about the unfortunate situation on the Internet and artists getting ripped off, etc.
What’s happening to me now is just sort of getting out of control. It’s never been this bad — where so much of my stuff is illegally being offered for free or for sale, all over the world. I have enough of an enormous ego to feel flattered, you know — if you want it that bad, then, great. However, it truly erodes my income. But at the same time, these are really old stories and novels and novellas, and so it sort of just makes me feel like I have to focus my energy on the new work and let go of these things I can’t control.
The truth is that without the Internet I never could have gotten as popular as I did, as quickly as I did — all over the world. I loved the World Wide Web. I thought it was the most awesome thing back in the late 1990s. And back then, it went hand in hand with driving sales of actual books in bookstores.
And, because of the kinds of books I primarily wrote, Amazon was also a godsend to me. Most people did not want to go out to a public bookstore and openly buy the kind of books I wrote (because publishers usually put such horrifically tacky covers on them!!). So the privacy factor of Amazon really helped put me on the map, 20 years ago.
Still, as much as I personally love the ease of Amazon, they were also the beginning of the erosion of my earnings, way back when, because they were the ones who started to make it so fucking easy for people to buy cheap used copies of my stuff, that I got no royalties on whatsoever. Eventually, the Internet and eBooks helped put all of my publishers out of business (small presses, primarily). So this disruption of my career has been going on for quite a while now and, for the most part, I’m used to it.
This sudden onslaught of so much of it at once is a little hard to take, though. However.
I made the decision a long time ago that I was going to be a writer, no matter what. I’m used to the winds of fortune constantly changing. I would not recommend being a professional writer to anyone on the planet, though, unless you can stomach that.
A few years ago, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, a national newspaper of the Philippines, interviewed me in the late Spring, as students were graduating school, and among the questions they asked me was what I would advise these students who might want to make a career out of writing literary erotica.
I was dumbfounded, you know? Why on Earth would they ever want to do that? You’ve got to be out of your fucking mind to, you know, willingly choose this if you had even the remotest option of doing something else. And if, for whatever reason, like me, you know you don’t really have an option: you either write what’s in your head, or you blow your head completely off. Well, if that’s the case, then nothing I say is going to persuade or deter you.
But anyway. I’m used to things being less than perfect. My main goal is to write something good enough that somebody somewhere likes it so much that they want to keep it. Because it only takes one copy of something to be buried away for safe keeping — like a scroll in a clay jug in a cave in the cliffs over Qumran — to help it be part of the physical world for a really, really long time.
That’s the goal, anyway, when I put a word on some sort of page. And the Internet and everything that comes along with it, is part of that; be it good or less than good.
Okay. Nick Cave sent out a Red Hand Files thingy today! It was all about:
Had I known he was actually going to eventually tell us what Ghosteen was about, I’m thinking I might not have spent all those hours pondering it while listening to it in my bed, or at my desk, or in my kitchen, or while I was doing yoga, or driving all over Muskingum County, or while I was taking a shower….
However, that’s all water under the bridge, as it were. What matters more is that I still look really young for my age so not too much time was lost there.
I’m just kidding, of course. Mostly. Anyway. You can read it here if you so choose! As always, he’s eloquent and thought-provoking. And the album is just breathtaking, however you interpret it (or try to).
FYI: “Spinning Song” is a song I really love. I have no clue what it’s about. It is not one of the songs that breaks my heart or anything; I just really like the imagery, even though I don’t understand it. At all. But it seems to be a little bit about Elvis. And “the Queen” whose hair was a stairway, makes me think of Priscilla — not just on their wedding day, but more specifically, in the official photo from when the baby was first born: Priscilla’s hair is not to be believed. I never could understand her hair in those days. As a young girl, her hair actually kind of frightened me. (But then it turned out, in the 1980s, that she just had regular hair like everyone else.) (And that she was also incredibly funny and cute.)
Okay. I’m gonna scoot. The day is practically over already!!! Have a perfect Tuesday, wherever you are in the world, and whatever it finds you doing. Thanks for visiting, gang. I love you guys. See ya.
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