vituperation

August 28, 2002

Out of the closet. Free at last!

I’m pleased to announce that there will be no entries about my ass today.

I’m even more pleased to announce that I got my first Fark ever today.

And I even got to make fun of the French. You non-Farkers can ignore this section.

Imagine for a moment you’re having a contest. Suppose this contest is for someone to write a 25-word essay on why they like The Firm workout videos. You make people aware of this contest, and get inundated with entries, to the tune of about ten thousand entries.

Of this ten thousand, you really like about one hundred, so you start pitching these hundred - roughly one percent of all the entries you received - to your bosses, for their selection of the one to be the winner. You pitch and pitch and pitch, and finally one of your bosses makes a decision that he likes one of the one hundred (another one percent) that you submitted, so the prize gets awarded.

One person out of ten thousand gets the prize for his entry.

Welcome to the wide world of trying to get a book published.

No, I’m not complaining, actually. Things are going well on the book front, just too slowly for my tastes. Agents, the first level in my theoretical contest above, reject about 99% of the material they receive. I got my share of rejections, but right now there are a handful (a small handful, albeit) who are pursuing it to the next levels beyond the initial query letter I sent.

Which is good, I think, given that I’ve spent less than two months actively trying to get an agent.

The sucky part is that once it gets agented, then there’s about another 1-in-100 chance that a publisher will like it enough to buy the rights. No wonder writers are so damn temperamental.

Nothing sucks quite like being so sore you go for a massage, and then having it not really doing any good at all. Unless it’s getting up the next morning and brutalizing your legs again in the weight room.

Saturday morning, on the way out of Publix with the uber-chatty teen guy who was taking my groceries out to my Jeep, I spotted a dime on the pavement outside the store and practically dove over the cart and knocked out a little old lady to get it.

A dime, people.

I’ve spent far too much time around my wife.

I was in Staples a couple of weeks ago, buying a queer little notebook I could carry around in my back pocket and make scribbles in when I get ideas for things to write about. [Note: I scribbled the scribbles that I’m now using for this entry back when I bought the notebook, so you get an idea of just how action-packed my life has been over the last couple of days] I have a tendency to have really funny things happen to me, then forget to write about them when it comes time to set my pen to paper to feed your need.

So I was standing in line, waiting patiently behind some woman who was buying enough stuff to furnish a small country with office supplies, when this kid from the spud’s school walked up to the counter. He was a large boy, and was walking with a peculiar twisting gait. Sort of a goose-stepping, as though he were trying to carry an egg with his ass. He stepped slowly up to the counter.

“Can you tell me where the bathroom is?” he asked quietly, speaking to the girl behind the counter.

“It’s back there,” she said, pointing, “in that corner.”

He turned slowly, and began walking with his strange pinching shamble toward the corner to which she’d she pointed. He muttered something under his breath as he left.

“What did he say?” the girl behind the counter asked, watching him make his way toward the back of the store.

“I think he said ‘I already looked back there’,” I offered helpfully.

“I guess he needs to look a little harder,” the clerk said, smiling.

“He looked like he was busy concentrating on something else,” the woman in front of me said, and we all laughed.

Damn. I hate it when my entries suck this much.