Writing THE END

Yesterday I typed THE END to ALMOST A DEAD MAN.

348 pages.

Then spell check.

Only seven typos

Then I hit search for God. Only seventeen times. No bad for an atheist.

I first wrote it in Ireland in 1997. I showed it to Shannon who read it in a single night. I sent the manuscript to a few publishers and then left the USA for Thailand where I wrote three more novels sending them overseas to the US. Nothing, but I kept writing.

I rewrote ALMOST A DEAD MAN in 2016, but was too broke to send it anywhere.

When my diamond job ended in Christmas I decided to clean up THE 2016 version. Two and a half months

348 pages

Now the hard part

Finding and agent or publisher

Next a synopsis and outline and talk about it all the time

Along with everything else

I'm hoping to fly to Bangkok and Hong Kong next month.

I start selling jewelry in Montauk this weekend.

It was a long wintah.

Mary Heaton Vorse reportedly said, "The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Today

Recovering from post partem THE END. I woke this morning, thinking, "Are you mad?"

A novel about pimps and whores with XXX sex scenes, BDSM, and violence and love and redemption and a woman's revenge against man, and fairy tales.

Off the food stamps to see if I can get more.

I had told them months ago that I was homeless, because I feel homeless. Insecure. Adrift. Apart. Like always do I'm comfortable that way.

Wish me luck.

Since the jewelry store in Montauk closed for the winter I've been revising a novel I wrote in 1997

Opening paragraphs of ALMOST A DEAD MAN

Hamburg 192

The scurry of claws across the filthy floor startled the woman on the battered chair and she lifted her black stiletto heels in horror. Rats were the least of her problems. Over the phone her lover had suggested a nocturnal rendezvous on Kaiserkai. No one came to Hamburg’s harbor at night. The woman had driven down to the warehouse district alone for rough sex with her Willi. Instead two men had been waiting on the unlit dock and dragged her into an abandoned warehouse. Now in a damp basement she pleaded, “Please let me go, I haven’t done anything wrong?”

"Nothing wrong?” The black man in the spotless jogging suit circled the chair. Aviator sunglasses hid his eyes. He swatted the dusty 40-watt bulb dangling from the rafter, then tapped the woman’s gaunt face.

“Are you a saint?”

“No, I am far from a saint.” The expensive wig flopped onto a folded lap.

"Saints are only saints, because they are dead. You on the other hand are alive, because you are a sinner."

Cali is still with us.

Willa Cather’s WHEN I KNEW CRANE

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http://www.online-literature.com/willa-cather/4311/...

An amazing passage from Willa Cather’s WHEN I KNEW CRANE about he meeting him several times in Omaha 1894.

Men will sometimes reveal themselves to children, or to people whom they think never to see again, more completely than they ever do to their confreres. From the wise we hold back alike our folly and our wisdom, and for the recipients of our deeper confidences we seldom select our equals. The soul has no message for the friends with whom we dine every week. It is silenced by custom and convention, and we play only in the shallows. It selects its listeners willfully, and seemingly delights to waste its best upon the chance wayfarer who meets us in the highway at a fated hour. There are moments too, when the tides run high or very low, when self-revelation is necessary to every man, if it be only to his valet or his gardener. At such a moment, I was with Mr. Crane.

The hope for revelation came unexpectedly enough. It was on the last night he spent in Lincoln. I had come back from the theatre and was in the Journal office writing a notice of the play. It was eleven o’clock when Crane came in. He had expected his money to arrive on the night mail and it had not done so, and he was out of sorts and deeply despondent. He sat down on the ledge of the open window that faced on the street, and when I had finished my notice I went over and took a chair beside him. Quite without invitation on my part, Crane began to talk, began to curse his trade from the first throb of creative desire in a boy to the finished work of the master. The night was oppressively warm; one of those dry winds that are the curse of that country was blowing up from Kansas. The white, western moonlight threw sharp, blue shadows below us. The streets were silent at that hour, and we could hear the gurgle of the fountain in the Post Office square across the street, and the twang of banjos from the lower verandah of the Hotel Lincoln, where the colored waiters were serenading the guests. The drop lights in the office were dull under their green shades, and the telegraph sounder clicked faintly in the next room. In all his long tirade, Crane never raised his voice; he spoke slowly and monotonously and even calmly, but I have never known so bitter a heart in any man as he revealed to me that night. It was an arraignment of the wages of life, an invocation to the ministers of hate.

ps I was there 100%. Great writing is not a mini-series.

To read WHEN I KNEW CRANE go to this URL

http://www.online-literature.com/willa-cather/4311/

On Writing - Patrick Dennis

“I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind.” - Patrick Dennis, author of AUNTIE MAME.