I have been drinking caffeine laced beer

Remember when I was going to start updating more often – I think I said once a week? Wasn’t that funny? I mean, did anyone who read that actually say, “Yes, I’m sure he’ll update all the time, now.”

Big deal. So I lied to you. I lie to people all the time. Just last week I told my own mother I was dying and needed $20 for an operation. Granted, she called my bluff, as I had already promised to be dead by now, due to a brain tumor I had developed in the middle of the winter, but that’s neither here nor there. On a related note, did you ever notice that there is a distinct lack of people who are begging in the streets because they or a loved one needs an operation? I mean, to watch a movie from the 1930s, it appears the streets used to be lousy with kids trying to put together enough money to pay for their mother’s “operation.” Probably because these days anything more complicated than a root canal comes with a prices tag higher than your average suburban home, so it is even less likely that young Davey will pick up enough spare change to cover it. I’m guessing most people just say, “Fuck it – who doesn’t have $50k worth of credit card debt?” But I digress.

Isn’t that a great word? Digress? Digress, digress, digress. I’m not even sure I know what it means, but it sure sounds nice.

In case you are wondering, and I know you are, I have moved on to the marketing/continual revision stage of my book. I have had a few people proof-read, a few more still have it out and I am still going over it (and I’m still taking volunteers), but I have it where I feel comfortable starting to submit it to literary agencies. Currently it is visiting an agency with offices in San Francisco and New York. I’ll keep you all updated on how things go.

This year I’m going to write a novel. I’ve written two before, but I was never happy with either. The first one I wrote when I was 21 and to re-read it now is painful. It causes actual physical discomfort to those who read it. Luckily, all copies but one are either under my control or have been destroyed. One remains unaccounted for – it was last seen in the hands of a friend whom I mysteriously stopped speaking with a few years later.

The second novel was better, but still not good enough to even revise. If I ever get super-duper fame from being an author and writing is what I do all the time, maybe then I’ll revise it, but I would be a larger undertaking than just writing a new novel. It has some good stuff, though, unlike the first book which was so bad I think even my copies need to be destroyed for fear that that terrible writing would infect other people in the house and doom my children to a life of preachy, terrible writing.

I did actually have about 20,000 words of a third novel which I liked, but it was lost somewhere along the line. Not lost like I stopped writing and couldn’t get going again, but lost like a computer ate it or something (yes, I was a good one for not backing things up – I’m over that now). Somewhere in my zillion pages of writing is about the first 10,000 words of that book in hard copy, so if I can ever get motivated to dig through all the boxes, maybe I can find it. What I’d really like to do it rewrite that story, which involves a drunk painter – no, not an artist, a house painter – and a war against something or other – yes, an actual war in the suburbs. Kind of a class war type of thing, but not serious at all, only serious. At one point the protagonist and his protégé are attacked by a rival painting crew who fire a squirrel gun into their van – not a squirrel gun like a gun you might use on squirrels, but a gun that fires actual squirrels. Live ones. Typical stuff, really.

Anyway, this blog entry is now beginning to resemble all other blog entries in the world and I am treading dangerously close to drifting into a zone where I tell you about what kind of sandwhich I had for lunch (peanut butter and jelly), so I’ll just go now. If you are nice to me, next time I’ll post some portion of the book that hasn’t made it up yet.