Writers on Steroids

Editor's note: this was organically published in June, 2005.

“Ok,” I said to the Senate Committee investigating Writers On Steroids in Room 2143 of the grand facade off Bluejay Way. They stared at me with jaundiced eyes. They shuffled paper. An old tottering fool of a Grand Inquisitor pounded his gavel.

I remembered him from the McCarthy Era and feared the worst.

“You are accused of taking steroids to enhance your writing performance. We have evidence from editors, hacks and wan-ta-na-bees that you and perhaps thousands of your ilk slaving away like drones in the dungeons of mediocrity, dreams, illusions and journalistic heaven on word machines have boosted your word output through the use of banned, I repeat, banned substances. Say it isn’t so, say it’s all a lie, a misconception, hearsay. What say you?”

I took a drink of pure spring water from mysterious unfiltered Alaskan lakes. A naked trout started dancing on the table in front of me and I laughed.

“Ha, you're joking aren't you?” I stuttered, spitting water all over the microphone. It shorted out and I was forced to use my voice minus amplification.

“Of course I sue steroids, why, in fact, in truth of fact and fiction I sear the meat on your grill with my defamatory remarks. The pills are beautiful and come in a variety of colors, like rainbows. They open doors of perception with wonder, shock and awe. I have irrefutable evidence that your committee grooved the approval of these pharmaceutical delights thanks to the huge financial contribution by multinational drug companies to keep you in office. It's well known this country, let alone sports “heroes” have been programmed to ingest chemicals.”

I jumped on the table with the naked trout and started yelling. “We are ALL filled with chemicals you idiots. It's the American way of life. It's the new mantra, Run, Read, Write with Greater Efficiency and Prose the Poem with diligence and fortitude using Elements of Style. It’s the style baby, the demolition charge under your hat, Jack.”

“Order, order,” yelled a bailiff approaching me with caution, mace and industrial strength handcuffs. “Down boy!” They shackled me. The Grand Inquisitor handed down my sentence. It had a noun, verb and object.

“Take the prisoner to Cuba and give him an orange jump suit. Interrogate him and deprive him of his writes.”

I screamed in anguish as they dragged me past a pharmacy filled with promise, hope and salvation. “You haven’t heard the last word from me. Where’s my trout?”

Metta.

A Warung story

Greetings,

He started this story on a Saturday morning. He was somewhere between dawn and noon. 

He sat on a thick green pillow at a Sasak warung, a small simple eatery. He'd found this place a couple of days earlier and liked it because it was quiet. The entire Air island was quiet. Maybe 1,000 residents. 

It was one of three islands off the coast of Lombok in Indonesia. It was called Gili Air. It was quiet. 

The bamboo pavilion where he enjoyed thick black coffee, hand rolled Drum cigarettes and serenity faced the ocean or maybe it was the sea or perhaps the Straits. Either one it was big and blue. Across the water was the island of Lombok. On this particular day Rinjani, the volcano at 3,500 meters was obscured by low grey and high white clouds.

He read "The Elephant Vanishes," a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami. 

One of the main reasons he liked sitting here was because it was next to a small cemetery. 

Ten or twelve small plots, a few eroded headstones with scattered grey and coral borders in a grove of small trees. Weeds and small pieces of trash.

He always found cemetaries when he roamed around the planet. Peaceful places where he learned and observed customs, habits, histories. Air. Bursa, Turkey, Grazalema, Spain to remember three.

How the small Spanish village in the Sierras used crypts near the Catholic church. How they were decorated with plastic flowers. How empty crypts held cleaning materials, rags, bricks and trowels.

How the grazing white and grey sheep near the Catholic Cemetario filled rising green fields. There was a beautiful single palm tree in the courtyard. Behind iron gates lay silent white crypts decorated with real and plastic flowers, names, dates and old faded curling black and white photographs of the dead where a procession of men laid a 40-year old friend of theirs to rest last week. 

They slid his wooden casket into a long stone cold cement cavity, blessed themselves and returned to the village for sherry and conversation full of memories speaking about the man who died alone with no wife or children and above the crypts were gray cliffs and peaks in heavily wooded forests and the sky was a watercolor in progress as white, grey, orange and blue colors hurtled on an east wind. Where families of Egyptian vultures expanded their wings on thermals. 

After this vision he returned to Spanish crypts.

He manipulated his camera obscura tool in fast fading light making images of interments with names and flowers, passages of memory in love and sadness, chiseled history and their pueblo connection. He imaged down cavities and shells of carefully constructed rectangular rows of empty passages. 

They were invisible stories waiting to be told. Stories of desire, conflict, ambiguities, metaphors, and silence. Waiting for air to carry them to the listening faithful. They were silent stories, silent night of the pious, silent in their collective breathing. Stories inside stories. 

Metta.

Publish or perish?

Greetings,

As the saying goes, if you want something done write you gotta do it yourself.

When it comes to publishing your book you have a choice in the game. Roll the dice!

Follow the instructions in traditional how-to-market books and articles or self publish.

"In 2008, nearly 480,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from close to 375,000 in 2007, according to the industry tracker Bowker. The company attributed a significant proportion of that rise to an increase in the number of print-on-demand books."

Option #1. Research literary agents. Send out query letters and a one-page synopsis by snail mail. Make sure you mention it's a "simultaneous submission" so all the literary agents and secret agents and cleaning agents know other prospective purveyors of literary genius are reading your breathtaking query letter. The letter has been honed to a sharp point. 

Then you Wait. You keep writing. You read all the publishing trade mags. You keep writing. You recycle material out into the slush pile. Read and recycle rejection letters, "Thank you very much for considering our agency. We have read your query letter and synopsis with great interest. However..."

You know your epic is not a hum-drum mainstream literary creation. It does not follow a prescribed plot and narrative structure. It is an anthropological journalistic blend of scatological hubris, an amalgamation of styles. It's a jazz poem, photographic riff montage. It's a combination of poetic prose, mud, meadows and strange vivid dream landscapes.

You create it. You self-publish it. You share it.

More....

Metta.