Writers have their hearts ripped out

Since I finally figured out how to use the video camera, mainly to photograph all the wildlife in the back yard, I'm experimenting with other stuff, mainly ads for my doomed novel, The Glass Character. Maybe I'll have fun with it; maybe I won't. I like the idea of the screen beside me, and the fact these are silents means I can blather on as much as I want. I know what it is to be rejected (stomped into the ground a few hundred times?), so this scene spoke to me in particular.

A serious contender for Harold?

For that small-but-loyal band of followers and merry men/women who have been patient with my Harold-rants for the past few years, let me at last present something dizzy, sunny, fizzy and funny and fine. 

I just figured out who's going to play Harold Lloyd in the movie version of my novel, The Glass Character. (A movie version that doesn't exist yet - that lives only in my imagination. So far.) This is a game that's gone on for several years now, and until Jake Gyllenhaal beefed up a little too much, he was a front-runner, being just awfully good-looking, not to mention a very fine actor.

For a while I was transfixed by Zachary Quinto, but to be honest I wonder if he has enough movie experience, being mostly a TV guy. And he's perhaps a little too Mediterranean, though very handsome, with that movie star big head. But his innate gravitas kind of eliminates him from the running.

But listen up, something just happened. A while ago I read an interview with Suzanne Lloyd, Harold Lloyd's granddaughter. The usual question came up: so who would play Harold in "the movie version"? (which did not exist at all then, except as an extremely abstract concept). She mentioned Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and when I quickly looked up pictures of him I thought: uh-uh. Doesn't really look like him.

I had to go away for a while. 

            

There's such a thing as a "quality", and it goes far beyond physical resemblance. In Harold's case it's a kind of mercurial energy, along with charm and boyish sweetness, but with an underlying intensity. When I started looking at clips, looking at pictures, looking at his track record, watching his movies, I started to think that this at last was a true contender.

A contender for what? A movie based on my novel? Preposterous idea, and I have been severely sniped at a few times for even daring to think of it. "Thank you very much for the opportunity to look at your 'movie-ready' manuscript. Unfortunately, this is an idea that we believe would have no mass-market appeal." Canadians love to shame each other for daring to have enthusiasm or (worse!) ambition, and believe me, I've been through the mill. 

But like in some monster picture, the dream just keeps on resurrecting itself, the Thing that Wouldn't Die. Who knows. Who knows? Could be, I think, and though I have no idea what the next step is, if there even IS one, it all has to start in my head and heart, where Harold has lived since that fateful day in 2007 when I pulled myself up to my computer and began to write.

Could be! 

Who knows? 

There's something due any day; 

I will know right away, 

Soon as it shows. 

It may come cannonballing down through the sky, 

Gleam in its eye, 

Bright as a rose! 

Who knows? 

It's only just out of reach, 

Down the block, on a beach, 

Under a tree. 

I got a feeling there's a miracle due, 

Gonna come true, 

Coming to me! 

Could it be? Yes, it could. 

Something's coming, something good, 

If I can wait! 

Something's coming, I don't know what it is, 

But it is 

Gonna be great! 

With a click, with a shock, 

Phone'll jingle, door'll knock, 

Open the latch! 

Something's coming, don't know when, but it's soon; 

Catch the moon, 

One-handed catch! 

Around the corner, 

Or whistling down the river, 

Come on, deliver 

To me! 

Will it be? Yes, it will. 

Maybe just by holding still, 

It'll be there! 

Come on, something, come on in, don't be shy, 

Meet a guy, 

Pull up a chair! 

The air is humming, 

And something great is coming! 

Who knows? 

It's only just out of reach, 

Down the block, on a beach, 

Maybe tonight . . .

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

The Glass Character: introducing Harold Lloyd!

THE GLASS CHARACTER  

A novel by Margaret Gunning

Published in April 2014 by Thistledown Press

I would like to introduce you to my third novel, The Glass Character, a story of obsessive love and ruthless ambition set in the heady days of the Jazz Age in the 1920s. This was a time when people went to the movies almost every day, living vicariously through their heroes: Valentino, Garbo, Fairbanks and Pickford. But comedians were the biggest draw, and broad slapstick the order of the day - with one very significant exception.

Standing beside Keaton and Chaplin in popularity and prowess was a slight, diffident man named Harold Lloyd. He hid his leading man good looks under white makeup and his trademark black-framed spectacles. Nearly 100 years later, an iconic image of Lloyd remains in the popular imagination: a tiny figure holding on for dear life to the hands of a huge clock while the Model Ts chuff away 20 stories below.

With his unique combination of brilliant comedy and shy good looks, Lloyd had as many female followers as Gilbert or Barrymore. Sixteen-year-old Muriel Ashford, desperate to escape a suffocating life under her cruel father's thumb, one day hops a bus into the unknown, the Hollywood of her dreams. Though the underside of her idealistic vision is nasty and fiercely competitive, she quickly lands extra work because of her Pickford-esque ability to smile and cry at the same time.

When her idol Harold Lloyd walks on the set, her life falls into a dizzy whirl of confusion, attraction, and furious pursuit. Muriel tries on and sheds one identity after another: bit actress, waitress in a speakeasy, "girl reporter", script writer - while Lloyd almost literally dances in and out of her desperately lonely world, alternately seducing her and pushing her away.

While researching this book, I repeatedly watched every Lloyd movie I could get my hands on. I was astonished at his subtlety, acting prowess and adeptness at the art of the graceful pratfall. His movies are gaining new popularity on DVD (surprisingly, with women sighing over him on message boards everywhere!). The stories wear well and retain their freshness because of the Glass Character's earnest good nature and valiant, sometimes desperate attempts to surmount impossible challenges.

Introduction: Why Harold Lloyd?

The Glass Character is a fictional account of a young girl’s experiences inHollywood from approximately 1921 to 1962, in which she develops a relationship with silent film comedian Harold Lloyd. Though I did extensive research in exploring the era in general and his life in particular, this story is not intended to be a biography of Lloyd. My main purpose was to communicate atmosphere: the excitement, exuberance and joy of these “high and dizzy” times.

Though I have the greatest respect for the memory of Harold Lloyd, who is in my mind one of the most charismatic performers in screen history, I did not wish to paint him as a two-dimensional figure or a saint. Though his behaviour is not always exemplary in this story, I tried to portray him as I came to believe he was: a human being of enormous complexity, phenomenal talent, and a basic midwestern decency that served him for a lifetime. This is not the Harold Lloyd, but a Harold Lloyd, a personal, fictional portrayal of a supremely gifted artist based on deep research and multiple (and very enjoyable) viewings of his remarkable films.

With his boyish good looks and appealing everyman persona, Lloyd was no less than the inventor of an entire film genre: the romantic comedy. These sample remarks from YouTube (all by women) indicate a charm and magnetism that reaches across generations:

I think he was and still is one of the most attractive men ever to walk the earth. I absolutely love him!

Each time I watch his movies I fall in love a little more.  He is sooooooofunny and the most handsome man ever!

Talented, funny, smart, creative and damn gorgeous!

I find him really attractive with his glasses on, and you can’t beat that half-shy, half-sly smile of his.

I don’t want to say it but he is in my fantasies. . . sigh.

I doubt if George Clooney could inspire such rhapsodic praise.

When I sat down to write, words often tumbled out at a fever pitch. Many of the scenes came to me out of sequence, as if I were shooting a movie. Inspiration had a timetable of its own and sometimes happened on holiday (can you believe I almost missed the Grand Canyon?). This had never happened to me before, and I had to take a few leaps of faith to believe I could ever piece it all together.

Plunging into his pictures to such depth, I experienced an immediacy, even an intimacy I had never known before. I was breathing in the gunpowder and the dust and the sweating horses and the she-loves-me/she-loves-me-not flowers and the white greasepaint. I could hear “roll ‘em” and “cut!” and “damn, we’ll have to do that again.” I was seeing that wonderful “half-shy, half-sly” smile of his in person. 

Though Lloyd’s work has been gloriously reborn through the medium of DVD, he is still too frequently seen as a bronze medallist after those two other legendary figures from the silent age: Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. It’s time to throw away useless comparisons and hierarchies (is Picasso “better” than Van Gogh? And how about Rembrandt – why does the poor fellow always come in third?), and appreciate Lloyd’s movies for what they are. He is so much more than the “everyman” of popular description. His Glass Character is a subtle, slightly surreal, heart-touchingly brave and boyish silent clown, and if you don’t watch out, he will take up residence in your heart, perhaps for good.

This is Harold Lloyd the way I see him. I hope you enjoy this story.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

What am I doing wrong?

No less a Hollywood legend than Kirk Douglas once had a pet project that didn't get off the ground.

For TEN YEARS.

He had read an obscure novel by an eccentric writer named Ken Kesey, formerly known for writing a stoner road trip story called The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This one was set in a state mental hospital, extracted black humor out of desperate circumstances, and was treated like rat poison by every major movie studio in Hollywood.

It was called One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Yes. That one.

Coming up empty again and again - movie executives were appalled at the very idea of making a comedy about mental illness - Douglas finally arm-twisted a playwright into adapting the book for the Broadway stage. He starred as the hell-raising rebel who crashes the doors of the hospital, Randall P. McMurphy. As Douglas writes in his memoir, The Ragman's Son:

"The reviews were murderous.Walter Kerr in the Herald-Tribune said, 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is such a preposterous proposition for the theatre that it could be dismissed very briefly if it weren't for the extraordinary tastelessness with which it has been conceived.' Howard Taubman of The New York Times wrote, 'Do you find the quips, pranks and wiles of the inmates of a mental hospital amusing? If you do, you should have a merry old time at One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

And so on, and so on. Do you hear the sound of a chainsaw in the background?

Not to be deterred, Douglas continued to shop the film script around, only to be told the same thing, or ignored outright.

"I crawled back home to Los Angeles like a wounded animal, defeated in my last battle to become a star on Broadway. I licked my wounds and moaned to (his wife) Anne, 'I gave New York a classic and they don't even realize it.' In between movies, I was busy taking Cuckoo's Nest to every single studio. They all turned it down."

Needless to say, the film finally got made and became a classic. No one complained about the setting and characters being in poor taste. There was an underlying compassion and tense drama just beneath the dizzy surface humor that gave it substance and humanity.

And Kirk Douglas was nowhere to be seen. The man who had pushed and pushed his pet project relentlessly for ten years until it was finally realized had been shoved aside. When it came time to assume his plum role as McMurphy, they told him he was too old. The role went to a relative unknown named Jack Nicholson.

So what am I getting at here?

I am trying to figure out where I am with my novel. It has been excruciating to pursue (or try to) what I'd really like to see happen with it. Can you guess what that might be?

The Glass Character isn't a Lloyd bio, but Harold Lloyd is its centrifugal centre. It would fly apart without him. He is the magnificent obsession who returns again and again, illuminating everything and trailing stars and comets in his wake.

It's a movie.

Let's get to it, let's stop pretending: it's an embarrassing proposition for me, a nothing little Canadian author whose books don't sell, to get a movie adapted from her story. And that's exactly what I want to do, need to do, and even believe is quite possible to do, though at this point (at THIS point!), no one else seems to agree with me.

I have no contacts in the film industry, absolutely none, and even if I did, I doubt if my communications would ever hit home or create any real interest. The idea of a Lloyd bio has been tossed around for years, far back enough that Jack Lemmon was once considered to play him (since Harold admired his brilliant combination of anxious comedy and poignant drama, with leading man looks thrown in for good measure).

So I am left with an embarrassed feeling. Why embarrassed? Because everyone else is embarrassed. For me. Part of it might be my Canadian-ness, that deeply-ingrained feeling that we are not ever, ever, EVER supposed to aggressively promote ourselves. It's somehow shameful to call attention to yourself like that. So there is this feeling of, OK, Margaret, here, take your medication now and take your dream home and put it to bed for good.

I feel this deep humiliation in myself, because it is such a ludicrous, almost insane idea. At the same time, I am absolutely certain it could happen and even would happen in the right hands. But I have not found those hands yet, in spite of what seems like truckloads of books sent out and hundreds of dollars of postage paid, all in the name of total futility. They just appear to fall into an abyss, proving I never should have called attention to myself to begin with.

I am an embarrassment, that woman who won't go away, who seems to think she has something here. She won't stop bugging me so I'll ignore her, maybe after some initial interest (leaving me to wonder: just what did I do wrong? Did I care too much? Did I not show that I cared enough? Am I just a natural-born, dyed-in-the-wool failure?)

Such is my reality, on some days, but I am not even supposed to say so.

This will not happen, reality tells me I am doomed and being silly and embarrassing myself to even want it. And yet, and yet. I know it could be realized. Nothing will kill that hope, though God knows I have tried to kill it a million times.

I try to comfort myself with Kirk Douglas' ten years of slogging to get a movie made that he couldn't star in, because by the time he got someone to pay attention to him, he was "too old". Unfortunately I will be too DEAD by then, in which case it  truly will be too late.

When this world began
It was Heaven's plan
There should be a girl for ev'ry single man.
To my great regret 
Someone has upset
Heaven's pretty program for we've never met.
I'm clutching at straws, just because
I may meet him yet.

Somebody loves me, I wonder who,
I wonder who he can be.
Somebody loves me, I wish I knew,
Who can he be worries me.
For ev'ry boy who passes me I shout, "Hey, maybe
You were meant to be my loving baby. "
Somebody loves me, I wonder who,
Maybe it's you.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

The girl on the clock: Harold is everywhere

One of the strangest manifestations of the iconic Harold Lloyd clock-dangling scene: Sofia Vergara selling "eesy, greesy, be-yood-iful" Cover Girl makeup.

When this ad first came out, I thought I was going completely crazy. I was seeing Harold Lloyd everywhere. It was a Sign. Now I just think I was going completely crazy.

But we had a nice run, Harold - didn't we?

Fakebook: when you can no longer fake it

Actual Facebook post from this morning. Name withheld for my sake, not theirs.

Well this is just dandy! I went to sleep yesterday with 2,012 likes on my author page and now I wake up to find I only have 1,960, on the reason that the likes from inactive accounts have been deleted. This is so unfair! If someone liked my author page, that means they liked me and/or my writing. If they died, changed their names or have simply deleted their accounts, that doesn't mean they've stopped liking me or my books. I've contacted Facebook about it and am anxious for a reply. I don't know if any of you have had this unpleasant surprise, but I strongly encourage you to protest against this policy. It's rude and unfair for everyone.

Well. Let me tell you right now, I am so inundated with thousands of "likes" that I didn't even NOTICE a couple of them had been dropped from my author page for some crass reason that is beyond my control (such as dying: what a feeble excuse for no longer liking my work!). As a matter of fact, today's posts on Facebook all seem to be along these lines. They're either hot-air-style self-promotion or humble "admissions" of receiving a major literary award (which they don't deserve, of course, but here's the name of the book anyway). People told me FB would be a great way to promote my book, but so far it's pretty much of a bust.

I'm at the point of surrender. Not willingly, not gladly, though there is a certain amount of relief involved. Trying to make a go of being published, even trying to break even and not end up (humiliatingly) in the hole is, for reasons that forever elude me, beyond my grasp.

I got to the party late, you see. Everyone already knows each other, so when a blank space walks into the room, no one sees it. Or so it has always seemed.

I have no regret whatsoever about writing the novel. It was exhilarating, and proved I COULD write again, book-length, after what amounted to wholesale spiritual and physical collapse. Then there was the thrill of getting it published, which I honestly thought would never happen. But oh the frustrations. A new FB friend recently asked me if the Lloyd family liked my book. LIKED my book? I don't know how many copies I sent them, and the silence was deafening. Such people receive stacks of books from would-be would be's, and they never get to them. I'm not saying they're not busy. They are. But the total lack of acknowledgement, the sense that another $20 or $30 (depending on postage) has been thrown into the Grand Canyon is beyond disheartening. This is a published-copy form of the infamous slush pile, a phenomenon which never goes away and which makes writers want to open a vein.

There have been heartbreaking moments of hope, as when Rich Correll phoned me from Los Angeles out of the blue, to tell me he loved my samples and wanted to see more. But suddenly, for no reason I can fathom, he stopped answering my phone calls and emails, and would not even tell me if he received his copy. I was left hanging, which to me is far worse than being told to go take a flying leap at the moon.  The only answer I received from the 25 or 30 I sent out (some to absurd places I'm too embarrassed to mention) was from Stephen Fry - his assistant, who thanked me and assured me he'd never get around to reading it. But it was acknowledgement. I exist. Whoopee!

So if you can't stand this particular form of heat, just get out of the kitchen. But it does make me wonder what awful deficiency in me (for others DO succeed, like the Likes Lady above) leads to this sort of failure over and over and over again, when I am so often told by readers how much they enjoy my work.

But I've never made it to 2,012 likes. Maybe that's the problem. I don't often get more than 12 likes. People just don't like me. 

But maybe it's because they're dead.

(p. s. This is a vastly rewritten version of a post that was so angry and bitter and devastated, I finally decided - even though nobody is going to read it anyway - that I just can't put out that kind of energy.)

"You had me at hello"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Embrace failure? Go ahead and try

Every once in a while, somebody asks me something about my most recent novel, The Glass Character. In its most blatant and perhaps rudest form, it goes something like this. "So. Just how many dollars do you make per copy sold, and how much does that add up to over, say, a year? How much do you earn per annum?"

Maybe the person is thinking about writing a book. Perhaps they will sell millions of copies and become immensely rich. In every case, I have "earned" in the minuses, so I am not sure what to say to these people to avoid utterly humiliating myself.

How can you possibly earn in the minuses? I'm still trying to figure that out. It must be a whole new definition of failure, which is something that we are (of course!) supposed to wholeheartedly embrace. 

And if I share this lovely fact with some other writer, what I generally get is some version of, "Oh. That's never happened to me."
As  I write this, I can feel an avalanche of advice coming on from writers who, unlike me, know how to do this.  I once asked one simple question,I think about how you get your books into Chapters/Indigo stores, and got THOUSANDS of words of "advice" on every conceivable aspect of writing and publishing. 

I thought - and in this situation, anything I think is apparently wrong - isn't this just a little bit of overkill? Why is this person treating a third-time novelist like a complete novice, and expecting nothing but gratitude?  Here's what you "should" be doing, and here's what you "should" be doing, etc. etc. etc. (because you're obviously doing it wrong). I realize now that this was an extreme example of gratuitous advice, but what irks me about this kind of situation is the utter lack of understanding that this could be anything but a great and even selfless generosity.

When am I going to smarten up, and either "win" at this godawful game or go home? Right now I would rather have my fingernails pulled out than try to publish again. It's the godawful isolation, the loneliness and the sense of being ineffectual, while everyone else skips around with royalty cheques in hand. By the way, what does a "minus" cheque look like anyway? Is it sort of like a black hole in space? 

I am sick of being chipper about the book. It has now been out for a year (and this is kind of like unwrapping the bandages from my wrists, if you know what I mean) and have had no reviews, NONE, except for one sort-of review in a online magazine from Winnipeg that doesn't strike me as very literary. It was written by a 30-year-old standup comedian who, by his own admission (in a published article in the Globe and Mail, no less) admits he's unambitious, unemployed, a general layabout, and feels the world owes him a living. He also said he was only writing the piece for the cheque.

But what's even more interesting is the fact that he made exactly the same amount as me - only my total is in the minuses! As with my other two novels, I bombed so badly, sold so few copies that I ended up in the hole. Am I okay with this? You tell me.

I don't  know what happened, because my first two novels got nearly universally glowing reviews, even in publications in the U. S. which had never been sent a copy. The Calgary and Edmonton papers interviewed me, I got a full-page spread in the Montreal Gazette (complete with full-color author photo!), and the Vancouver Sun said I should be a contender for the Leacock Award. Both my hometown papers interviewed me at length and put out big spreads. The second book was favorably compared in the Globe and Mail to the work of Nobel-winner Alice Munro and Oprah pick Anne-Marie MacDonald.

My first publisher, whom I very much enjoyed working with, phoned me breathlessly to say, "Margaret, it's a miracle. We've never had so many reviews for a novel, even in places we didn't send copies to, and they're all positive. We can't believe it!" A miracle being a supernatural event not caused by human beings. Then she went on to say that my sales were worse than any book they had ever published before.

What happened? You tell me. Maybe I'm just too old and don't know what I am  doing. An act of love has become an act of poorly-executed, even disastrous commerce. 

I don't know how to invite myself to writers' events and seem to be getting no help from anyone. It seems as if you have to know some sort of bizarre secret handshake, like a Freemason. This did not happen before. They asked me. But because it got no reviews, my book does not seem to exist. It does not exist because it got no reviews. And so on. Begging is undignified and destroys my morale. Not having my emails answered is worse, giving me the impression that I don't exist, or, at least, I don't exist in their minds (or they would rather I didn't exist). 

I've sent out multiple copies of the novel to people whom I thought might be interested. I might as well have dropped them into the fucking Grand Canyon. The waste of money, the hundreds of wasted dollars isn't the half of it: it's the waste of hope, the wasted years of creative effort, out the window. If a story doesn't get told, it ain't a story. Isn't that true?

But it's your fault, Margaret. Don't you ever forget that you bungled it in some mysterious way that everyone else is able to avoid. And you're not supposed to "learn" this, but just know.

I no longer care about what will happen because no one will see this anyway. They never do. I am tired of the whole goddamn Facebook popularity contest and how many "likes" I get, all the simpering profile pictures with hair gently streaming in the artificial wind, and the phony modesty, feeling so "humbled" by winning a major award, followed by the usual "oohs" and "ahhhs" of the sycophantic Greek chorus who secretly want to kill them with envy. Fuck it. 

One day well over a year ago I got a phone call from Rich Correll in L. A. saying he was very interested in the book. This was more than a year after I sent some excerpts to an address I wasn't sure was valid. Rich Correll was like a second son to Harold Lloyd, almost one of the family, and was his filmographer and is in every documentary about him.

When we talked, he told me he thought a feature film about Harold's life was long overdue. My God, this was what I had been thinking about from the start, and now a major Hollywood director agreed with me! Could it be he was seeing potential in my work? An adaptation? A SOMETHING?

I wasn't just excited, I was walking on the ceiling! How could this BE? How could Rich Correll be interested in my work? It was like getting a phone call from Jesus. Well, it can't be, folks, because he stopped answering my emails some time ago, and like an idiot I don't know why. In fact, to this day I don't even know if he got his complimentary copy because I haven't heard from him. Like an even worse idiot, I phoned him and left a message last week. He didn't call me back. It was last-ditch and I feel vaguely ashamed that I did it, but Jesus, Rich Correll! I wrote a whole post on him and about how I felt he might be the key to blowing this novel out of the backwater it's stuck in. I just never get the message, do I? Do I? My stubbornness, my refusal to give up is pathological, even poisonous. Certainly it is not a sign of health, as it nets me exactly nothing.

Losing interest is just fine. I am not referring to losing interest. I am referring to having a blank intractible silence open up where the interest used to be, so that I automatically fill it in with what might be the truth, in a hundred different poisonous ways.

I need information to get me out of this. "Your book sucks, it's offensive, it's inaccurate, I hate how you portrayed Harold, (or, worst of all) it bored the piss out of me and I hate you for writing it" would be better than this. One three-word email: "I've lost interest." ANYTHING would be better than this. For, like my book, now I don't exist either, or I am not deemed worthy of a reply. 

I can't deal with it. Help me here. But no. I know it already, I know what no answer means.

Now I will tell you something really stupid, or at least now I know it's stupid. I used to worry this book might bother someone in the Lloyd family, who were badly burned by an insensitive and poorly-written thing Richard Schickel wrote to fulfill a contractual obligation. So I let them know I was writing a novel about him (though I never quite got past the front desk). I didn't do it to avoid a lawsuit, which wouldn't happen anyway. I didn't do it to avoid "stepping on anyone's toes". I didn't do it so I "wouldn't get in trouble". I did it because I love Harold Lloyd and I care what his family thinks about any book written about him. 

But as with everything else, I'm not on the radar. Oh. Did somebody say something? Sorry, no, I must be mistaken.

Why is it I am ALWAYS dumped on my head? What is it I'm doing so wrong? Is the book really weak, or even a piece of shit? Once in a while I think, well, what else could it be? But I surely didn't think that at the time. God, at the time it was nothing short of a rebirth. I didn't think I'd ever write again, and I was so disabled it was unlikely I'd even want to try.

But that is a whole 'nother story, and if you think THIS one is hard to tell, that one is plain impossible.

Oh, I realize I shouldn't even be writing this, as it's taboo to say what you really think, but I am at the point that the loneliness and isolation are killing me and I wonder if I care any more who (if anyone) sees this. I wanted this so badly for so long. I am being punished by the gods, it seems. And if you think this is bad, you should see the paragraphs I just deleted. 

I read a piece in the Globe and Mail by Russell Smith who said writers should not blame themselves for a huge shift in the global economy. Maybe. But some authors, as others point out ceaselessly, are doing just fine, which is I guess supposed to make me feel better.

I just get tired, is all, of being entertaining, which nets me exactly twelve readers anyway, sometimes. Or not. What a futile enterprise this all is! And it has gone on for seven years, from the first moment the idea hit me like a brick on the head. Harold Lloyd - I would write about Harold Lloyd!

I will not do this to myself ever again, no matter how badly I want to, as it's obviously too late for Harold after less than a year. My tiny window of opportunity has already slammed shut, and guess who is responsible. 

I loved him, I did this for love, I still love him, and the silence (no doubt mysteriously caused by me) is bloody deafening. And by the way, I am NOT saying, "Oh, I wrote such a crappy book that everyone is ignoring it". I still think it's the best thing I have written or am likely to write, and it far surpasses the first two in complexity of story line and characters. Though I also realize that there may be no one else on earth who thinks so.

We're supposed to embrace failure. Right. I have embraced it three times, and all it has done is publicly humiliate me and kick me in the head. What is worse, I don't dare speak of it to anyone, when all I really need is a human being who will listen to me. No advice, no corrections, no "gee, that never happened to me".  All I know how to do is be a writer, but no one told me there was an imperative to be a "successful" writer (i. e. move copies). Publishing is a business, it's there to produce and sell books, and not only is there nothing wrong with that, I think it's absolutely great. Authors couldn't exist without it. But it is becoming increasingly obvious that for me, it was not meant to be. About all I can do to deal with this feeling is try to walk away from it and do something else. Sometimes, it almost works.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA