I saw him again last night

I saw him again last night

And you know that I shouldn't

To string me along's just not right

If he couldn't he wouldn't

But what can I do, I'm lonely too

And it makes me feel so good to know

That he'll never leave me

I'm in way over my head

Now I  think that he loves me

Because that's what he said

Though he never thinks of me

But what can I do, I'm lonely too

And it makes me feel so good to know

He'll never leave me

Every time I see that boy

You know I wanna lay down and die

But I really need that boy

Oh I'm livin' a lie

It makes me wanna cry

I saw him again last night

And you know that I shouldn't

To string me along's just not right

If he couldn't he wouldn't

But what can I do, I'm lonely too

And it makes me feel so good to know

 That he'll never leave me

The Glass Character: in person!

Perhaps I should explain.

Almost every author wants their novel made into a movie. It stands to reason. That way, you might earn more than the $1200.00 the average writer makes for their first book.

My current book, The Glass Character, this magnificent horse I'm trotting out (ahem!), this-here project or product or whatever-it-is, is all about the life and times of silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd.

Harold Lloyd was a looker. If he hadn't been a legendary comedian, he might have been a leading man. He had that wonderful jaw, the nicely-shaped (and big) head, the fine eyes that telegraphed emotion, not to mention intelligence. And a direct line to your heart.

So, I've been looking around for actors to play him in "the movie". The movie that will inevitably be made once this thing hits the stands! The fact that this thing is nowhere near hitting anything like a stand does not deter me. (Well, actually, it does, but I've learned to proceed anyway: I'll have to re-run the e.e. cummings quote about that.)

First it was Zachary Quinto, who did a fine job playing Spock in a remake of Star Trek. He too has the handsome jaw, and beautiful eyes and a heart-melting smile.

But he's a little too - I don't know. Ethnic? He'd sure need an eyebrow-pluck. Then I got onto Jake Gyllenhaal.

He was a bit of a hard sell at first - to me, I mean. I saw him in Brokeback Mountain and thought, what a brat, he knows exactly how gorgeous he is. He also had a renegade quality about him, a wild card feeling, almost as if he's an undiagnosed bipolar (as is half of Hollywood, these days). And just a touch of androgyny: not as much as that wretched sooty-eyed Robert Pattinson, whom I don't like at all, but a touch - and a seductive way of eyeballing the camera.

So. . .

Then I started seeking out photos to see if I could get a match. It was fairly easy, and in some cases (those astonishing tux photos!) eerily close. They could be brothers. They both have that three-cornered vulpine smile, and eyes that you're never quite sure of - there's something behind them, but whatever it is, he ain't talking.

So could Jake play Harold? Call his agent, right now! The movie hasn't been cast yet -well, the screenplay, y'see there's a little problem there, too, in that it hasn't been written yet. And the novel, well. . .

It at least exists on paper. And it's burning a hole in my heart. I have huge dreams for this thing. It's called The Glass Character. Directed by Martin Scorsese. (Just because he's my favorite.) And starring. . . Jake Gyllenhaal, Harold Lloyd's mysterious twin.

Do you call that thing a book?

I can't name a favorite Harold Lloyd movie. Like children or grandchildren, they're all special to me in their own way. But there is one in which Harold plays a character who is very close to my heart.

I watched Girl Shy again last night. I don't know what it is about this man: he was magical. Tender and fierce, brilliant and adorably clueless. He plays a tailor's assistant in a small town, a meek loner who can't even speak because of a debilitating stutter. By chance, he meets and wins the love of a beautiful rich girl with his sincerity and pure heart. But he has only one chance to make himself worthy of her: to become rich and famous as the author of a ludicrous guide to romance called The Secret of Making Love.

After being laughed and jeered out of the publisher's office, he does the only thing possible: sacrifices his own heart so that she will be spared the indignity of loving a pennyless loser. So he drives her away. He drives her away not just by taunting her, but by laughing at the very idea that they were ever in love. It is Lloyd's Pagliacci moment, the time when he must don the motley, play the clown, and break her heart for her own good. It is excruciating to watch, and one of those moments when Lloyd's extraordinary ability as an actor takes your breath away.

But the scene that really tears my heart out (can you guess why?) is that awful moment in the publisher's office, when he is briefly hopeful, then completely shattered. Social humiliation plays a large part in Harold Lloyd's universe, and he has an uncomfortable way of pulling his audience close and asking, "Has this ever happened to you?".

There is something in his eyes - his stunned, vulnerable, devastated eyes - the bottom suddenly dropping out of his world with a sickening gut-lurch, not because he won't be famous, but because he knows he will have to cut his girl loose, it's the only way to be fair to her - it's, what is it anyway? It's hard to watch, and the tension builds almost unbearably until the time when we can mercifully laugh again.

This is not mere comedy, folks, this is something else. This isn't the soppy melodrama of Chaplin or the can't-win fatalism of Keaton. Lloyd is a hopeful loser. And we so want him to win, we need him to win, for if we leave him in that terrible sinking vortex of failed dreams, we'll be reminded of things we don't want to recall.

But as always (and as in Lloyd's real life), Fate intervenes. In his darkest hour, tragedy is flipped over and transformed into a kind of acerbic comedy: the publisher suddenly decides to release his failed manuscript as a comic farce called The Boob's Diary. At first he rages and rails: they can't do this to me! It's undignified! Then, on reflection - and no doubt thinking of the girl - he reconsiders. . .

Ah, yes. The comprimise! (Has this ever happened to you?)

The most famous sequence in Girl Shy is the spectacular race to the church to prevent the rich girl from marrying a bigamist. I won't get into that now, as you should be watching it right this minute instead of reading about it, do you hear me? Get some Lloyd DVDs now, so you'll know what I'm talking about! If you don't, you're missing small masterpieces that tell stories that are not just humorous, but human.

The laughter in Lloyd comedies arises from an unlikely source, and it isn't just the ordinary fellow in extraordinary situations. It's from identification with a profound social dislocation. Harold so wants to belong, and doesn't, and can't, until he finally discovers, at the end of practically every movie, that there is only one person he needs to belong to. Because once he belongs to himself, you see, the girl is in the bag.

Quite possibly the most beautiful photo of Harold Lloyd EVER

What is it about you, Harold Lloyd? What's the mystery?

Part of it is, of course, the fact that you are plain gorgeous. Add to that superior acting skills and a naturally balletic/athletic grace, and you have a killer combination.

But most of all, Lloyd ("dolly" in anagram) had an indescribable charm, and a way of gently but insistently taking you on-side. His was often the humor of humiliation, something that might be hard to take from a lesser-skilled comedian. What he was saying, without coming out and saying it, was, "Sometimes life is embarrassing. Sometimes we feel plain foolish. Has this ever happened to you? Like this. Let me show you."

And he'd show you, and you'd groan and shake your head, seeing yourself, and you'd laugh. And laugh.

The best part, though, is the way he always won in the end. Some critics have misunderstood Lloyd (hell, most critics have misunderstood Lloyd, especially several decades after his films stopped being shown in about 1940), calling him a "go-getter", and explaining his waning popularity in the '30s by saying that his style of go-getting had got up and gone.

It wasn't that way at all. If Lloyd was driven by anything, it was romantic yearning. In fact, the few critics who did understand him have always insisted that he single-handedly invented the genre of romantic comedy.

In his most famous movie, Safety Last! (in which he scales that skyscraper and dangles off the hands of a huge clock), his task is anything but a foolish daredevil stunt: he has to prove himself to his fiancee, the peony-sweet Mildred Davis. Always there's that struggle to prove his worthiness, to put his personal anxieties aside for the sake of a higher purpose (and what purpose could be higher than love?).

In Girl Shy, when his "how to romance women" manuscript is laughed and jeered out of the publisher's office, he feels like such a failure that he's purposely nasty to the woman he adores, cutting her loose from a loser at the expense of his own heart.

My God! That's the most romantic thing I've ever seen!

Yes, and there's more. That race to the church at the end of Girl Shy: it's a flat-out epic, the shy, stuttering, failed writer galloping through hell-fire to prevent his (already spurned, but still adored) inamorata from marrying a callous bigamist. This sequence, one of the finest in movie history, has to be seen to be believed, and it's obvious he's doing most of the stunts himself, working without a net in the typical Harold Lloyd way.

Lloyd didn't like heights, and I don't know how well he liked thrills, but he seemed to need to seek them. Testing, testing himself all the time. Against what, we don't know. When I researched The Glass Character, my novel about Lloyd and his times, I discovered a complicated man who seemed simple, who maybe even thought of himself as simple. His intelligence was subtle, mercurial, and worked at light-speed. It's that canny look in his eyes, friendly, yet in some way sizing everything up. As he got older, that look deepened. The charming old gent was still fierce inside, still looking for a duel somewhere, maybe not so much to win as to prove to himself that he still had it.

Harold's nickname was Speedy. He liked it when people called him that. It's a boy's name, isn't it? - not the kind of nickname a middle-aged man might choose. Did the name choose him, I wonder - or was it Foxy, his charming, twinkly old Dad, a man who could sell snake-oil to an anaconda?

When he finally had to let go of an acting career that had become his life's obsession, Lloyd had to change gears quite dramatically, finally taking up a dizzy array of hobbies and athletic pursuits. What people didn't always know about him was his dedication to philanthropy. (He didn't believe in thumping his own drum.) Still, through the Shriners, he did a tremendous amount of good for children's hospitals. Especially burn units. Lloyd had been horribly burned in an explosion when he was still in his twenties. You don't forget a thing like that.

I can't say everything about Harold - can't say anything, can I? - except that I love him. The novel waits in limbo, and I don't know what, if anything, is going to happen to it. I ache to see it in print, for it's the work of my life. If it doesn't make it, I'm going to feel like Harold in that publisher's office. The look of devastation and the collapse of his dreams goes way back inside him, not just in his eyes but in his spirit, as if he has somehow, uncannily, made his soul visible. This isn't just great acting, it is a powerful actor's instinct for reaching into the psyches of his audience. What has just happened to me, dear viewers, has also happened to you, and you know it.

I really thought that when I finished writing The Glass Character, someone would get as excited about it as I was. So far the silence has been deafening. Hell, Harold's movies made more noise than this. Being ripped to pieces is easier than this indifference. I already posted about how I was literally rubber-stamped by an agent who wouldn't even waste a sheet of his stationery on me but sent me back my own letter with a stamp on the corner of it that said, "List is full".

I'm not supposed to take this personally, but it's kind of like losing an arm, and I can't let go of the obsession. Well-meaning people tell me to just enjoy the writing process and forget about all the rest. But as I've written before, it's like a concert pianist, trained over decades, being told he should be perfectly happy performing in an empty hall.

You're not supposed to fall in love like this, you're not supposed to be subsumed. It ain't professional. But it's the only way I know how to be. I caught a bad case of Harold Lloyd, and right now I've got it bad. I may never recover. Sometimes I wonder if I even want to.

Do I have to actually write something?

This is the best of times, and the worst of times, all glommed together.

Things are particularly sweet with my grandkids. For Ryan's 5th birthday, I knitted him a new blankie, his old one having been reduced to a pile of strings. Now he must transfer his attachment to a nice-looking one, which I hope he won't pull to pieces.

Caitlin's new lavendar fuzzy replaces her yellow fuzzy. She bit a big chunk out of it - no kidding, and she's 7. She wore away at the edge of it for a couple of years until it had a big semicircular bite mark on it. I begged her not to chew this one to pieces, as it cost about $45.00 to make.

NO MORE BLANKIES, I swear! Yes, I love making them, but it strikes me as silly to go on and on replacing them until they're in university or something, or getting married. "Where did the groom go?" "Oh, he lost his blankie. We'll just have to hold up the service."

In other news, things are moving along, or at least moving, maybe, in my search for a home/venue/a shred of hope on The Glass Character. I suddenly joined Facebook and feel foolish now because my "profile" was nothing but a desperate ad for the novel. I'll have to change it today if I can get the bally thing to work. I feel embarrassed, because I don't know Facebook from a hole in the ground and swore I wouldn't go there. BUT I REFUSE TO TWEET. I have a bird to do that.

I have a bird that whistles, I have a bird that sings.
I have a bird that whistles, I have a bird that sings.
But if I ain't got a contract,
Life don't mean a thing.

Just so.

Losing My Mind

Do I know anything about Dorothy Collins? No. Except that she kicks the hell out of this song. I heard Cleo Laine sing it many years ago and thought it was definitive, then heard it again this morning and collapsed into helpless tears.

You said you loved me. Or were you just being kind?

I could only write The Glass Character, which is 312 pages of unfulfilled love, because I know everything there is to know about Stephen Sondheim's paean to hopeless longing. I like the heroic, torch-song way she sings this. She just has so much voice, yet you get the sense she is only using about 3/4 of it. Oh God. I dim the lights. . .

I've lived inside that yearning, sometimes for years. I had this friend. . . he said he loved me; he was just being kind. I can't say more. I can't.

Did I somehow transfer that gut-twisting yearning to my main character, Muriel Ashford? Am I right now suffering the same anguish because nobody even wants to look at this novel, which I am sure is the best thing I will ever write?

Are you there?

Anyone?

A living dyoll

Rah, old dolly.

Words from the master

In making inquries about my Harold Lloyd novel (The Glass Character), I scraped up my nerve and sent an email to Kevin Brownlow, who is without a doubt the world's foremost authority on silent film. Not only that: he knew Harold Lloyd personally.

I was quite taken aback that he responded so quickly, and with such detailed commentary, which I can't help but share here.


Dear Margaret Gunning

I am fascinated that you are so keen on Harold Lloyd. Me too, but it’s strange how people repeat the old cliches about his being ‘mechanical’ You will love John Bengtson’s book – it tells you so much about the places in which he worked.
You are a good writer, and it was a pleasure to read your extract. I would take issue with you on one subject – did they use obscenity when they swore in those days? T E Lawrence, in his account of barrack room life THE MINT, had his book banned because he repeated the swear words, which he was finally compelled to reprint like this; ---
But in talking to scores of silent film veterans, I heard plenty of swearing, but it was all profanity – ‘Jesus Christ’ – or ‘God almighty’ - presumably because of the strong Irish Catholic tradition in Hollywood.. When they got worked up it was ‘Son of a bitch’ I notice you use both for Hal Roach – ‘Jesus, Harold! Do you want to be fucking killed?’ (Roach’s family was from Cork, by the way.) You may be right, but I would be interested to know if you have any evidence.
I noticed, when I researched a script about silent era Hollywood (never made) how many words they used that have fallen out of fashion. ‘Everything’s jake!’ ‘Twenty-three skidoo’
By the way, motion picture makeup was yellow, not white. (The cameramen hated white )
As for the money earned by the top comics, Chaplin made three comedies to Lloyd’s eleven in the 1920s, but Chaplin’s still made more money overall.
Did you know there was a film magazine publisher and producer called Wid Gunning? Are you any relation?
I have written a book about making THE THIRD GENIUS, but as the rights for the documentary have lapsed, it won’t be possible to bring the programme out on DVD with the book as I did with the Chaplin and as I planned with the Keaton book. What a shame,
I wish you the best of luck with the book.
Warmest wishes
Kevin Brownlow

Haunted, haunted (and haunted: the trifecta)

I want it to stop, but it won't. Today I found out about the winner of the Westminster Kennel Club Best in Show: a Scottish deerhound named Hickory. But that wasn't the thing that grabbed me. It was the owner's name.

Angela Lloyd.

This news came almost immediately after I watched a story on Dateline NBC about a young woman brutally murdered by a military hero gone mad. But it was her name that grabbed me:

(From the news story)

Hundreds of people filled a Belleville, Ont., funeral home Saturday afternoon as the community came together to honour Jessica Lloyd, the 27-year-old woman whose body was found on a rural road on Monday.
Before the service began, several members of the Canadian Forces entered the funeral home in uniform and wearing black armbands.
Small groups of people clustered outside the funeral home during the service, with one group of young women carrying a sign that said: "Rest in peace sweet angel."
Col. Russell Williams is facing first-degree murder charges in the death of Jessica Lloyd, 27, of Belleville, Ont.
On Friday, long lines of people had waited patiently outside the funeral home to attend the visitation for Lloyd, one of the alleged victims of Col. Russell Williams, the former commander of CFB Trenton.
Lloyd's cousin and brother both spoke at the service Saturday, and her brother paused to thank local law enforcement officials for their work on the case.

(P.S.: Less than half an hour after I posted this, I was washing dishes with the TV on in the background. A newsmagazine show I almost never watch called W5 came on, and the host announced himself: "Hi, I'm Lloyd Robertson."

Three? Well, yesterday there were two. Only.

Tell me there are no coincidences.)

A three-Lloyd day

I don't know how someone
can love across the ages
or even haunt

coz I guess in strict terms
you really are a ghost
or maybe just a friendly spirit
who's decided to come around for a while

When you came into my life,
I hardly knew
you'd be everywhere I looked:
on street signs
in magazines
on the radio
and especially on TV

like last night
with that stupid Stephen King movie
about the Pet Semetary
when the guy turned out to be named (you guessed it!)
Lloyd


and like most days, there were others too
that popped out at me from my readings
(even when I wasn't looking
but, stranger yet, even when I was)
I tried to mind my own business
but my heart had been stolen
Harold, listen
send me a signal flare:
are you really there?

I feel you
I know it's weird
I sense you like heat in the room
and if I had those night-vision glasses
I think I could even see you

because now you live fully
in that world you half-inhabited when you were here:
incandescent
surreal
full of shadow
and shine

it's said the stars
from the early screen
carried a spotlight around inside them
but the way you faced fame was different
you were just doing your job

doggedly
sometimes with grim obsession
creating someone new
who stood out from all the grotesques
just an ordinary
jaunty fellow
with a bruised heart
and unexpected courage
an ordinary soul
that people couldn't get enough of
because they saw him in the mirror

Harold, I
I don't know where to start
I tried to write about you
I tried to write a story, put you in a story
and now I don't know where it'll end
Maybe nowhere
the fate of my (usual) work

This howls within me
for I wish sometimes
I had not had this inspiration
if my story goes nowhere.

It needs to be
for if pictures can be silent,
words cannot be

and I can only make story
in words.

I don't understand this at all: Harold Lloyd synchronicity

When I started this blog some months ago, I had a sort-of theme in mind.

I wanted it to be basically an ad for my fiction, so maybe, just maybe, somebody-out-there might see it and take some sort of an interest.

I mean, somebody who might be able to help.

This didn't happen. Instead, I became more close-mouthed than ever about the subject of my latest (unpublished) novel, The Glass Character, a fictionalized account of the life and times of silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd.

You know: that Harold Lloyd. The ordinary fellow, looking a little geeky in his hornrimmed glasses, who ended up doing daredevil stunts such as hanging off the hands of a huge clock 20 stories up.

I can't get into the complex, often paradoxical life of Lloyd right now. Instead, I want to write about some (many!) examples of synchronicity I've experienced since I began to research and write about this man a couple of years ago.

Synchronicity being, as I understand it, coincidences that don't seem like coincidences because of their existential/emotional significance. Or, in this case, sheer numbers.

It started small. I'd see the name Lloyd on a street sign, on the side of a truck or train, on a realtor's sign, in movie credits, in novels, in magazine pieces, in - well, it could be anywhere.

This escalated over time. It became routine to get at least one Lloyd-sighting somewhere, every day. I mean, every day. Sometimes, there were two or three.

"Oh, you're just noticing it because that's what you're writing about," my friend claimed. Ahhhh, maybe. But when I watched an odd little British comedy called The Wrong Box, I counted, not one, not two, not three. . .

There were five references to the name Lloyd, in the credits (2), in the cast (2), and even in a list, the Tontine, which was the pivotal subject of the movie. When people got bumped off, their name was crossed off the list. One of those names was Lloyd.

Would it surprise you if I said I am still getting this, nearly two years later? The name Lloyd jumps out at me from a newspaper article (but never when I am looking for it!), a doctor's sign, a DOG'S name (yes, a dog!), or just about anywhere else. And in Googling "Lloyd synchronicity", I had to give up after only a few examples.

One blogger kept encountering the name Frank Lloyd Wright, over and over and over again. A Kathrine Lloyd had a display of art prints called Synchronicity. Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, a psychiatrist, contributed to a paper on synchronicity, a subject both acknowledged and discredited in the psychiatric realm. (Nobody wants to look that crazy, so everyone thinks they're the only one.) And so on, and on, and on, probably into the hundreds, if not the thousands.

Maybe I should tell you about the gold beads, or maybe I shouldn't, because I can't guarantee I didn't misinterpret this. Along with being a serious painter, dog breeder, amateur scientist, photographer, and Imperial Potentate of the Shriners, Harold Lloyd was a master magician, adept at sleight-of-hand (and this in spite of the fact that he lost the thumb, index finger and half the palm of his right hand in an accident early in his career). He made things appear. He made things disappear, then appear again. The coin behind your ear, or -

OK. Things started to disappear, but only in a certain spot in the house. It was in the centre of the bedroom upstairs. Watches went away. Rings. Gold pens. It was weird.

Then came the gold beads. Or, rather, the one. I have a necklace with four tiny charms, each representing one grandchild. I had these mounted on a gold hoop earring, and for some reason I wanted to unfasten it, perhaps to change the order of the charms.

The four were separated by small gold beads.

I unfastened the hoop, and, ta-poinggggg. One of the gold beads shot across the room and disappeared.

I was plenty miffed. I crawled all over the bedroom floor on my hands and knees. No gold bead. Vacuumed and vacuumed, then searched the gritty, fuzzy contents. No gold bead.

It maddened me. I looked for another gold bead, and could not find one just like it.

So I sort of gave up. Months went by. Maybe a year. I was walking around in my bare feet in the opposite side of the bedroom from the ta-poinggggg, then felt something sticking on the sole of my foot.

"Aha!" I cried. "Lloyd, you've done it again!"

I put the gold bead into a tiny drawer in my jewellery box.

More time went by, maybe months. I was walking barefoot in another part of the bedroom. I felt something stuck to the bottom of my foot.

Oh no.

Maybe, somehow, had the gold bead jumped out of the drawer? Or what? I knew I didn't have another one. I had already given up and replaced all the beads with shitty-looking ones, and glued the hoop shut. No more ta-poingggggs for me.

So I put the bead in the drawer with the other one. But you're not going to believe what happened after that.

I now have three perfect gold beads in the drawer. Does this have anything to do with the fact that the rather odd, not-terribly-common name Lloyd keeps popping up every day, sometimes two or three different times in different contexts?

What does it all mean? Lloyd always looks to me as if it spells something backwards. It almost spells "dolly".

It maddens me, because right now I have no prospects at all. I think The Glass Character is the best thing I've ever written, and at the moment it looks like it will die on the vine because agents and publishers won't even read my covering letter before firing it back at me with a (quite literal) rubber-stamped rejection that makes form letters look respectful.

Harold, either lay off, or help me here! I have enjoyed your presence immensely, but I can't believe it has no other purpose than to provide an odd but enjoyable experience, the kind you wouldn't want to relate at a psychiatric conference.

After all. . . they might think you're crazy.

Murderous rage

Well, almost.

When a non-proficient computerphobe like me has to retrieve a file that contains an entire novel (several years' worth of sweat and hope), it's a bit disconcerting when said file won't come up.

This is what happened yesterday, leading to a clever little post. But you didn't hear what happened last night.

Oh, dear.

My husband tried to fix it for me. He tinkers around on my computer, putters. Clicks here and there. It takes a long, long time. In many ways, his skills are worse than mine.

There, I've said it. But I thought he could pull this thing up out of oblivion.

When he finally got it, I wanted him to email me a copy so I wouldn't run into this shit again. He right-clicked the file name and began to mouse over and over and over "delete". My panic and terror was rising. He has been known to slip, to falter and click on the wrong thing.

I could see my work disappearing into a hole. I exploded. He exploded. We almost physically fought. He stormed out the door and I tried to push it shut, but he was pushing it back. Holy hell! I finally won, slamming it hard. Good thing his finger wasn't in the crack.

Today I found myself writing this thing - God, this thing about how nobody gets it, I mean nobody, not even my life partner. People think this is a little hobby, like baking or knitting, not bloodletting onto the page. I write because it's my twin: flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. Not writing is unthinkable. Is it its own reward? Not if you're a real author.

And I crossed that thresshold years ago.

Did it create expectations? You bet it did. Expectations that I would go on publishing on a regular basis, doing a little better each time, building an audience steadily, until. . .

Instead, it has been like being tied to a wild horse and dragged over the rocks.

The economy failed. That's one thing. My illusions about becoming an instant celebrity died. I had to ask myself why I was really doing this. But ideas thrust themselves into my brain, notwithstanding. They said, "Write me, write me!" I could not resist.

I have two novels unpublished, The Glass Character and Bus People, and a book of poems (The Red Diary) about the diary of Anne Frank. I think all of these manuscripts deserve to see print. I sent queries on Anne Frank out, only a few because I couldn't seem to stand it. I didn't think I'd have to slam my head any more. I remember in the '90s sending out 65 queries for a novel called A Singing Tree. I now see it was unpublishable, but who knew at the time? 65 queries, zero acceptances.

I'd quit, yes, but when Better than Life and Mallory came out, reviewers were giving me the kind of notices a writer dreams of. Now I wonder if it was worth being dangled like that.

Would I rather not have gotten them? Well.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I suppose I should quit bellyaching and try to be more constructive. This is more like a diary entry than a blog post. But sometimes it hurts so much. I wish I could go do something normal. Nobody in my family or small circle of friends gets this. They just don't. If it's so painful, why not just walk away?