Nothing ever happens: or, my first psych nurse

Some days you may ask: why am I seldom writing long, in-depth  pieces about a particular topic of burning interest? Why instead do I resort to gifs, little videos, wacky things, etc.?
Because I have, literally or figuratively speaking, had it.

I've just had it.

Had it with trying to be A Writer and make Sales. Had it with internet popularity, followers, likes, views. Had it with  high school redux and that awkward feeling surging up my neck like a conspicuous red blush.

Had it with competition.  Of any kind. Want to just go walk in the woods,and probably will. Don't want to think about the past and all the things that sucked, and all the things that were beautiful, because all of it is over and both are gone forever. Want to dwell in Now exclusively.

Not good at this, but am practicing.

I DO look back at writing three novels after literally decades of effort, and selling nineteen copies and getting the best reviews in the world, or no reviews. So I have quit.

Quit all that effort. I am now Loose. Free. Not to be branded or categorized.

I tell myself pain is part of life, that it's all about letting go, then I think: ah, screw it, I'm NEVER letting go. Holding on is what I have learned to do all my life. Don't tell me to surrender the one thing I'm good at.

So  this is why you don't find a lot of in-depth writing from me any more. It was killing me. Don't be a writer, it will kill you unless you win the popularity lottery, and I almost guarantee you you won't.  Unless the genetics are just right, or the phase of the moon.

Can the dalmation change its spots?

Yes, I admit it. I do get depressed.

This is like a Dalmation saying, yes, I do have spots. Or something.

Just trying to set up this particular post, everything stopped. Quivered and flickered back and forth for a while, then froze.

I feel the twingy, warning signs of a toothache deep in the left side of my jaw. A few months ago I had to have an expensive root canal, a crown replacement and surgery on an abscess. Because of the inflammation the freezing didn't take, so had to be injected four times until I couldn't feel my whole head. (Up until then I didn't think such a thing was even possible. FOUR doses of novocaine? Actually, the last one was delivered in four shots, making it seven.) If this is going to be another dental disaster, it had better happen NOW before our insurance runs out.

I don't know.

I know you're supposed to be chipper, no matter what happens to you, or doesn't happen to you. It's fashionable, and when something's fashionable, 95% of people follow it in great sliding herds like lemmings without even looking at it, let alone questioning it.

If a lot of people are doing it, then it must be right. I even had this used on me (by a minister, no less) to prove the validity of Christianity. Nobody mentions Eichmann and his merry band of assassins.

There's a new documentary out called Pink Ribbons, Inc. which no doubt echoes many of the things I said about breast cancer fundraising in an earlier post. Not that I mind, but why does the damned movie get all this attention when my writing on the same damned subject doesn't?

No, I'm not being gracious, because I don't feel like it!
A very few of my 600+ blog posts have attracted hundreds of views, and one freakish one on Carrie Fisher's ECT treatments drew 12,000, but for the most part I get less than ten views per post, sometimes even zero. Imagine posting something that no one looks at, at all, ever.  It happens to me with alarming frequency. Does this mean I'm: (a) a shitty writer, or (b)cursed?

I've heard pop psychologists/New Age philosophers (an oxymoron if ever there was one) say, "Never take anything personally." They mean anything. I mean, even if your best friend socks you in the face, then laughs. Even if your name is left off your mother's obituary (no joke - it really happened to me, indicating they are so ashamed of me they won't acknowledge that I was even born.) Even if NO ONE is taking your manuscript seriously, not even looking at it! For I am convinced that no one in the publishing industry has read it yet, in spite of well over a year of attempts and even a few promising leads.

It has been completely ignored. Whited out. And I'm supposed to be OK with that.

If I express any of these feelings, certain predictable things happen. The first one: advice. Torrents of it. Even if I haven't asked for it (and I haven't!). This indicates that my feelings are "wrong" and I must be "advised" out of them. (No one thinks just to listen.) The most predictable advice is, "Just write for your own enjoyment and don't think about publishing any of it."

Hm. Dickens would've gone far on that, eh? Or how about Mickey Spillane. Anybody. Writing isn't knitting (and even when you knit, which I do, copiously, you like to think someone, somewhere is going to wear the thing that you're knitting. Or should you be happy to throw it in a drawer somewhere, or even just throw it in the garbage?)

But writers are told to do this ALL THE TIME. I know I go over and over this, it's probably pretty tedious by now, but no one expects a concert pianist to play in an empty hall. But writing is a cheat, something you can't really study, so it doesn't count as "art". Wanting recognition for it is somehow deeply embarrassing. 

There's an unexpected phenomenon now that might have helped my chances enormously if I'd only been able to use it: the flukey runaway success of the European indie film The Artist. It's a silent movie about silent movies, and it has stolen the critics' hearts (which means Oscar nominations, causing the public to rush lemming-like to the box office and rave about it afterwards,not because they liked it but because it's the thing to do). 


But when I began marketing The Glass Character, which BY THE WAY is about the life and career of the phenomenal silent film comedian Harold Lloyd, I didn't mention The Artist because I had never heard of it. I had never heard of it because IT WASN'T OUT YET. And even when it did come out, I brushed it off as too hokey. There was no way anyone would pay attention to something so marginalized and odd.

Woody Allen also made a period movie, now up for several Oscars, called Midnight in Paris. It's all about a writer disillusioned with his own times who is somehow magically transported to Paris during the 1920s and the great flowering of arts and literature called the Jazz Age.

I didn't think to use that as a marketing tool either because, well, I just didn't. It didn't occur to me, and the way I'm feeling now, with a major dental catastrophe only a wet blink away, I wonder if it would have mattered anyway.

Listen, this is a damn good book: Jeffrey Vance is probably the only person who has really read it, and he loved it. Jeffrey Vance co-wrote (with Suzanne Lloyd, Harold's granddaughter, whom he raised) perhaps the definitive Lloyd biography. My favorite one, anyway.

No one else is giving it the time of day. Even my queries aren't being read, and it's killing me.

Over and over and over again, I am being told to either self-publish, or e-publish. I am still hanging back. Though it doesn't mean I will never do it, every instinct in my body tells me to wait. I had enough trouble with distribution and promotion when I had a whole publishing company behind me. So many writers are doing this now that I think the market is being flooded. And I don't know how they put together a promotional tour with readings/signings, how they get the book into stores or reviewed in newspapers and magazines, or even significantly noticed on-line.

Are there editorial standards? I'm just askin', though I have that crawling feeling I shouldn't.

As far as I know, a novel published in this way would not be eligible for the Governor General or the Giller or the Booker or any of the other awards that can propel a writer from the literary doldrums into a position where (though we aren't supposed to want this, it's vanity, ego and other nasty things) people actually read our books.

Do I think the revolution will never happen? Things are in a state of flux now. Come back in ten years, maybe five. Maybe even three. But I wonder what the statistics are. How many self-published/e-published writers are becoming best-sellers and making decent money, or even a profit? One can usually pull out a single smash-hit, but what's the average? But even by askin', I'll be making a lot of writers angry and defensive (that is, if they read this at all). 

It's as if you can't ask anything or say anything (unless you're a non-writer, in which case you are required to give floods of advice on a subject you know nothing about), have to tiptoe around on eggshells or you'll end up a pariah, disloyal. I figured out a long time ago that there is a secret code among writers, one that I will never crack. But once a writer crosses over, is there any chance of reverting back to more traditional methods? I think publishers are pretty freaked-out by all this, though I think some of them are beginning to get on-board. Maybe it's that perceived lack of editorial standards. How should I know?

Along with the reams of other unsolicited advice, writers are forever being told to "toughen up", but guess what: if you toughen up, then you can't write any more. Writers are like tuning forks vibrating sympathetically with whatever buzz is going on around them. Not to agree with it, but often to criticize it and stand up to it. They serve a crucial but often completely unheeded function: to be the conscience of the world.


Being this cranky isn't popular. It exposes things, bare nerves that people don't want to see or feel. There's only so much novocaine in the real world. Another favorite ploy of people who know nothing about this is, "Well, I don' t feel that way about it, and I don't know anybody else who does." More lemming syndrome? Maybe. I can only have a certain emotion, or objection, or opinion, if others share it.

You're the only one. And don't you forget it.
I see why writers commit suicide, I really do. I can't because of my family, but if I did not have them, well, I see why they do it anyway. I don't see why successful writers do it however. I can't see why ANY successful person does it. They do, but it doesn't make a damn bit of sense to me.

Mothers, don't let your sons grow up to be writers! One way or another, they'll be shot through the heart.

P.S. if anyone actually does follow this blog, they will read this post and say, "Oh, I can't read it any more, it's just too negative and depressing." Then they will abandon it. (Not that I have any abandonment issues. Being left off my mother's obituary is totally OK with me.) Never mind that 95% of the posts are NOT negative or depressing. Every once in a while I just feel weighed down with all this and have to try to get words around it.

It's what writers do. Isn't it?

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Does everything happen for a reason?

For more years than I can count, I carried a little slip of paper around with me with a few lines of what looked like poetry on it. I remember what it said by heart, but cross-checked it on the internet just now. The title is, "I don't know".

I don't know where to start
There are scars I could show
If I opened my heart
But how far, Lord, but how far can I go?
I don't know.

What I need I don't have
What I have I don't own
What I own I don't want
What I want, Lord, I don't know

What I say I don't feel
What I feel I don't show
What I show isn't real
What is real, Lord - I don't know
No, no, no - I don't know

Once in a while I risked showing this  slip of paper to someone, and they read it in blank puzzlement and handed it back to me. One woman - God, how I regret giving it to her - read it out loud in a sweet, querulous, schoolteacherish voice, the final "I don't know" in a fluffy little voice out of a '50s sitcom.

All right, I don't know. I don't know what this piece is going to be about. The quote is from Leonard Bernstein's Mass, a mammoth undertaking that was a cross between a formal Latin mass and the hippie-ish Hair sensibilities of the day. It had only mixed success, and I have never actually heard it.

I got thinking this morning about Fate. God is kind of beyond me right now, though I will blushingly admit there was a time not so long ago when I thought I understood God, or knew what God meant. Now I wonder. Is there a "something" that shapes our ends, rough-hew them though we may (to paraphrase/massacre Shakespeare)?

How many of us get what we want, what we really think we want? Might it be true that on our deathbed, we will suddenly sit up and cry, "That's it!" - then fall back lifeless? (For a long time I had this odd vision of a monk in that situation exclaiming, "I could have had a woman!", then collapsing backwards forever.) Conventional wisdom says things like, "You can do/be anything you want to, so long as you want it enough and work hard enough." But what if one day your doctor calls you up and says, "I'm sorry. It's MS." (Or ALS, or pancreatic cancer, or schizophrenia, or . . . ) What if your lovingly-raised children, hopelessly embroiled in a miasma of drugs and despair, can't look after their children, and you suddenly find yourself raising them instead of retiring to a carefree life of sun and surf?

I'm talking about the curves life throws at us, some of them fatal. I'm talking about a beautiful young woman shot in the back just as her life is starting, with a "loved one" suspected. If this is love, how do we define hate? Almost all murders take place within families. Most of them are perpetrated by spouses, with husbands predominating. What am I trying to say here?

Another trope that bugs me no end is, "Everything happens for a reason". People say this at memorial services all the time, and it makes me want to scream. If a baby has a convulsion and dies in her mother's arms, it happens for a reason. If a person finally commits suicide after 40 years of endless turmoil and failed dreams, it happens for a reason. If the bottom falls out, people whose lives still have a bottom spout this bit of cowardice and ignorance, then, having done their philosophical duty, go home.

What's reason? It's an explanatory thing, isn't it? Or else something logical, almost cerebral. Isn't this just people's way of rationalizing and taming a reality which can be ferocious and terrifying? Does God keep score, have a little abacus up there (and it's always "up there", not inside us or around us), and dole out lessons as per our spiritual needs?

I can think of a worse thing. These tin-plated philosophers secretly believe that because the tragedy has a reason behind it, it's - well - almost deserved, isn't it? It's all part of a mysterious higher reality or karma or Fate, and whether the person has done something in a previous life or just stepped on a crack in this one, God has just decided, well, that's it - I'm really tired of all this transgression, intended or not. For what else could this "happens for a reason" mean?

I also have trouble with angels. The angel fever has died down somewhat, but for a while the books were so stupid, one of them had instructions for finding your wings. I mean it, trying to find the actual spot on your shoulder blades where the wings sprouted out, or would, I assume after you croaked.

The idea was, if someone was falling off a 70-story building and fell on an awning and didn't die, their "angel" must have been looking after them. It came rushing up underneath the person like Superman catching Lois Lane.

OK, then. . . you know where I'm going with this, don't you? How then do you comfort the agonized family of the guy who fell without an awning? No doubt, many would just fall back on the familiar escape clause, "Everything happens for a reason," then go home.

Did September 11 happen for a reason? If it was a lesson, and most Americans are incensed at the very idea, then what was it? For it provoked the same old human reaction that has kept us in chains for millennia: REVENGE.

I have dreams. Yes, I have them, and I've been told from the very beginning that I have potential, but here is a confession. I never fulfilled that potential, because struggle as I might, I just can't do it. There are obstacles in my path that no one told me about because they were too busy saying I could do/be anything I wanted to be if I only tried hard enough.

I have been put somewhere, and don't get me wrong, it's the best place in the world because it is the bosom of my family. But why can't I do other things besides that, why can't I fulfill my dreams without some sort of blood sacrifice?  I see other women doing both. They're not trying to steal it from their families, or from other writers. They just have it, they do it. They sign contracts, they don't sit in the starting gate slowly dissolving from the acid of unfulfilled promise.

This is probably the most personal thing I have ever written here, and I know I take a risk in making myself look like an impotent loser who never got beyond being a housewife. I swear to you, I don't know what I have done or not done to miss  the magic that seems to happen to other writers, the sort of magic that creates "buzz" before their book even leaves the starting gate.

I have reviewed hundreds of books, literally hundreds, many of them wildly successful, but when does it get to be my turn? Am I wearing some sort of invisible pink chiffon bridesmaid dress, now tattered from a few decades of use?

It's fashionable to ignore me, in spite of the sometimes-rapturous reviews I received for both my novels. "Well then, dear, just be happy with that," the sweet little Betty Crocker voice tells me. "East, west, Home is best."

Then take it out of me, God, take it, rip out of my chest the desire and uproot it forever. "What I need I don't have/What I have I don't own/What I own I don't want/What I want, Lord, I don't know/No, no, no, I don't know."

Except that I do know. The "reason" for everything, that mysterious force that orders the universe and every person in it, has somehow or other never happened to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og59KBIu6D0

Women and sangria: or, how not to be a writer

A friend and colleague of mine,  Matt Paust, recently passed along a link to a post on Open Salon by Ann Nichols. It recounted the ordeal she faced as a little girl, already deeply devoted to the written word, who was forced by a shallow substitute teacher to write an inane assignment called "I am a Lost Penny". When it came time to read outstanding pieces to the class, hers wasn't included: the teacher didn't get it, so she concluded there was nothing to get. Unfortunately, this is the kind of reception writers face throughout their lives. Agents don't get it. Publishers don't get it. Editors especially don't get it. But like fools, we carry on.

I emailed Matt today as per usual, and this piece (below) evolved into another writer's story. In no other field are there so many wanna-be's, so many people who talk about writing but don't really do it, who read how-to's but don't really follow them, who attend endless classes but don't ever risk their work to someone else's eyes/mind.

If and when you do, you're in for it. Unless you're one of these rare instant phenomenal successes (and I know a few of those who have flamed out after one novel), you struggle and toil and chop your way through the underbrush, occasionally finding yourself in a howling wilderness of loneliness and despair. Welcome to the wonderful world of being a "real" writer.

The reward? Occasionally being able to dump it all out in words that are meaningful. That post about "someone's" sister was a huge catharsis for me. Since then I've thought of other details. But just being able to sit down and pour it out was reward enough, at least for the time being.

This is already longer than my email to Matt (and I've tinkered with it since), so here it is:


This whole penny thing has got me going on the only time I joined a "writer's group" called Women and Words.  I lasted two sessions. I was the only one who had written a novel or, in fact, had anything published (mostly newspaper columns and book reviews, with the odd poem in a lit. mag.) Someone came up to me and said, "Are you Margaret Gunn?" Not sure what happened to the "ing".

Anyway, we all had to go around the circle telling everyone what we had written and what were working on. When I mentioned my novel (which by the way never did see print), there was a sort of muted, fireworks "ohhhhhhhhhhh," tinged with "who the hell does she think she is?". It was weird. Were they impressed, or merely embarrassed?

There was a nice little old lady in a print dress, introduced to me as "our poetry expert", whose appreciation of poetry went back to the late 1800s. A few people read their poems out loud, almost all written in rhyme and meter.

THE EAGLE

The eagle flies
so high in the sky
In power and might
and not showing any fright
If God could fly, the bird
Would carry a holy word
And I'd fly on his wings
As my soul there would sing.

The universal response was "ohhhh, how LOVE-LYYY!". Then a young black woman, dressed rather edgily with spiky earrings, read a very strange but raw, edgy poem in a Jamaican accent. There was a silence. "Oh, that's different," said the old lady.


It surely was.

When I talked about the novel, a woman asked me instantly, "What's the conflict?" I felt ill. I didn't know what she was talking about. "The" conflict. She had been to too many writing courses, read too many how-to books. And the books. They were touted, one after the other, as the one we had to have to learn such-and-such a technique.

I remember wondering, why not just pick one and do what it says? But commitment to your craft was measured by how many shelves you had filled with these things.

But then came an actual project, a book they were self-publishing as a fundraiser. Great! I thought, a book of the group's short stories or excerpts from novels or memoirs. But it wasn't that at all. It was a COOKBOOK, and they wanted a recipe from me by next week. I don't know why I came back. The next week was almost all socializing. We had been assigned something to write (one lady seemed to be in charge, practically holding a wooden ruler to rap our knuckles if we stepped out of line), but no one mentioned it because no one had done it except me.

We were told to choose a character we wanted to develop in our fiction, then list absolutely everything about that person. "You have to know where he lives, what he does, how he dresses, what he likes to eat, where he grew up, everything." There must have been something wrong with me, because when I start writing fiction it's a process of finding out about my characters, and knowing everything from the get-go would bore me to pieces.

But never mind, no one had done it anyway. It had been forgotten. People talked about their kids, and something called "sangria". It seems the group got together between sessions to have a sangria party and get drunk.


Oh, and one more thing. A timid young woman pressed a few poems into my hands and begged me to comment on them and be brutally honest. I should have just said, "Oh, these are LOVE-LYYY!" without even looking at them, but I made the mistake of reading them and commenting as kindly as I could, making sure I pointed out some strong points. These were written in rhyme and meter and seemed to be about some sort of illness, and God and angels. When I gave her my comments, her eyes were brimming with hurt. "Oh, it's OK," she said. "I'm manic-depressive. It's one hundred per cent genetic, I got it from my mother, I didn't have a bad childhood or anything. My psychiatrist encouraged me to write these while I was in the hospital." 

I felt like I'd stomped on a bunch of baby chicks. Now I think writing can't be taught. The native lust for wordsmithing is in you from birth, but then you have to do an awful lot of flexing and honing.

It's like being an athlete. If you're born with poor reflexes and a caved-in chest, you won't make it, but if you never work out or train, you won't either. And you have to WANT this and want it and want it and want it and want it and want it. And not have sangria parties behind other people's backs.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

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

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

How to kill the bunny in one easy lifetime

The! Writing! Life!: Myths and Tips your Mother Won’t Yell you

MYTH #1: Once you’re published, you’re “in” and will never experience rejection again.

MYTH #2: You will keep the same publisher for the rest of your life.

MYTH WHATEVER: All agents know what they’re doing and who to approach and how to best represent you to the publisher.

YEAH, AND (while we’re at it), you can protest honestly about how badly you have been treated without serious or fatal repercussions.

Writer’s groups help sharpen your skills and boost morale. But they don’t, and I’ll tell you why:

Most people in them don’t know how to critique, so they just put down an opinion which may be very uninformed and of no use to you at all. And the following:

(i) Most of the critiquing isn’t critiquing at all, but consists of “oh, that’s awesome/lovely”, or words to that effect.

(ii) Everyone will strive to find the atom of good in your piece and play it up so as not to hurt your feelings.

(iii) NO ONE takes criticism well. If they are pretending to, they’re phonies. In fact, no one really wants criticism at all. They want to hear, “oh, that’s awesome/lovely”.

Writer’s groups are a great source of mutual support, no? Guess what. Sharing secrets of what makes writing work for you is deadly. If you were a tennis pro, would you sit down with your competition and say, “Now, here’s how I do my killer backhand”?

Publishing, like most things, is a pyramid, with 98 or 99% of writers at the bottom or in the middle somewhere. Only a couple of percent make it to “the top” and make any real money or get movie deals, like everyone expects to. If you “support” other writers, you are in effect saying to them, “Here, let me give you a leg-up on the ladder and take my spot. I don’t want it.”

Some writers are absolutely ruthless (see “only a couple of percent”: that’s how they got there) and, if you’re any good at all, will do anything to obliterate you and your work. Watch your back.

Some writers, usually those in writer’s groups, will sabotage you in all sorts of subtle ways. They wear away at you like a worm until you are completely undermined. It’s not that they want to succeed; they just want to see you fail.

Rejections never stop hurting, you never get used to them, and they always come on the same day the plumbing fails, the dog dies and you have your period.

(Here’s another reason why not to exchange work with other writers.) Be careful no one steals your stuff. It happens, and it’s devastating. It isn’t usually the whole manuscript, just the spiritual core of it, ripped out and shamelessly exploited. If it’s published before yours is (which it probably will be, given the 2-year lag that no one knows about), you will be branded a plagiarist, or at least unoriginal. If you protest or even say anything about it at all, you’ll be considered defensive, insecure and unprofessional. Practice the indispensible skill of enduring abuse silently and with a smile.

Coming up to a published author (especially a famous one) with manuscript trembling in hand is a bad idea. They don’t have time to read your stumbling efforts because they are busy writing their own work. If they did read it, they would likely tell you what they really think. They won’t read it, say “God, this is the best thing I’ve ever seen!”, hand it to their publisher and say, “Here’s the next best-seller. Publish it.”

If the famous author turns down your work, don’t go around telling everyone he/she is a jerk. It’s ungracious and unfair and not true. Well, probably not.

How-to-write books can’t teach you how to write, because writing can’t be taught (though it can be learned). Amassing shelves of them does not mean you are serious and dedicated, it just means you never get to your desk. Why not just pick one and do what it says?

Don’t talk about it endlessly. Most people who say they want to be writers don’t write. It’s easier than facing the blank page/one’s limited talent/terror of being rejected and found out.

Oh, and! I hate to be a pain and go on and on like this, but there are such riches of anguish to impart. If you go to writer’s workshops and conventions, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t, you will hear maddeningly contradictory advice from different instructors. The truth is, there is no right way to do this, and writers detest being told what to do anyway. Real writers don’t even go to these things, for that reason (unless they’re hired as instructors: try to land this gig, it’s great for exposure/covert book-signings and strategic schmoozing/ass-kissing!).

Doing free gigs is supposed to help you get launched. In truth, it's a one-way ticket to Palookaville. Charge money as soon as it is humanly possible, as much as you can get.

I hate to say that the best part is the writing itself, but it is. It’s maybe 90%. It had better be, because your chances of being a real success are slim to none. There – are we feeling better now?

The Beatles - Rock & Roll Music

These blogs have a life of their own. This was going to be a serious treatise on "the writer's life" (or should I say, The! Writer's! Life!), but somehow it didn't happen. It's evolving into some sort of nostalgia column, which is a bit alarming on my part.

But oh, these guys.

I stumbled on A Hard Day's Night the other evening, and was quickly sucked in. It had that heady, exuberant feeling the Beatles exuded during the early years, before they lapsed into their jaded I'm a Loser/Baby's in Black/You've Got to Hide your Love Away period. This clip is one of the best compilations I've seen, complete with fluffy head-shaking (which drove the girls mad) and a kind of mad joy. They'd made it past the skiffle clubs of Merseyside and had gone on to (as John put it) "the toppermost of the poppermost!"

Pay attention to 1:18 in this clip: Paul absolutely cracks up at something John has played on the keyboard. These guys were brothers, and sometimes experienced the rancor and Cain-and-Abel rage of blood kin. Yet, separately, neither could write or perform in that same focused, fruitful way. The shock is that they almost never composed together: they wrote songs "at" each other, put them out there and said, "What do you think?", or even "Try and stop me." This jealousy and tension pulled genius out of them that never would have manifested any other way.

OK then, I've come as far as Mad Men and the Beatles. Do you know what I'm avoiding? I do. I am avoiding the welter of pain and residual anguish of being published for the first couple of times. It was a heady experience, to be sure, but at a certain point I fell through the ice. How on earth am I to comment on "the writer's life" without mentioning this? But if I make too much of it, I will be worse box office poison than I already am. Writers must never let on that their experiences have been anything but totally positive. Only ingrates complain.

The truth is, I have a manuscript that I believe is my very finest work, and I have no idea what to do with it, who to contact. I can't do this alone! I am turned away everywhere, before the thing has even been considered. Sorry, we're full up.

I feel as if I am recreating the cold shoulder I have experienced all my life, from every direction and in every area. Is there a way out? I have to pretend I don't need this, pretend it doesn't hurt and I am fine and I don't mind only writing about the past and writing about the Beatles.

This thing is going to die on the vine. In the words of the Beatles: "Help! I need somebody." After becoming a published author, after having my dream come true twice, it's an awful position to be in.