Smoking and Writing

Two more rejections. Both form letters. Always apologetic, but it still sounds arrogant when an agent who hasn't read one syllable of your novel when for all they know you could be the next Dan Brown tells you he or she is a very busy person and is very selective (so why is so much boring dreck published?) and doesn't really have time for you, but good luck with another agent who is not so busy or selective or maybe will find your dull plot to his/her liking and will shop your particular dreck around to a publisher of boring dreck. Do I sound bitter? You better believe it. Well, as tI am wont to say: suck it up. So far only four of 28 responses has been personal. The business has really changed for the worse since I started shopping my first pathetic work around ten years ago. It was pretty bad, plot wise, but I had more interest generated than this third novel which seems so much better. Go figure.

The good news is I have 70 (seventy!) pages of the new novel, Festival Madness, aka The Turning Point done, and the part I'm writing takes place at Burning Man and it is such a fun challenge to try to capture the festival as part of the plot. Difficult, but fun, and I love writing and writers and reading and talking about writing and the writing process but the rest of the business you can have.

I still have smoking dreams after fifteen years off the weed. Incredible what a powerful drug nicotine is, and how hard to break its habit. I smoked off and on (but mostly on) and was incredibly skinny. Why have two helpings when you can eat one and then have a cigarette? Once I stopped, I vowed never to smoke again, because I sure as hell didn't want to face another withdrawal. But nicotine comes back in my dreams. I am smoking a cigarette, which is strange because I don't smoke, but as long as I have the lit cigarette I may as well smoke it. The reasoning of my sleeping mind, which nicotine is still trying to seduce, is Byzantine. Sometimes I dream I'm hooked again, and the guilt is overpowering, but I still smoke. In my dreams. It was wonderful. But it's cool to have lower blood pressure, better circulation and smell fresh.

Tune in tomorrow for drinking stories. Fortunately, I never got that addiction. But it was probably a near thing.