Publication

I wish I could say that the reason that I've been less than diligent about blogging is that I've been devoting my artistically-oriented free time to working on something that might actually be publishable someday. I wish I could say that. And I really have been spending quite a bit of time working on something that might be publishable some day. But the simple fact is that I haven't been updating here very often because the last month has fairly well sucked, and I just haven't been able to work up the energy to sit down and start typing. Which, I'm convinced, is the true key to quality blogging; nobody who reads these things really cares all that much about the subject matter, we just like seeing what's going on in the lives of people we know, and if we can get an occasional laugh (either laughing along with the blogger, or laughing at their expense), so much the better.

Based on this theory, and also based on my recent experiences writing a little bit of this and a little bit of that, I've reached the conclusion that the VAST majority of aspiring writers are aiming for the wrong goal. Far too many people dream of coming up with the Next Great American Novel. Goes to show that they haven't thought the matter through. If you can score and score big (and I mean HUGE: think J. K. Rowling), you can come up with characters and storyline that both you and everyone else fall in love with, and spend a decade making it all come together, en route to becoming one of the wealthiest people in the world. Of course, the reason that J. K. Rowling is the only example of that sort of success is that she's the only one who's had that sort of success. Might as well aspire to winning the lottery; you'd probably have better chances of success with Lotto.

In any rate, for the vast rank and file of aspiring writers, that sort of thing will never happen, for a variety of reasons I won't go into right now. Although some writers make their careers on a single storyline (Card's Ender Saga, Jordan's Wheel of Time, Lucas' Star Wars), it's amazingly rare that anyone reaches that level of transcendental success. The hardest part about writing is rendering the storyline (that looks like gold inside your own head) into some concrete written form, and doing it in such a way that the storyline still looks like gold after the translation from loosely-defined ideas into clear text. Suffice to say that writing is hard work, sometimes for no other reason than that, while working on one storyline, you come up with something that strikes you as absolutely brilliant, but will need a storyline all its own. You have to put the shiny new storyline aside for weeks or months and finish up the old, less exciting, but closer to completion tale. Don't think for a second that writing is a cushy job that requires no discipline.

This train of thought has led me to the conclusion that the greatest job in writing is not the novelist. It's the columnist. Dave Barry needs to come up with a few pages of good stuff every week. But he only needs to come up with a few pages of good stuff every week. He can write about any damn thing he wants, so long as it's interesting enough that people are going to read it. Theoretically, he can come up with those pages and email them in to his editors from anywhere with an Internet connection. Since Dave does pretty well, I suspect he can afford a satellite connection, which means he can work from anywhere on the face of the planet, notably including Fiji, Cancun, St. Barts, and other sunny places where they serve fruity drinks with little umbrellas in them. I don't doubt for a second that Dave is an amazingly prolific writer, who at any given moment has 30 to 50 articles in various stages of development, but of publishable quality, so he's got some columns in the bank toward incidents of emergency, such as sudden attacks of overwhelming laziness and/or drunkenness.

The columnist is the ultimate literary profession. Which means that there's a long waiting list for the job. Generally speaking, you don't apply for a get a column. Instead, you make a name for yourself in some way shape or form, and then the job is offered to you on a trial basis. You get to keep the job for as long as people keep reading your stuff. It really is that simple. (The hard part is getting there, I gotta believe.)

Personally, I'm in the process of writing a commentary on male/female interaction, from the angle of rules and guidelines about love and life that guys REALLY need to know, but are not smart enough to reason out on their own. Little things like how to be good in bed: All you have to do is pay attention. When she gasps, moans, or tenses up, that means you did something right. Do it again. Don't do it harder. Don't do it faster. Just do it again. I honestly think that this is the sort of wisdom that guys REALLY need to know. And there's no fucking way a woman is ever going to boil things down into something that simple. So I'm writing The Rules. And incidentally, I'm seeking beta-testers to read the still-under-construction manuscript, so let me know if you're interested.

Now here's the twisted part: While I'm perhaps overly optimistic, I think my book is going to do well, because - while I write nothing but truth - the work as a whole is going to be something that just slightly offends every woman on the face of the planet. This is going to help me. The largest reading demographic in the world is the bored housewife; why do you think romance and self-help books sell so well. If a housewife reads my book, she will call up her friends and say "Oh my God. You're not going to believe what this guy says in this book I'm reading!" Then all her friends go buy my book, too. CHA-CHING!!! Victory is mine! The Holy Grail is where I end up on Oprah, facing down America's Unified Housewife Liberation Front, defending the things that I've dared put in print.

Besides being one HELL of a good time, that's the sort of thing that leads to cushy gigs like writing a column. I mean seriously, if a douche-bag like Adam Corolla can manage a regular social-commentary radio show, I can too. And the writing part is fun, even though I only really come up with a few pages of good stuff every week or so.