1) Yesterday I was getting a pedicure and my foot started bleeding while she was scrubbing it. I'm having trouble getting a refund and dealing with this in general because I think this is the gayest injury I've ever had.

2) Right now I'm working on trying to forget that my main character is only seventeen. I want him to be authentic, but I don't want him to operate like a seventeen year old. Which means I have to take out passages like this:

They act like they care about you. They pretend to, at least. They want you to sink into something that you really care about, something important. But they don’t want you to do well. They want you to ace their tests. They don’t care that you can fix a Volkswagen or rewire an outlet. Even when you work hard and start to care, it’s not good enough. You can turn in a history paper and talk about how our country’s whole history—from the Bearing Strait to Ellis Island, from Lewis and Clark to the Oregon trail—was just one big national road trip. You can even think about the conclusion for more than ten minutes say, "It’s in our blood, traveling through all of us." And they’ll still give you a C and write on the back in red pen: "Donner Party? Trail of Tears?"

The saddest part of a large-scale editting process is that you have to destroy the little darlings you've worked on for years. For the next few weeks, this website will become a graveyard for the passages that I love, but that must be lanced in order to let the novel live.

“Do you think we can make it there by dinner?"
"Possibly."
"Possibly?"
"Possibly, but I don't know. Probably.” For a second I wonder if this will just fade out of us as we grow up or if our whole generation is doomed to be unsure about everything. Elevator Capicity is Possibly 2500 Lbs. Please enter your PIN number, I guess. Smoking cigarettes while pregnant could, like, maybe harm your fetus.

A Sobering Thought

There are precious few people in the world who understand properly how proud of oneself one should be if one manages to get oneself drunk in New York City. Often I come home late at night smelling of mustard gas and roses and have to contend with the love of my life and her distain for my pleasant state. "You gotta understand," I would say if I could speak. "I made it all the way home, I didn't miss my subway stop, I got my clothes off before getting in bed and I didn't leave my bag on a train!"

My best work friend is in a band. He understands, thoroughly, the high-five one must give oneself for getting and getting home drunk. I told him my mustard gas story and he came back to me three days later, beaming. "I played a show, I got some drinks, I got real loaded and I made it home with all of my equipment." But that wasn't enough. He had to raise the stakes. "And I successfully had sex and remembered to put a condom on."

I was amazed. I was as congratulatory to himself as I am to myself on the occasions where I remember to take both of my shoes off before breathing mustard gas and roses onto the somnolent back of the love of my life. Later that day I bought him a beer, and I'm pretty sure it was an honor.

And then today he told me that his girlfriend is pregnant.

It is more than refreshing to hear that The Sunday Times of London is ruining the already over stuffed mailboxes of literary agents and publishers all over the world. It just came out that the Times submitted typescript copies of two Booker Prize winning novels to twenty literary agents and publishers. Only one agent responded with any interest at all.
I find this interesting since I have spent the past few months performing a similar prank on unsuspecting agents around the world by submitting to them my own novel manuscript “Breakfast Anytime.”

Much of the literary world was shocked to discover that the rah-rah boys at the Times were not found out. The rest of the literary world was likely to just be in shock from reading my 409 page kunstler-roman But the rest world should not be shocked to discover that people in publishing don’t actually read books. (To cite an Updike-era New Yorker cartoon of a woman looking surprised in a fancy business lunch: “My gosh, I haven’t talked this much about books I haven’t read since I was in publishing!”)

Last month I submitted my manuscript to a hot-shot super agent and a hot-list up-and-comer that a friend in the biz directed me to. I got an email back right away from Mr. Upwards saying that he found the characters to be fantastic but the story to be difficult to get into." Three weeks later I got another email from Mr. Upwards, who turns out to actually be the assistant to Mr. Hot-Shot.

The plot coagulates!

“Hi, this is Mr. Hot-Shot's assistant, Mr. Upwards. I'm sorry that he cannot reply in person. I'm afraid we will have to pass on this one. While I found the story to be great, I just was electrofied by the characters."

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that a handful of these morons can’t pull V.S. Naipaul’s “In a Free State” or Stanley Middleton’s “Holiday” out of their slush piles. Your average literary agent is a person who went to college to learn how to read Proust and Joyce, but who now looks forward to the day when an Olympic skier breaks a leg so they can work on a memoir and pocket a nice set of mahogany shelves for all the books they’re busy not reading.

Put it this way: Clay Aiken’s agents made more from the advance for his “inspiration memoir” than whats his face ever did with “A Million Little Pieces.”

Knowing that the dweebs at the Sunday Times have put the literary world on notice makes me hopeful for my future chances.

Right now there's two things going on:

1) This afternoon I final-fucking-ly have a meeting with an agent who is interested in my manuscript.

2) I'm working on a essay about writing novels that has stalled. The only credible ending to it that I can see now is to have the narrator (me) meet with a prospective agent and ruin any chance they might have of working together.

One thing I cannot ever stand in New York City is how when you meet up with your friends and you find a good bar--and everyone is inside of that bar doing what they planned to do inside--someone motivates the entire group to leave the bar where everyone is having fun and gamble on another bar, half a mile away through the cold, cold city.

This happens without fail as soon as I've maxed out the jukebox. There has been a rebirth lately of fantastic jukeboxes that are still great without Creedence, The Eagles, or anyone from the Sunshine band. At a wood panelled palace on the Lower East Side I found one with MC5, Minor Threat, Clap Your Hands, The Clash, The Shins, and James Brown. And that's when everyone wanted to leave.

To stall the group I said I had to go to the bathroom. I turned to the girl standing outside of it and said: "Are you going to be standing here for thirty seconds? Great. Do me a favor? Will you just stand by the broken door and don't let anyone in?"

For some reason she was totally into this. "Yeah, sure! It's like we're sisters! I do this all the time for my girlfriends. 'Cause I totally hate when I'm in the bathroom and someone just--"

"Great thanks." I walk into the bathroom and the door smacks some guy in the face while he's sitting on the toilet.

Ten seconds later I'm in the cold walking to another bar while my first song comes over the speakers.