NOT TOO MANY WRITERS WOULD PUBLISH A TITLE: THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL

If editors don’t like the title, it steps on some toes, then they should take a pass on the book.

Motherfuckers, don’t waste my time.

I lived on dog food. Name me one editor who lives on dog food. My favorite dog food is called slops. They sell it to us homeless people in the back of Walmart behind the dumpsters. I no longer taste it, but I can taste the load of cow caca agents live in. The House of CaCa and Shamrocks by Tim Barrus. Maybe an Irish book. Push that. We only read on Thursdays in a bar on Times Square.

It has taken me twenty years to do this. To write this novel. Publishing did everything they could to fuck me to disable me. I am already disabled (I blame them for that, too). They do not just just let go of the past, they shape it.

I could always change my name again.  

I am critiqued for not taking my time.

The critique is spurious. It’s revenge. People hate my guts because I fucking mess with their core ideas. All the red flags go up. There are people who believe that the red flags will stop me from writing. Simply put. They’re not red flags to me. They’re bullshit. The rich know that bullshit is what they live on.

WHY CAN’T PEOPLE WRITE ANYTHING THEY WANT.

OOOOO. But only if it’s approved by the select committee of Shit for Brainsville’s Apathetic Whores Committee.

Novels wrap all this stuff up – hopefully with at least one dose of humanity – and the rest usually hinges on that.

Why are you so angry.  

There is no support for it whatsoever. Other writers will go way, way out of their time zones to fuck you in public right up the ass. And if you say one word back, it’s the guillotine.  There are no second chances because there are no first chances. Chance is not a game publishing plays out on the playground. If it was. I win.

Let us look at risk: Where are the publishers. The publishers have left the building.

If you’ve never been exposed to the toxicity of cruelty, you have not published zip. It’s important to never suffer fools.

Faulkner did it well. His eye alone is rich with what it sees, records, evaluates in a context called time.

No one else does that well. But seriously, novels are a time machine. But what is time.

Time and death are synonymous. Faulkner represented it. I have studied his life. Joe Christmas is my favorite character of all time. Life has ruined him. Life has twisted all his guts. He is no fucking hero. I’ve seen his eyes in dozens of men. I do not much understand the “hard-scrabble” of the background.

My poverty is different. Writing in the American South accentuates. I have written four novels here. I cannot express how different it is from the rest of America. Yall know Jimmy Bob and his truck. It’s growing on me. Jimmy Bob is not a stereotype. He’s actually a fool because he thinks with his dick. Boy over here, yall, says it’s a writer. Well, look-at-that. My wife, Nancy Bob, is kinda an artist, you know, art supplies, I built her her own room right in that chicken coop. Then, we get excited, and we have-to-go take pichers.

Am I making fun of the South. Yet. Oh, please let me.

That’s the problem with the South. It’s in the South.

I can’t get up from the table until I eat all my grits.

And then, you wrote about it, you old fool.

The problem with living in small towns is that I will guarantee you, your next door neighbor will be a cop. I smoke damn good shit with my neighbor. Outside up into the hayloft because children.

Because what children.

Those children. Any children. Nick Adams was a child.

Whose daddy sewed up that gut wound with fishing line.

You cannot go to the library in drag. You can. But. It might alert everyone in town, make no mistake about it, it’s a town of whores because children. Drinking Jack Daniels. Scrubby and covered in carrot dirt.

Who has the time and the money because children.

Don’t let them children read bad words or god himself is worms. I swear.

We know.

I lived next door to the Hemingway house during one of my Key West stints. Stints and stunts. The cats are real.

The sound of typewriters alone on that block.

They would go digital but they cannot afford it.

Yall can’y buy shit anyway, Jimmy Bob.

Your wife is autistic, alright. I saw his house in Cuba, too. Hemingway was odd. Meat and potatoes, all the low moments placed like musical notes so we can’t go too far down the rabbit hole, and then Hemingway comes and pushes your fat white ass into the hole. My Hemingway gig was in Grey’s Sporting Journal. Think Montana.

Maybe I have lived in the South too long, hung up to dry in the unforgiving son I have to stop writing about him.

It will be the death of me.

That is all I know about literature, and the Great American Novel. WTF.

I want to move to Ireland and go to libraries.