cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Got an Agent! Success. I went to NYC for a couple of days and met with this prospective agent while I was there. She and the other principal agents at her firm were completely gung-ho about the whole idea. They want to sign me immediately, hone the proposal a bit over the next few weeks, and then start submitting the manuscript as-is to publishers. It seems that I must have given a really, really good presentation. Because they said that they definitely want me to come back up to NYC to meet personally with prospective publishers, which I gather is an unusual thing. This is where my day job prepared me very well. I've done marketing. And I spent about 10 years moonlighting on political campaigns, giving speeches and meeting with individual donors and kingmakers to build support for an issue or a candidate. It has all fucking come together perfectly. These past few days it has all really felt very much like my actual job. Flying to the city to meet with an agent, owning the meeting, walking out with everything I wanted and more, sitting down to several hours worth of emails, returning calls to reporters, doing a phone interview the next day, fielding calls and emails from students, etc. I have a whole set of routines and systems coming together. This really is a proper job now and I'm good at it. I'm really getting very close to making enough money at this to quit my day job. My agent was really excited during the meeting when I mentioned that part of my overall career plan is to do paid speaking engagements and conferences and such. They do representation and booking for that work as well, and she thinks they can find work for me in this area. I really, really want to be doing that. Paid travel where all I have to do is stand up on a stage and talk about stuff that I am interested in for 40 minutes or so. Fucking awesome, as far as I'm concerned. The deadline for the new version of the proposal is 3 weeks from now. I think I can beat that deadline, cutting it at least in half. As soon as I do that, they start pitching it to publishers. And the sooner they do that, the sooner it sells and the sooner I get the first chunk of my money. The impetus is significant. Once the new version of the proposal is done and after my February course is finished, I have decided that I'm starting the next book right away. No waiting, no fucking around. If a publisher gets serious and bites and offers money and has changes they want me to make right away, then great. Obviously I'll do that and drop other writing projects in favor of getting those revisions or new chapters done. But I'm not going to let the probability of that prevent me from starting another book. This is one of the books that I NEED to write in order to move my 10 year plan forward. Have I mentioned that yet? I have a 10 year plan that involves me winning the Nobel peace prize. I'm fucking serious. I've been playing guitar again. After a good 14 years away from it I have been playing my Stratocaster a few times a week. Aside from having to build up callouses again and having hand muscles that get sore quickly, somehow I am now a better guitar player today than I ever was as a teenager. I don't get it. I learned '2,000 Light Years from Home,' by the Rolling Stones yesterday afternoon. I'm having trouble getting back into the dual rhythms of singing and playing guitar at the same time. The straight guitar playing I've been doing has been fucking awesome. I think that part of the difference now is that I've listened to way more punk and garage rock than I had when I was playing a lot in high school. I'm not afraid to just crank up the gain and volume on the amp and grind the shit out, hard and sweet. In high school I was too focused on the 'perfect ' chord or note. I was strongly influenced by jazz guitar players and by the sound of a Ch@pm@n Stick plugged straight into an amp with no effects or distortion. Writing music is also suddenly easier than it ever was. I'm writing the music (not lyrics) for perfectly cromulent songs in, like, 10 minutes. Again, its the Buzzcocks, early Clash, Swell Maps, early Cure and Bauhaus coming out. In high school I listened to a lot of Bauhaus and Cure and Clash albums like 'Sandinista' and 'Combat Rock.' I never really gave the Buzzcocks or that sort of thing any attention. Even the early, punk-ier Bauhaus was stuff that I listened to sometimes but it never occurred to me to try playing it. Perhaps the other difference is that for the last 10 years or so I've still been writing music, just not playing it. I write it and play it back in my head. I can hear it at will. I can improvise what I think are rather good jazz solos on trumpet, sax or piano. The seems odd to write down, but I can feel the music in the back of my throat. I think that as far as the human brain is concerned, playing and composing music in your head is exactly the same thing as doing it in real life with your hands or voice. 8:57 a.m. - 2010-02-02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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