cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I Cannot Stop Moving 9/24 - Home, at last. Already I'm like a shark. If I stop moving, I'll die. I've been home for only about 24 hours and I'm already antsy. I got the schedule for the goose thing in NYC firmed up some more and I got in touch with some people in the city to get access to a roof top to trap some pigeons that we're going to eat so that I can knock out another chapter of the new book while I'm up there anyway. Then only about a week later I have to go back up to NYC for a big marketing meeting and event of some sort for my publisher. This is to promote the first book but I'm hoping that this event is for the entire publishing group rather than just my current imprint, because the new book would be a good fit with one of the other imprints of my publishing group and I want the opportunity to sell that as well. My budget for both of these trips is exactly zero. I'm going to have to hit the pawn shops or clear out my IRA completely in order to finance these trips to NYC. Its ok - this will all be worth it when I sell the new book for $40k or so early this winter. The winch system for the pop up trailer broke when we tried to raise it to unpack the trailer when we got back yesterday evening. Perfect timing. Now we need to rebuild it in time for a pig hunt on October 10th. This will require some basic metal work. I need to get some steel plate and shape it into a box to make a new body for the thing, find a bolt for a new axle/pivot thingie, and drill a bunch of holes through metal and probably tap one for threads. Then my Flip video camera crapped out and died today. The screen is fucked for no apparent reason. It has paid for its self in the sense that what I got from the FL trip was essential and necessary, but I still need another one for the pigeon thing and the pig hunt and I don't have the $100 to buy it. Fucking hell, I need to get paid already. Good news today is that I tested Ida's shooting this afternoon ahead of her deer hunt tomorrow. If she didn't do well enough then I would have pulled the plug on it. I made a cardboard deer, half life-size, and had her shoot it at 50 yards. She nailed it in the lungs 4 times in a row with her .22 rifle. Then I had her take a shot with her mother's 7mm deer rifle and she hit it in the lungs again, just behind the heart. Perfect. If we can get onto a deer tomorrow then I know she can make the shot, within 75 yards. She knows the anatomy, she's an excellent shot and the recoil doesn't both her in the slightest. As a rifle shot, Ida truly is a prodigy. She's also helped me to field dress and butcher so I think she is emotionally well prepared for the reality of a dead deer that we will eat. I just got an offer from a hunting and camping retailer. They want me to link to them and do ads for some amount of money. What I just told them is that what I actually need is sponsorship of the travel for the next few chapters of this book. Provide some gear and subsidies for travel and hotels or campgrounds. ___________________________ Evening of the 25th now. Ida did not get a deer, but comported herself very well on the hunts today. She has much more patience than she did even a few months ago. She desperately wanted to get a deer - especially a buck. She did not get that from me, by the way. I'm a meat hunter and have never emphasized antlers. Nor do I have any trophies on the wall. We heard a deer in the brush right near us and waited a long time for it to come into view. She was visibly focused and excited and alive while waiting for this deer to step out into sight. Unfortunately, her 3 year old brother opened the front door loudly and came running up to us, yelling, before we saw the deer. It spooked and ran off. The TV pilot goes out to those 4 networks on Monday morning. I finally scheduled and announced another 2 day course. The pigeon thing in NYC is all set. I'm talking to that documentary film maker from NYU on the phone tomorrow about working with her. They did a big article about me in the local paper for the island that I was hunting igu@nas on early in my FL trip. I tried for some geese out at my parents' ponds in the middle of the day today but nothing was there. Although I did see some FUCKING HUGE carp in the lower pond that I had no idea existed. Literally, some of these things were over 30 inches long. An expedition will be made for a few of those fuckers, probably with a cast net. I don't like being at home. Its a fucking pig sty here. I want to get back out on the road and get more work done towards the book. I can't even write here with the kids and dogs and shit. Nor can I drive into town and write at a library or something, since Trish's car is still broken and she keeps needing to use mine. Tomorrow she and the kids are going to R1chmond for the day and I'll be here alone and I can finally get some writing done. I've just been asked by my editor to completely re-organize several chapters of the deer book and I want that shit out of the way pronto. My mind needs to be back on the new book right away and I really need to get first drafts of the chapters for this last trip written quickly while it is all still fresh in my mind. Fuck, I need to get that audio recorder back to my NPR producer on Monday. I should send her an email about it. You know what I'm kind of sick of? People acting like I'm on some kind of permanent vacation. Trish included. As much as I thought that my first month, post-day-job, would be like that, it isn't. I work every fucking day. No exceptions. Its 7 minutes past midnight and I'm still sitting up here writing emails and fiddling with my calender. Like today I didn't really want to drive 45 minutes each way to try to find some geese to hunt. I wanted to lay on the couch and watch a movie. It was hot as hell outside today but I had to go try for geese because I have a workshop on eating wild geese to teach in like 2 or 3 weeks. That is work. In every sense of the word. Even in Florida on this 11 day trip I only had 1 day that was really free. The rest of the time I was either driving somewhere or hunting lizards or scouting or interviewing people or being interviewed or doing voice overs or butchering strange dead things and turning them into food. Let alone having time for, you know, actual WRITING. Which is sort of the work that is the whole point of all of this. The retarded part is that when all of this effort finally pays off and I get a TV show and a nice advance for the new book and things are going well, most people are going to say "dude is so lucky, he gets to just go fishing and whatever all day long and they just hand him all of this money for that." Whatever payday I finally get will come after over a year of constant, daily toil. Month in and out without a day off. Waking up at 3 am every other day or so and driving to the office to write or edit until everyone else came in and it was time to do my day job until 6pm. All of this preamble will be invisible and it will just look like I got handed $100k or whatever out of the blue to fart around with a rifle and a fishing rod. I have changed a lot in this process. I've had to leave out a lot of things that I would have rather been a part of my life. I've become more focused than I ever have on anything else in my entire life. Sometimes I fear that I may have become a bit of a bore in the process, because I *have* to think about a very few things all of the time. No more architecture and decorating and politics and weird philosophy. Precious little reading of fiction. How long can I keep this up? 12:22 a.m. - 2010-09-26 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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