cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Inhuman Well alright. I have my second book contract nailed down. What I've got with it is some clarity. Publishing one book could have been a fluke. But now that I have my second book under contract, with about 20,000 words already complete, with real credibility I can say that I am a bona fide author and that I have made a career of this and that I am firmly in the club. That's what I wanted. That's what I'd intended to achieve since I was a kid. And here it is. I've fought and worked and sacrificed and clawed my way to this. None of this has been easy. Sometimes its been brutal. I have literally killed to forge myself a writing career. There are many people with far greater talent as writers than I have who didn't make it anywhere near this far. I have writing friends and acquaintances who are twice my age who haven't managed to get two books deals yet. They are jealous and kind and wondering how in the hell I've managed it in such a short period of time, as these things go. Well, I did it by being desperate and brutal and cunning and tenacious. I threw everything I had at it. I risked or sacrificed everything I had. I transformed every element of my self into something singularly focused on victory. That same pinpoint of will that I used to kill when my children were hungry. And next year I will sit on a panel at the book festival with a pitcher of water and a glass in front of me. It will be terribly civilized. And earnest people will ask me how I made it and what advice I would give to aspiring writers. They don't want to know what I have to say. That you should first be desperate and hungry and needful in a terrible way. That you should need food for your hungry children and that you should cultivate in yourself the constant vision of tearing out the throat of your prey with your teeth so that when the moment comes you will not hesitate. Because YES, I visualized this. When we were hungry I thought all day and all night about leaping on to my prey and tearing the throat of the deer open with my teeth. And I was ready and I became a coiled spring that leaped and killed in many different ways with rifle and knife when the time came. I wanted to kill and the constant vision of killing allowed me to kill and so to feed my children. And I know that this has made me uncivilized and unfit for the company of other men and women. I know this. I know that the things I have suffered through have made me less than human. Please understand that everything I have done has been for the sake of love and desperation. This same course of honing a razors edge also made me what I am as a writer. It was that same hungry desperation that made me fight for publication of this new book. Not very good advice to the aspiring writer, is it? For the love of all that is holy, go and do and be something else, if ever you can. 2:48 a.m. - 2011-03-12 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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