cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cold Turkey Over the last few days I learned the lead guitar for a bunch of songs by The Breeders. 'No Aloha' and 'Saints,' in particular. Then today I started working on 'Cold Turkey' by John Lennon. Plus continuing to practice all of the Joy Division material on bass. None of it is very challenging material but that's ok. I'm having a lot of fun playing it. 'Cold Turkey' in particular has been a lot of fun today. I play that shit really, really fucking loud. I live out in the country so I might as well enjoy it and make a big racket. With the Breeders songs and with Cold Turkey I feel like I've really nailed the tone and the feel for the lead parts. I'm playing my old Fender Stratocaster that I've had since I was 12 years old, run straight through an old 1970's Peavey amp with reverb. Everyone is suddenly getting really psyched about the foreign rights potential for the second book. My ex-agent, who is still the agent of record for that book and has the legal right to act as agent for foreign rights, actually seems to be getting up off of her ass to do something about it. I bit the bullet and emailed her a few days ago. She has fortunately handed this phase of the work off to a specialist in foreign rights sales, who will be taking the book to the L0ndon Book F@ir in April. The wonderful thing is how very many different markets that there are for this. If everyone does their job here then this could be my salvation for the next year. Even so-so foreign rights deals would probably add up to enough money to keep the bills paid for most of a year while I write some more books as fast as humanly possible. This foreign rights thing will probably decide what happens with my career from here on out. If I can get at least $30k or so then that buys me another year to keep writing. If I can't get any real money out of foreign rights sales then I will probably have to look for a day job at the end of the summer and that would probably represent the end of my career as an author. Its hard to write books and travel around the country and the world, or go on book tours, when you have to show up for a 9 to 5 job. So we'd better sell some fucking foreign rights to overseas publishing companies. I think that there is still enough lead time here before the August deadline, financially. These deals usually take months to sell and put together and then because its publishing everyone has their thumbs up their asses and will take an extra month or longer to actually write the check and put it in the mail once they have an agreement. Six months should hopefully be enough time for money to start reaching me from these prospective deals. I'm sleepy. And I'm fucking broke and getting really sick of that. And I miss Helenah. We're trying to figure out what we're going to try to make our lives look like starting this summer when she finishes her masters degree. It looks like she's probably going to be offered a permanent position with N@tional Ge0graphic. On one hand, this is awesome because my girlfriend will be a filmmaker for NG. On the other hand, that will keep her living in DC, which is a pain in the ass for us in terms of distance. Two hours on the train each way isn't too bad, I guess. 2:33 a.m. - 2012-02-18 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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