cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Looking back So I got front-paged again on Sl@te. The comments went up around 450. It was, like my previous article for them, one of the most popular articles on the site. I just finished the first draft of my next piece for Sl@te. Its really good. This one is for the food section rather that the science section, although it is actually more science-focused than either of my other articles for them. I'm analyzing the evolutionary history of meat t@sting like chick3n. My article that just ran was my classic sort of swashbuckling stuff with action and danger and ecology and a call to action. I like that this next article will be more science-driven. I need to prove that I can be versatile. I've been writing here for over 12 years (under a different name before this one). This entry from 2007 is a good example: http://cellini.diaryland.com/070813_52.html This is the culmination of years of work. As I laid out here in this diary years ago, I was setting out to become something that I thought the world needed. A modern deity of the hunt. A representative of manhood and adventure. Right now I am pretty close to achieving that. I wasn't boring before I transformed my life the way that I did a few years ago. Many of the stories that I wrote about my life were compelling and really worth reading. I had forgotten that. For the last few years I've been desperately trying to cram as much adventure in as possible. A constant mission to make my obituary as interesting as possible. I have done some very dangerous things. Repeatedly hunting w1ld boar on foot in Texas armed only with a kn1fe. Skin-diving with a spear for venomous l1onfish in the Bahamas. I am still notorious among the surfers and artists of N0rth C@rolina's outer b@nks as the crazy fuck who walked there from the city of V1rginia Beach in order to write an article about it. Next month I'm leaving on a week-long expedition into the coastal swamps to look for proof of the w1ld allig@tors in V1rginia that aren't supposed to exist. Then speaking gigs in Maine and PA, followed by a book tour. But in retrospect I had very good things to write about even before I did all of this. The really good material that I find myself sorting out into books and short stories, both in my mind and on the keyboard, are mostly not these sorts of swashbuckling adventures. I think about what the light looks like on certain days through the trees. Funny stories about family members which are often a bit tragic in the long run. Great characters I knew as a teenager. That sort of thing is where my best material will come from. But I probably couldn't have gotten to this point without having become this. I don't know how else I could have built an audience and gotten publishing deals. I'm not sure how most professional writers do it. How they build a career. My entire professional career was built out of baiting the NYT to interview me and then leveraging that interview to get an entire article written about what I was doing. All of it goes back to that one email that I leveraged into a career. I am literally a high school drop-out, if you want to get technical about it. I left high school a year early to go to college, but then 4 years later I ran out of money to finish college. By rights I should have been awarded a degree on the basis of credits completed, but I had to transfer twice and they only took a certain percentage of credits each time. But the bottom line is that I have neither a high school nor a college diploma. Ha. Way back in January of 2008 I wrote something here that is worth revisiting: "I am an utterly ordinary person with no special talents or amazing accomplishments. I chalk it up to one important thing that I had the good fortune to figure out very early in life: that it is just as easy to make friends with people of consequence as it is with those of no consequence." This remains extremely good advice. 1:38 a.m. - 2012-08-15 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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