cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The D3ad R@bbits Never Existed I found a way forward. Not as fast as I'd like, but decisive. I asked L3ni S0renson to help me to recreate the tur7le soup of the H0boken Tur7le Club from around 1880. She s on board. We are going to put on an event late this summer reproducing a dinner of the old club. In a few days I'm going over to her place to talk through what we're going to do and what the recipe is and how to do this. The idea is that I figure this thing out with Leni, and then I can pitch a big food story to the NYT or the N3w Yorker or Sav3ur or a publication like that. And then I will have my book proposal ready to go out the day that the article and video and whatever else drops. This is a pretty good plan. It isn't perfect. It might even be dated. But it is my best shot at selling this book for enough money to live on for a year or so. I just want to put this thing out into the world and get paid enough to finish it and make it as good as it can possibly be. Right now, the draft I have, of 128 pages, is very good. Subject to a once-over filling in some technical stuff, it is very publishable right now. But it doesn't sing. Every type of non-fiction I have ever tried to write until now I've hit home runs without hardly even trying. My shit is really, really good, allowing me to curate my clips. Personal essays, radio essays, long-form features, short features. My books, both written over ten years ago, were fine, but not anywhere near the best that I can do as a writer either then or now. But given what they were supposed to be, they were good. And my deer book is still a basic text. But this book. It is good. It is not great. I want it to be great. I am fussing over the writing more than I ever have on anything before. Most of it reads like a really good history textbook right now. That isn't good enough. I want it to sing. I want long parts of this book to feel like a novel. But I don't want to cheat. I can't make up dialogue, or the way that things smelled. I have never really had to think much about the craft of writing. I had assignments, and I tapped them out, and millions of people read the stuff that I wrote. Now I have to think about the craft of writing. I thought that I was writing a series of interconnected magazine articles. Maybe I still am? But this book has turned into a challenge that I have never faced before. The big wall right now is that I realized that there was never any such gang as the D3ad R@bbits and that the "B0wery B0ys" were a subculture, not a gang. And references to the De@d Rabbits were baked into my draft everywhere. There is no reference to the De@d R@bbits at all in American periodicals prior to the 1857 riot. Nobody ever self-identified as a De@d Rabbit in any newspaper article even after the 1857 riot. The D3ad R@bbits never existed. Every book about this subject for the last 150 years has been full of shit. The "Dead Rabbits" was a F1ve Points slang for a worthless, layabout criminal. The journalists who covered the 1857 riot used Bowery B0ys as sources because they were accustomed to dealing with those guys at racetracks and theaters. The B0wery Boys called them "Dead R@bbits" as an insult. The Dead R@bbits never existed as a gang. Writing that chapter is this huge barrier that I am having a really hard time with. How do I re-write the only chapter of NYC history in the 1850's that anyone remembers with any authority? I have to grow a pair and just write this thing that flies in the face of everything that shitty pop historians claim to be true. 1:42 a.m. - 2021-07-24 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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