cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Holy crap, my book is pretty much done. I pretty much finished it. The book which I have been writing for three and a half years is basically done, excepting about two pages that I have to write finishing the story of The Allen taking over the 5th Assembly District of the Republican Party with the help of a member of the H0boken Turtl3 Club. And then getting stabbed with an ice pick. This book is now 94,000 pages. The timeline that I put together to write it is 84,000 pages. This is the hardest thing that I have ever done in my life. It was more time and effort than making 0ur Streets. It was way more work than writing E@ting Aliens. I have spent years of my life with my head in the 1850's to 1890's. Now I am about two weeks away from selling this thing. There seems to be a few hundred thousand people who buy every groundbreaking book about New York City history. If even half of them might buy this book then I should be in a good place. Imagine if Mark Kurlansky had written the Gangs of New York, and that it included murders, recipes, culinary history, corruption, determining the outcomes of a few presidential elections, and an epic love story involving an alleged French baron. I don't know how to sell this thing, because it isn't like any other non-fiction book. It isn't following anything else. It's a history of the American paramilitary instinct, and a story about how NYC street gangs brokered power, and all of these bizarre, funny diatribes along the way with cannibalism and fixing elections and random bits of Black history. It is the thing that I have most worked at, more than anything else. I have fought really hard to finish it over the last few weeks, ignoring everything else and hitting 6,000 words a night. Alex is still trying to have some sort of dialogue. I met what looked like a super hot little older woman, about 5 feet tall, a few weeks ago at a concert. She texted me, I showed up at her house which she is badly renovating after her pending divorce. Her decorating was awful. I think she might be Pentacostal. I fucked her on her couch at her insistence after cooking her dinner and cleaning her kitchen. She turned out to be super anorexic and I am appalled at everything about her. Meanwhile, Alex, texting me, leaving a voice mail message some hours ago after I had called her, which I have not listened to yet. Shit or get off the pot, Alex. Commit to an actual relationship or go away. I started looking for beta readers for my book last week, finding them on a NYC history online community. Eight have signed up and I haven't heard a word back from any of them. Which is terrifying, but it is a 94,000 word draft and most people just read a few pages before bed. I have no idea whether this book is brilliant or confusing garbage. And that means that I have no idea how to plan for my life right now. I've spent years working on this book and I don't know whether it sucks. That is a scary thing. 2:04 a.m. - 2023-02-10 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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