(short blog)

Just one of those days. I finally get round to looking at submissions and I’m thinking PUBLISH A RECORD NUMBER. LET ALL COMMON SENSE FLY OUT THE FUCKING WINDOW. YES INDEED. It’s the kind of mood I’m in. Given that capitalism is about to collapse anyway. SHEEYIT…

I have to say this is the DAMN PROUDEST I’ve been in, in a long time. I haven’t felt encouraged in a long time. I have been beleaguered, poor and struggling for a while now. And lonely. Damn lonely. I don’t mean in the ‘Bull Durham’ ‘ah was lownleee’ way where a woman just wants some lurrve, I mean Bakhtin lonely, Che lonely, Troy Davis lonely, you know, just sitting in here working and believing, even though I know the cunts are coming at me soon with their spears, lances and kill-‘em-bitches torches. Believing all on my lonesome without any power or money or success to show off to the whores out there who only see success, who are terrified of any real action because they are blinded by their terror of being called ‘losers’… Believing, so the other lazy cunts out there will have something to believe in when their world finally starts to fall apart too and they won’t be able to blame the poor or the colored or some other ‘losers’ they can’t look down on anymore and will have to face the fact that they were getting buggered by the wealthy and the STATE all the fucking time (sad sacks)…

I haven’t written a blog in such a long time, I don’t even know what it means. I have (if you can believe it) been focusing on me. Baha! Yes indeed, cue laughter. No. That is crap. I have been working mostly, editing, coaxing, encouraging, mothering, you know all the shit that publishers and editors do. I created Revenge Ink. And like all viciously loyal mothers, serial killer or not, I will love my dead-dog-ugly offspring to the bitter end.

But yes, I have also been writing. In spits and spurts. A few stories. Trying. A paragraph here and there, on a thread of biled hatred or anger or just plain whiskey venom. There are days you get barf sick of people, stupid wretched fucked-up human beings, no matter how beautiful and perfect, and you need and will have, only yourself, the word and any brain-numbing liquid you can find. The more expensive, the better. I admire Bukowski. But I am a woman when it comes to liquor, I will only drink the best. And I will drink it in the right kind of glass, clean too. Spotless. Bourgogne if you please, and a damn good whisk(e)y. No cheap stuff for yours truly, no matter how hard it gets to pay the bills.

But there will be NO BITTER END. Not here folks. If you want to see someone give up and go all reasonable, savvy and whatnot, move on, find a sadder story somewhere else. Not here. I have been reading all your submissions, you wonderful sick isolated talented freaks, and I am loving them all. Well not all, obviously. Some will be rejected, only because I am a human being and will have my dislikes and likes. But I am damn proud of what I’ve been reading. It has whetted my deadened appetite for destruction, rebellion and shocking the bubon’d body public. It has inspired me back to some sort of love for life and myself. Because I have to say. I am feeling a great deal of self-love right now. You know, for creating this here refuge for the furiously talented. And the furious tout court. And that is the only true kind of love there is. The Hindu goddess is a monument to self-love. Without her absolute self-love there is no universe. The Hindu universe is not about love shared by two reasonable money-saving cocks in a happy suburb, it is about ruling the universe on your own because the source of all things is you, inside and outside, the disgusting with the divine. There is no other truth than this, no other indeed.

Right, back to the grindstone. Thought I’d reach out to you all. Since it’s been a while. And you have been loyal and caring. The world is a-changing folks. You’d better find a good reason for living soon, if what you have right now is only money. If it is. And you don’t find anything better, you’re fucked. You heard it here first!

TCHINN fecking TCHINN TCHINN!

wow. so THIS is what it feels like to write… damn authors. i feel like an old peasant mamma with hair on her chin who recalls what it was like to fall in love… (meanwhile the old fart upstairs pisses into his bowl with G-force, like he’s climbed up on a chair to do it, oh to stifle him in his sleep).

To write! the creativity, the thrill, the rampant unchecked (but entirely private) hostility i start to feel when i write… Bliss!

It’s sad, it’s fantastic, I’m writing again. I’m working on a novel, a second one, in case you were confused and hadn’t bought or read my first, UGLY DUCKLING (big crime in my book!). It feels wonderful but the cycles of creativity are hard to bear. A friend of mine used to say to me, oh no wonder you’re in a crap mood, you’re writing again! It was a variant of the ‘oh you have your period’ jibe, but unfortunately true.

My novel-writing isn’t a fun thing. I mean it is when I start, it feels like being in love again, like being with a sacred lover. A sacred, secret, deep and extremely fulfilling lover. But then it starts to go downhill because such a jealous, exhausting lover, I hope you never have! Like I said in my last blog post, writing is a sculpting of the emotions. All art is strictly speaking the same, but writing and music are the most mystical. They don’t use solid materials. They use abstract units of meaning, even if words require paper and books, and music requires a recording medium (now). But in actual terms, writing and music use no materials for their creation. They go straight to the heart, soul, brain, nervous system. Music is perhaps the most mystical of the arts. But words themselves are mystical if you think about it. Why certain sounds to express meaning? A constantly shifting use of sounds among different peoples? Words themselves, in this sense, being formed of sounds, are a subset of music. And therefore profoundly, undeniably, inescapably mystical.

At least that’s how I see it. In today’s shit-bucket world, good writing is all about rules and highly schooled gibberish. But I don’t like that kind of writing. Perfect form doesn’t move me. I like writing that reaches beyond the intellect and the rules of form and literary crapola, and enters the heart in a rapturous, unmediated, gut-munch sort of way. I like it messy, I like words that feel unique, immediate, unrehearsed, and even if they are rehearsed, I like it when they feel they are made of raw human flesh, when they aren’t fantastically perfect and artificial. Such writing has emotional weight as far as I’m concerned, it carries mystical possibilities. Bukowski moves me for this reason. John Updike does not.

The way I write is, if not mystical, definitely mysterious. It builds up, to paraphrase Bukowski, and then gob-smashes down on me like a giant wave. WHOOSH! But unlike Hank for whom it was a pleasure, with me writing is not. Well not entirely. I am deeply happy when I’m writing at long last. It feels like I’m alive again, like I was dead all this time that I wasn’t writing. So it isn’t work either, I don’t mean that. But when I write, I control little of what’s going on. I feel like I’m in a trance or something (although I’m not) and that the book is writing itself (although it isn’t). Of course it isn’t. But it sure feels like it is. I have to run almost, like a child who’s being dragged along the street by a mother who’s too tall and so the kid has to rush and run constantly to keep up. It’s exhausting. Debilitating, depressing. The images arrive, the words, in a rush of blindness, they don’t wait, the mood descends, the movement is there. It must be followed. And followed NOW, relentlessly, without time or space for rest. It’s like a rhythm that must be kept up with, snip snap, clip clap, no time for sitting, reflecting, looking out at the trees. I do not form, set down or create. Gopal, my brother, writes like that. I do not. I write like a bedeviled fool, like I’m possessed by demons, a despicably divine madness. And this is why my emotions do the f*cking shimmy when I start to write a book. It sounds crazy when you put it like that. Write a book. It sounds impossibly huge. Unfeasable. Last year, when I was accepting manuscripts from authors and doing no writing myself, not a word (except something resembling a diary), I marveled that anyone would be fool enough, insane enough, to waste their lives writing a book. It seemed absurdly time-consuming, I admired anyone who could do it. And I wondered how I had been able to do it, me! And why, why on earth! Like other people, I even used the word ‘discipline’ about writing. Man, I thought, these people who stayed home for days on end and sat in front of their computer and wrote this stuff. But how?

When I write, it has nothing to do with discipline. It is a type of enslaved dementia. If I have a sense of clear controled words that I am typing, when I do have a sense of that, the writing is crap, banal, laborious. So over the last few years, I have learned not to write when I’m in that state. When it doesn’t ‘come,’ I don’t write. This can be depressing too. When I’m not writing, and the mood can disappear for days, I feel like I’ve been dumped by that ruthless (but divine) demon lover. And I get wrenchingly depressed. It is good to have a boy around at such times, or booze, friends, restaurant dates, but life doesn’t work that way. I hope not to go through that this time. This time I have Revenge Ink (yeah right). No really, I hope this time, to be good about it all (?!).

For all these reasons, there is the slight wearing thin of my emotional state when I write. I write when I’m in the mood, but I tend to work to exhaustion. Outside of the world of what I’m writing, I become alone and moody. It’s ups and downs all the way. I have to admit, this time, my inner imaginative world has yet to fully come alive. I am too distracted with Revenge Ink. But I am buzzing around it, I write and scratch and carve. Even if the world doesn’t fully show itself and only peeps out dimly from behind the Bodhi bushes, I hack at it because I have no choice. I tell myself it is showing itself gradually and even for that I must be grateful. Because even this feels fantastic. It is an unbelievable act of grace to be able to write. To be bestowed this gift, this inner beautiful world. Even if it is the world of my already lived life.

When I’m not writing, I am equanimous, well ok, not quite, but I am even-keeled. Self-contained. I am pleased to potter about, I pass the time, I watch TV, I do this and that. But when I’m writing, time begins to hang heavy, things go cock-eyed, I feel like I’m hanging off a cliff of some sort. And I don’t like it.

But here I am. Damned bloody grateful for the new book that is installing itself in my soul, and f*cking delighted to accept the shit with the bliss, the beatitude, the sheer incredible honor of writing. I thank the stars. Or my own inner spirit. For having chosen this life.

Amen!

(Original blog date: 07/12/09)

Let it be clear, I am not a publisher. I am a writer who publishes. Why? Because I am doing what the publishers out there should be doing, but aren’t. Not properly anyway.

Today’s writer is a slave to the money society. The money society as represented by the marketing cohorts of the ‘publishing industry’. But books can never be part of an INDUSTRY. No more than can children, family, love, sick or old people.

The money society is not a trading society. Trade has existed forever. No, the money society is one where everything is subsumed under the capitalist obsession with value-addition. A vulgar stupid despicable concept. A transactional stencil that we apply to everything these days: to women’s bodies (they must be of the model-type, the pornstar-type, or the young-girl-type to command a high price); to our own selves (we must have ‘marketable’ skills to matter); and that has even made love transactional. So that now you have two kinds of love: conditional (that comes with a money-back guarantee if you get fat, old or ugly) and unconditional (the old-fashioned kind, which I gather exists somewhere under the rainbow, where Sex and The city meet).

Let it be said: a civilization that runs its affairs according to such a low, conformist, anti-spiritual, inhuman concept can have no future but the shithouse. It will leave no trace. And indeed, while ancient civilizations have left behind monuments built to the gods, the West prepares to leave nothing behind but toxic waste. The only vestiges of Western capitalist culture will be its monumental hillocks of trash.

Anyway, once I had created Revenge Ink (in a fit of enthusiasm upon reading Blake, as I think I’ve mentioned before) I figured I might as well share my good (or bad) fortune with other writers. Now this is truly heroic. It is a generally acknowledged (and largely true) fact that writers are not the nicest brand of people. They aren’t the worst either. But insecurity, narcissism, vanity, passive aggression, envy, neuroses of the most unbearable kind plague writers. Worse than other people? Probably not. Then again maybe. I don’t know. But the point is, for one writer to deal with other writers is nothing short of miraculous. A rare and award-deserving show of solidarity. Especially since writers tend to be so self-obsessed, solidarity means as little to them as caviar to a camel.

But I don’t care. I’m not in this for the moral satisfaction, pleasure or the money. Revenge Ink is for me a side-dish, a service rendered to contemporary society, a big up-yours to the big guys who believe publishing is a favor done by their august selves to what they believe to be a mentally-challenged (and largely useless) species (writers). This is why they (the publishers) like a certain kind of mythologized writer best: the bourgeois hack who sucks their asses for a living but in public claims to write high, anti-populist literachure. Not me. I prefer writers who don’t give a crap. Who behave like self-serving dickwipes if they have to or as poised and mature professionals if it comes naturally to them (a rare type, but they do exist). Either way, they must be themselves because this proves they are individuals. I don’t like to make writers feel they are children. I don’t like writers who conform.

Why? Because I am a writer. And I don’t demand that I like myself. I don’t demand that I be like other people. I don’t demand that I be popular. I demand that I be myself. And so, while publishing is a side-dish for me, the main and most delicious course will always be my writing. My world. My words. Ironically, this is the only way, I believe, to guarantee that I will respect other writers. Because I will prefer to leave them alone, as I expect them to do with me. We can only ever respect each other as true individuals. As unique and surprising human beings. Never as predictable ants in a fixed hierarchy. We are not ants. We were never meant to be.

So go ahead. Spread the word.