Woe Is Me, Woe Is You. Whoa, Now Wait Just a Cotton Pickin' Minute!

Y'know, it's been a long while since I've indulged myself in a good old-fashioned mean spirited rant on this blog, and no one to my mind deserves to feel the brunt of one more than Garrison Keillor, a man who might be considered our generation's Mark Twain, if Mark Twain was a plodding, unfunny huckster intent on shucking a brand of faux Americana homespun cornpone horse manure - a nostalgia that's been so leached of vitality it doesn't even have the decency to stink. Seriously folks, if this man is lamenting the fall of the old publishing paradigm and the rise of 18 million writers with 14 readers each, then I say give me a baker's dozen and a sledgehammer and stand clear. God only knows this tired old industry could use the change.

But I suspect that none of this is really about change, good or bad. It's about money, something Garrison Keillor, Inc. alludes to not once but twice in his mercifully short and almost certainly well-compensated pap piece for the Baltimore Sun. Money. After all, biscuits ain't free, not even those bland, largely indigestible rocks stamped out by a certain copyrighted Midwestern purgatory.

To that I say this: Don't worry, Garrison Keillor, Inc., you're not going to starve. Not, that is, unless you chew at the same agonizing pace that you monologue.

Fools go, so do all, but fools keep going. . .

And so do I. I'm not sure why. I promised myself that when my new novella was finished (It is done, and I'm quite pleased with it) I would take the rest of the year off from any serious new writing. That's a funny turn of phrase, take the rest of the year off. Like this is my job, writing. If it was I would starve; not for a lack of quality, only a dearth of paying readers. Water everywhere. . . But writing is not my job. It's an exhausting passion. Half a year away from everything but this blog, my surf journal, and a few odd bits of verse doesn't sound too bad at all.

There's just one problem: I've already started a new project, a relatively ambitious one, if ambition and hubris can lay claim to being cousins. Worse than that, I'm enjoying the work. The research, the planning, the small, imperfect passages I've already committed to paper and to memory. All of it. Never, Dear Reader, never trust in the promise of a writer. That's true in so many ways, isn't it?