Category Archives: Memoirs

Another Writer Accused of Making Stuff Up

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The “Three Cups of Tea” author, Greg Mortenson, has been accused of making up stories in his book.  Accused by Jon Krakauer of CBS’s 60 Minutes, Mortenson denies the falsehood claim and is not commenting further due to a medical condition he is suffering from recently. Unfortunately, with him out of commission and not on record to defend himself, the media frenzy will probably swarm him at this horrible time for him. Hopefully, he gets a chance to defend himself, and the truth is reached, regardless of what that truth might be.

With this accusation, the writing community appears to be undergoing yet another challenge, as it did when the whole James Frey controversy occurred with “A Million Little Pieces”, a book that featured numerous made-up events in a book claimed to be entirely non-fiction. Hopefully, the accusations will not continue to paint a dark light on the many works other writers have put out there, making it so that readers walk into every bookstore, expecting fiction in the non-fiction section and accepting each memoir produced as a “quasi-” real account.

I recently published my “Neo Revolutionary Messages” on Kindle and Nook, and I promise that it is entirely non-fiction, as it is an analysis of the August 1991 Coup d’etat in the Soviet Union (where Boris Yeltsin challenged the hardliners when they imprisoned Mikhail Gorbachev). Yet, with stories like the one I linked here, there’s always the fear that a reader is going to think the author took liberties with the facts for the sake of trying to tell a better story.

An Unknown Writer’s Circle of Pseudo-Support

Memoirs, Writing, , , , , ,

Like most writers, I have this recurring fantasy. It involves a large library, thousands of books, a bowl of jello and Jessica Alba. Oh wait, that’s a different fantasy. The fantasy I’m talking about involves this vision of one day looking back on today as a seasoned, professional writer who has made it and wonders why the journey to get where I got was so hard, so long and so filled with obstacles. But one thing that keeps coming back to me, and to many writers like me, is remembering all of those friends who stuck by you through the struggle. And to be honest, I can count on one hand the close friends of mine who actually stuck by me. The rest, not so much.

To be honest, I think this is something most artists deal with on a constant basis. I have a friend of mine who is a struggling filmmaker. He’s actually pretty good at what he does, and I have a lot of respect for his work in that field. As a matter of fact, he finished his latest film just a short while ago, and when it came time for the premiere, of all of the friends at work, only two or three actually attended. The rest kept asking about it, wanting to know when it was going to happen, and then when it did, they all mysteriously had other things they had to do.

That’s what happens to a lot of us artists when we hit that point of trying to actually introduce one of our works into the public realm. When I published my first novel, people said, “oh, that’s great” and that was all they wanted to say about it. None of them were actually interested in reading it. Oh, they’d say nice things in pleasant circumstances, but they really weren’t interested in the fact that I was struggling to be a writer, and it was about the only thing that mattered in my life. They’d talk endlessly about their families, their dreams and aspirations, but when it actually came to picking up a copy of my book, Osama Bin Laden was more popular than I was.

I did a simple experiment a few weeks ago, which I repeated a few days ago, because I was actually interested in how far friends would actually go on this sort of thing. I have most of my normal friends, and former acquaintances, as Facebook friends. So, as I have a simple little comic strip called The Adventures of Stickman & the Unemployed Legospaceman, I thought it might be interesting to start up a Facebook page for that strip itself. Then I sent out a “like” request to all of my “friends”. That was several weeks ago. To this date, five people have “liked” it. One was me. Another was that filmmaker friend I talked about. That means three others appeared from practically everyone else I know. Three.

So, I repeated that experiment by putting one of my books out onto Facebook as well. Six people have liked it. That filmmaker friend of mine, and my friend Melanie from Germany. Including me, that means 3 people have added it, and none of them are any of my actual Facebook friends who have been friends for the years I’ve been on Facebook. Kind of tells you something, if you take the time to think about it. It’s kind of depressing as well.

Which leads me to realize that if most other artists are going through this sort of support from the people they know, it says something really crappy about the way social networks interact with our psyche. I’ve talked to a lot of professional writers over the years in their formulative years, when they were really struggling, and they’ve all said something similar, kind of pointing out that the art is a lonely art, but not just because you have to be alone to write. Quite often writers feel abandoned and write from that place, and once they actually make it, seek out new sources of friendships because it’s very hard to look back at the friends you had before when so few of those friends stood by you during the toughest times.

I’m finding it quite telling that some of my closer companions these days tend to come from people who have found me through my blog, or others who have contacted me through circles of writing, rather than through my normal, already established social networks. While it leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, it also leaves me wondering if the future is a series of connections yet to come rather than the ones that seem to be dislatching from behind.

It’s a lot like the feeling I’ve always had from my family when I first mentioned that I was going to be a writer. Instead of respect, awe or even interest, I received condemnation and ridicule, almost as if it wasn’t something to be taken seriously. When I received my first positive review on Amazon, rather than say, “that’s great, Duane!” I heard, “so did one of your friends write the review, or did you write it?” That was from my family. So, you can imagine how long the desire for success in this field has been burning for me.

That’s really all I have to say about that.

The Hardest Book You’ll Ever Write: Book Number Two

Books, Memoirs, Writing, , , , , , , , , ,

Some years back, after I finished my first novel, I was faced with a daunting question: Could I possibly write another? For anyone who has never written a first novel, this probably sounds like a no-brainer, but believe it or not, when I came face to face with the blank sheet of book number two, I found myself realizing that I was facing an enemy I had never imagined before.

When I was writing the first book, I had lots of bravado behind me. I mean, I had written a bunch of short stories, and inside me, I knew I had a book in me, so no matter what happened, I knew I was going to finish that first book. But when it was done, after a few months had gone by, I actually came up with the idea for the next book. And then I realized I would actually have to write it.

When faced with the second book, you find yourself in a very interesting dilemma that seems to go something like this: Well, the first book was a fluke, and everyone has at least a book in him or her, but am I really capable of sitting down and accomplishing the second book? The first book was a mystery/suspense novel that was kind of hard to pin down to its exact genre (you can see for yourself as it can be found here). The second novel was going to be a science fiction book, and although I had written a few short stories that had been published in fanzines (not having yet published in larger magazines), I was trying to convince myself that I was capable of pulling off a brand new genre on the second outing.

For days, I sat down and tried to outline the book, but nothing would come to me, because even though I had the basic idea of this novel, which I was going to call LOSER, I had no idea how to create a world that was so bizarre to me that I would have to invent it from the ground up. Yet, each day, I sat down and tried to tackle it.

And failed.

At one point, I convinced myself that this book wasn’t possible, that my first one had been a fluke. I was sure that I might be able to do another suspense book, or maybe an espionage adventure, but science fiction was definitely out of my capabilities.

At the time, my editor was the wife of a colleague of mine who sat down with me and asked me to explain what the story was about. And for hours on end, I sat down and crafted this amazing story of what I wanted to write. As I talked to her, I kept imagining all sorts of great things that would happen. And then, at one point, she told me to just sit down and make it happen.

So, for the next four months, I sat down in my chair and typed away. My first novel had been written on a typewriter, so this one actually got written on a computer with a word processor that we’d probably laugh at today. But by the time I was done, I had crafted my second novel. And even as I typed THE END, I stared at it, still not sure it had actually completed its journey.

A year later, I sat down and started work on that suspense novel I thought might have been the next novel, and it became my third novel. But each time I wrote a novel after the second one, I never imagined for a moment that I would have trouble finishing a novel again. That second one was the one that broke me of the belief I was never going to be a writer.

And I’ve been writing ever since.

Breaking News: Author Gundrum Gains Control of duanegundrum.com

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In a move that is certainly going to cause stock markets around the world to increase and decrease at different levels, depending upon other, important national and international news, the unknown author Duane Gundrum was finally able to gain control of the domain name duanegundrum.com. Up until this time, the author was limited to using littlesarbonn.com, which his many fans (often referred to lovingly as “my stuffed animals”) know is the name of one of the characters in one of his equally unknown novels. Duane, quoted in while reading an issue of the New York Times, stated: “I don’t know why I didn’t think about it before. I mean, it’s my name. Why not actually use my name for my actual web site?”

Fans across the globe have responded immediately upon hearing the news. Lindsay Lohan was quoted as stating that her career is most definitely not over, even though new work has not been forthcoming for her from major studios, although it is not exactly clear what this has to do with the acquisition of Gundrum’s new web site. Other celebrities also responded with quotations that were equally baffling, none of which seemed to have anything to do with this breaking story. Charlie Sheen replied with something that sounded like profanity, although it is not clear if it was a response related to this story. President Barrack Obama was questioned by the White House Press Corps, and he responded that even though Gundrum has acquired this web site, President Obama still feels that the need to control airspace over Libya is a priority for the United States and NATO.

We here in the media, charged with following all things Gundrum, vow to continue to bring you breaking updates on this important story.

When is it Okay to Steal Another’s Ideas?

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The other day, I was reading through different blogs, specifically looking for information about a political theory that’s always been one of my pet projects. Because my theory has never made it into the mainstream as theories go, I’ve always followed the ideas that resonate around it, wondering if the political atmosphere of academia will ever change to where my idea might start to have a bit more merit. Anyway, the other day I was following a conversational trend on a particular economic impact on international negotiations when I came across a drawn graph that immediately struck me as very similar to my theory. Well, to be honest, it was not only similar, it was the exact same graph I had drawn five years ago as an explanation of my theory.

I checked for attributions on the graph, wondering where my  name would appear, but none was given. As a matter of fact, the “author” indicated through lack of any information that the graph was completely of his own doing, that he had come up with the economic graph to prove a point that he was making.

I just stared at it, flabbergasted that someone would actually take my own work and claim it as his own. I read through the rest of his theorical post, and what I discovered was that he didn’t even use the graph correctly. So there was my information, used, abused and done so wrongly.

I sent off an email, asking for clarification of where he got the information, but never received a response. I sent off another, and still got no response. I posted a comment on his blog following the article, asking for some clarification, and a few days later, my comment was deleted. No explanation.

I had heard there were people like this, but I never believed it would ever actually happen to me. I mean, my theories are generally nuts, or so out of the mainstream that I don’t expect anyone other than a deranged scientist to ever agree with me. But there it was. Right in front of me. I sent one more email asking for any type of clarification, and the next thing I saw, the whole post just disappeared. The author never responded to me once.

What bothered me the most was that the “author” is somewhat respected in the field, which means that if the two of us were ever in the same room together, everyone would have wanted to talk to him and probably would have ignored me completely. Personally, I have no desire to drag someone’s name through the mud for reasons that really substantiate doing so, but an inner feeling asks me how many others this guy probably does the same to as well. For all I know, my situation is a very isolated incident. But who knows? Certainly not me. Or I. Never really got that grammar rule right.

As a writer, I always assumed that somewhere down the line someone would probably steal one of my ideas, but as an academic, I never actually believed it would happen in academia, or from someone who actually has a lot of respect in the field. Dont get me wrong. I’m not bitter, and I have no desire to go after someone for something like this. Personally, I’ve always accepted that most of my political theories will die with me before they ever get implemented by anyone with the ability to use them.

So I guess I’m just ranting. That’s what blogs are for, aren’t they? I mean, what would Charlie Sheen do? Don’t we always ask that when stuck in a dilemma?

This Just In! Duane’s 2011 Spending Plan Extension Has Been Approved!

Business, Economics, Memoirs, Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

brucoe 

(Brucoe, the one independent member of Duane’s government. He is still undecided on the budget.) 

Today, after a marathon session involving his partisan stuffed animals, Duane Gundrum has declared that he has come to an agreement to continue his spending plans for the next few weeks. Up until this time, his conservative stuffed animals, led by Scruffy the Bear, were holding out for more cuts in collections from his job at the Piggly Wiggly Convenient Store. However, after promising that Duane would cut back on discretionary spending, specifically Root Beer flavored Laffy Taffy candy bars, the conservative bloc decided it would fund Duane for a short period before he would have to reexamine his finances again.

Liberal leader Elmer the bean bag frog pointed out that Duane has been making numerous sacrifices this year by avoiding payments of his electricity bill, his cell phone bill and normal expenditures of necessary pornography at the Double Juggs Adult Bookstore. In Elmer’s words: “Duane has been suffering greatly during this period of downturn, and thus, we couldn’t see any other areas in which he could cut,” even though conservatives claimed that there were areas of spending that could be curtailed, such as iPhone apps, “special” massages at the controversial Madame Wong’s Swedish Massage Parlour, and random purchases of Twinkies and Ho-Hos.

elmo darth 

(Liberal representative Elmo during a particulary tense negotiation session with the conservative whip.) 

Members of both parties recognize that without a dedicated budget agreed upon by all members, Duane will continue to barely function economically and further discretionary spending may suffer as a result. There has even been a fear of insolvency with gas purchasing and difficult to cancel Netflix memberships.

This is the third time since both parties could not come up with a budget that Duane has been forced to push a spending plan into the new fiscal year. It is hoped that a consensus can be reached by the Stuffed Animal Lobby that is influencing finances in Duane’s government. We will keep you informed of further developments.

In other news, girls still don’t want to date Duane. We go to Angela in Grand Rapids for more on this continuing story…..

women 

(A random selection of women willing to go on the record as “not interested in dating Duane”.)

If I Had the Job I Really Wanted

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I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately. Not sure why, but it just keeps coming up in my mind. I wonder what it would take to finally get the job I really want, rather than the job I actually have.

I don’t mean I don’t like my current job. It’s okay. It’s just not really all that exciting. Nor is it really that hard. It’s not even all that interesting. I’m a glorified editor who sometimes creates stuff that’s not really very creative. It requires working for the health care industry for a hospital system, and most of the stuff I do is really designed around rudimentary stuff like registration, insurance and other boring stuff that would cause most people to scream if they had to deal with on a day to day basis. Every now and then I get to contribute on some education for a surgical procedure, but it’s not like anything I contribute really helps the procedure in any way. I just make sure that people can understand it, and that no one in the chain of command (or higher up outside of the chain of command) thinks it was designed by Neanderthals.

But no, I think I’ve figured out the job I’d rather have. I just don’t think I’ll ever be able to get it. It’s not because the job isn’t something I can’t do. I’m highly qualified for it, and if I was able to find an opening, I’d probably be one of their top choices. But I don’t live anywhere near the place where this type of job is accessible, and in order to move to such a place, I’d probably have to be jobless for some time before I actually found something, and that’s never a good situation to be in.

I’m not even talking about a really, highly technical job like law or medicine either. I’m talking about something I do all of the time. As I’m a writer, I realize the job that’s perfect for me. I should be a copy editor, or an editor for a large book company.

I know these jobs are out there, and I know a lot of strong writers got their start in the field by making connections with these types of jobs. I just don’t live anywhere near where such a job might be possible.

This often gets me thinking that I’m living in the wrong place. I even moved back to the wrong place when I came back from South Korea. The San Francisco Bay Area just wasn’t the place for me, even though you’d think those jobs would be available there. I really think I should be living in New York City. I just don’t know how to make that kind of move, as I’m now kind of stuck in West Michigan right now. There’s not a lot of upward mobility when you hit your 40s. You’re kind of stuck with whatever job you can get, and often you have to stick it out, even if it’s not the best match for you.

If there was some way to obtain a job like this from afar (BEFORE moving), that might be the greatest thing ever, but I’ve never been all that successful with trying to hook up a job long distance (even though I did get the current one that way). I just really think that working for a big publishing company as an editor is the one thing I could probably do well. I sure don’t see myself getting a job with the government or anything all that exciting these days.

Oh well.

Memoir Books Are Being Slowly Replaced by Lazy Writers

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I was in the bookstore the other day looking over the selections of books when I came across a really interesting book of which I had heard nothing so far. But it looked intriguing. It was called Moby-Duck, and as you can see from the picture with this article, it is about a man who goes on a quest to discover what happened to 28,800 bath toys that were lost at sea.

So, why am I talking about this book? Well, think about the story involved in this book. The author, Donovan Hohn, actually put forth a lot of work to find out what happened to these rubber duckies and bath toys after the disappeared. In essence, he went on an epic quest, like the infamous Moby Dick to find what happened to these items. In other words, he went through a hell of a lot of work to get the story that he later transposed to paper so that the rest of us could experience his adventure.

My point is that so few people who write memoirs these days actually go through this amount of work in their adventures before sitting down and writing their “memoirs”. Instead, they suffer one bad relationship, have a bad drinking problem, or do something singularly simple and then try to convince the rest of us that it was actually an epic journey to get from one place to the other. I guess you could say I’m getting a little sick of these kinds of stories that really have no great master journey to them, no odyssey, yet are treated as if they are the epic adventures of a lifetime.

We need more writers out there who are willing to go through a little bit of work to actually come back with the story they need to tell. Instead, we get lazy writers that try to profit off of their innane adventures. And we keep buying this crap because none of us are willing to demand more from the writings that we read.

I felt this way some time ago when I was writing one of my earlier science fiction novels, Thompson’s Bounty, which was about a Coast Guard cutter that gets sent back into the 17th century. When I first started writing the novel, I actually tried to just crank it out without really knowing much about my subject, other than having watched a few old movies about pirates. Then it dawned on me that I wasn’t ready to write the novel. So I contacted the Coast Guard and requested some in person information, which led to going out with a cutter crew for several days over several weekends. It also led to a bunch of long conversations and tours on a Coast Guard base where very knowledgeable people gave me first hand information about the subject I was writing. In the end, I wound up with a book that told the story I wanted to tell instead of one that was peripheral and out of context.

Recently, I’ve been working on a novel that I originally wrote decades ago that takes place in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Originally, I kind of winged it through the story, but after doing my thesis work on the August Coup in the Soviet Union, I finally had the premise, place and event that really made up the background of the novel I wrote years before. So, I’ve been sitting down and tackling that book from the start, realizing that I now know a lot more information than I first did when I wrote that book back then.

That’s sort of the thing I’m talking about with the kind of reading I’m coming across these days. So much of it can be so much better than it is if authors would take the time to actually do the research that would make their books that much better. I remember a great scene from Billy Crystal’s Throw Mama From the Train when a woman in his creative writing class is describing a submarine story she wrote, and he comments that maybe she should actually know the name of the device she’s describing if she wants to be taken seriously in a story that involves submarines. I take his advice a bit further and say that maybe some time should be given to exploring the lifestyles and events that lead people to the moments that occur in novels so that the reader believes the author is the right person to be writing the story.

We seem to have a lot lazier writers these days with a lot of the stories and memoirs I read, but that doesn’t mean we have to settle for that. We can demand more substance, research and work. We just generally don’t. And we’re the ones who suffer as a result.

My Thoughts on Memoirs and Autobiographies

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We live in an age where we seem to get a lot of autobiographical tripe paraded before us as legitimate prose and original content. Recently, previous political leaders have released their “true” stories of their administrative actions, including Decision Points by George W. Bush and Known and Unknown by Donald Rumsfeld. I’m not going to link them because I really don’t feel like hyping their work for sale because I think they can do quite well on their own as they try to force their manufactured truths onto the public through the usual channels.

My problem with just these two works is that the reviews of these have pointed out quite admirably how the truth is extremely distorted in these works. The nation, and the world, knew what happened because we recently lived through these events, yet we have two spin doctors doing everything possible to rewrite the history of those times because they still believe in the axiom that the winner gets to rewrite the history. What both books do, and I watched an incredulously sounding interview on the Daily Show with Rumsfeld the other day that was just filled with attempts at reinventing history, is attempt to clean up a very dirty period in American history by pretending that certain things didn’t happen and others did. Both make a weak attempt to pretend that weapons of mass distruction weren’t sold to us as a given in the lead up to war with Iraq. Both books also attempt to pretend that the administration didn’t do everything possible to sell a war, even though so many other rational voices were urging for more time. The Iraq weapons inspectors were begging for more time, and the Bush Administration did everything possible to discredit their voices during this period. Colin Powell, in the greatest travesty of UN history, stood before the world and powerpointed the most falsified series of documents about WMDs the world has ever seen. To this day, that event gets glossed over, or ignored as much as possible, because there’s no way to get around the fact that the administration straight out lied about the lead up to war with Iraq. And that’s really the elephant in the room there that no amount of rewriting of history is ever going to change. Rumsfeld, himself, went way out of his way to cast Saddam Hussein as the best friend of Al Qaeda, and even his attempts at trying to rewrite the narrative on the Daily Show the other night did not change my opinion that this man is amongst the greatest disgraces to the American people of all time. Sorry, you don’t get to rewrite your history when everything you did was wrong, you lied consistently and you haven’t even acknowledged the wrongs you did in your past, especially when those wrongs led to thousands of deaths of young American soldiers.

Which then brings me to the whole memoir thing that seems to be coming out of the woodwork these days. It’s bad enough that we get tomes written by people who spend 200 and some pages lying through their ass because to tell the truth would be career and political suicide. There’s another kind of memoir that has been driving me nuts lately, and that’s the one that comes out from someone who has done nothing of greatness or significance, who somehow manages to get a million dollar contract to tell his or her life story.

First off, I have to point out that if someone is under 25, the chances of that person having a great life story that needs a book is quite minimal. Sure, you might be Alexander the Great, and have conquerered the entire known world by 30, but even he would have needed to wait a few years before writing his great autobiography, if he ever got around to doing it. But I’m sorry, Justin Bieber, who is only 17, or anyone of many celebrities who have done nothing but shake their asses in front of an audience for a few years, really don’t have all that much to share with the rest of us. I mean, honestly, how much more can Justin Bieber, at 17, tell us about his life on the road that is any more intriguing than a book by Robert Plant or perhaps Life by Keith Richards. I mean, at least these people “lived” an actual rock star life that might have a bit of content to them. Granted, I have no desire to read a book of this nature, but at least I know that which ones would actually have something interesting to tell me.

Recently, there have been tons and tons of crappy books being signed by publishing companies for autobiographies of unimportant people who haven’t been alive longer than the lifespan of my car. I’ve had this belief for a long time that a memoir should never be written by anyone who is not at least 35, and definitely not by someone who hasn’t at least done something so significant that rest of the world would stop and take notice. Someone who has spent an entire life in the movies might have a story to tell. Someone who is 13 and nominated for an Oscar because she played a spunky kid in some movie does not. A rock star who has had multiple divorces, four or five near death experiences, and quite possibly is known for ushering in the second age of rock ‘n’ roll might have a story. A Disney mousketeer who is now singing for teenyboppers probably doesn’t.

Which then brings me to the unimportant people writing important memoirs for the rest of us. Unfortunately, not all of us can be Jack London, living a bunch of different lives before finally settling down and giving us literature to ponder over for centuries. That means instead we get a lot of life stories from people who broke their cocaine habit, lived through therapy, had a really cool dog with a funny name, or just outright manufactured their history because it was the only way to get Oprah to let them appear on her show. Very few of those stories are important enough for us to really want to buy their books.

But even when someone does manage to have an important enough story for the rest of us to read, that person needs to realize he or she might not be the next Hemingway and should really stop at that one story. Dave Pelzer is a good example of this. I’m not sure if you’ve read his ground-breaking book, A Child Called “It”, which is his story of living with a seriously deranged and abusive mother. It’s a great book and really pulls at the heartstrings. Unfortunately, Pelzer felt he was onto something and has never stopped writing books about his life. The first one was great. The rest of them tired, old and overdone. At some point, you need to move on and show us that you learned something from your journey, not that the only thing you learned was it was very profitable and worthy of returning to the well over and over again.

One of the greatest memoirs I’ve ever read comes from probably the only man to ever do a memoir the right way. It was so much the right way that he spent his entire life trying to figure out how exactly to write it, and then spent his final years doing just that. I’m talking about the Autobiography of Mark Twain, which the author demanded not be released until 100 years after his death. And having just read through it, or at least the first volume of three that’s been so far released, I can say that he definitely knew what he was doing with an autobiography. I’ve learned so much about his time and the important figures around his life in so little space. Few memoirs are capable of ever transcending the page like that.

Unfortunately, we rarely get a Mark Twain to tell his story as only a Samuel Clemens can. Instead, we get lying politicians and self-important teenagers with a million dollar book contract. If only the middle ground was so much brighter.

Bristol Palin to Write the Book of Her Life…I Can’t Wait….

Memoirs, Writing, , , ,

Nothing depresses me more than to see that a woman who is 20 years old, who has done nothing special with her life other than live in the shadow of her overexposed mother who is writing her life story. As someone who has done a “little” more than the young girl who was on Dancing With the Stars, bought a house in Arizona and got pregnant during her mother’s vice-presidential bid, I’m constantly amazed that a company like Harper Collins is willing to shell out real money to fund a “book” from someone who is no more special than any teen girl across the planet. Probably much less significant, to be honest.

Yet, big book companies constantly churn out this drivel to us, as if this is what we want to read. The other part that bothers me is that somewhere, somehow, there are people who are actually going to buy what she writes, being almost as excited as someone rushing out to buy Snooki’s next bestselling book.

As a writer, this is one of the things that has depressed me like pretty much nothing else can. I’ve lived most of my life in a Jack London-ish belief that you don’t really start writing great life stories until you’ve at least lived a few of them. So I spent my life trying to do just that, and now that I’m on the winding down part of that life, my writing feels great, but the writing industry passed me by, contracting books with White House party crashers instead of actual novelists and people who tried to go the old route of living and then writing, rather than doing something sensationalist and then thinking that was the groundwork for a great writing career.

I know I’ve complained about this sort of thing before, but is this what writing in America has come down to? Are we so foolish in our pursuit of stardom that this is what we’re going to pretend is important enough for us to buy and read?

I’d write a book about it, but considering I haven’t pulled any Charlie Sheen shenanigans lately, I can’t guarantee anyone would want to read it.