Literary Connections

Or Lack Thereof

Photo by Syd Wachs on Unsplash

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I want to start a new novel but I don’t know where to begin. Over the past year I reached, for the very first time, if not the lack of knowing what to write about (crazy for me), then at least low on the speedometer as far as how fast I can produce ideas, content, characters, etc. Of course my Main Thing has usually—almost always—been heavily autobiographical. Maybe I don’t have anything in me truly bigger than that or genuinely beyond that. Or maybe I do and I just haven’t found it yet. I’m hoping over the next 2-3 years as I release more books and build up my stack more and more, that I’ll start to gain a bigger and bigger following. As I said before about Substack and books, and as most serious writers understand: It’s all about The Long Game. The long, slow, realistic, upward arc of the career.

Unless, of course, you’re that lucky cunt Norman Mailer. What a fucker. I finished The Armies of the Night. Brilliant yet also navel-gazing, anecdotal, very boring for long stretches, self-absorbed, overly poetic (which I both respected and disliked at once), and filled to the brim with gorgeous, profound little angelic notions. The March on Washington DC, October 21, 1967. Mailer broke through the gates and got arrested and spent a few days in jail. Fascinating look at the inner workings of the bureaucracy; Kafka’s The Castle territory.

But. Mailer. I realize more and more—every time I read another biography—how much connections matter, something I’ve always been in short supply of (but not devoid of entirely). It reminds me of that arrogant asshole writer I met at that NY Public Library (NYPL) author reading—I forget who the main author was now—back in 2017. (I picture now the two growling statue lions in front of the magnificent, epic building along 5^th Avenue.) My ex and I were together still back then. We lived in the El Cerrito house across the bay from San Francisco. I went to Manhattan for two weeks. I rented a little studio via Air BnB on East 74^th Street. I spent most of the time alone, wandering into bookstores, going to literary readings, exploring Central Park, and writing, working on what would become my first autobiographical novel in what I still hope to be a literary trilogy around my hardcore wild hitchhiking days, circa 2006 to 2010.