A Sick Refusal to Accept Rejection

When I'm not writing, I'm still busy pimping The Good, the Spam and the Ugly. I think my first radio spot, which will air this weekend, went very well. I have one lined up for tomorrow, and I have four scheduled for next week.

The big problem with this book is making it sound as funny as it reads. I have tremendous confidence in the quality of the material. People, including the publisher's lawyers, routinely tell me they disturbed folks around them by laughing out loud while they read it. But when you talk about something funny, it has a way of sounding less funny.

I'd like to get a magazine piece published, in which I describe the process and go through a sample exchange. I already wrote the piece. I used an exchange with a guy named Lance Donald. That exchange has already been posted at Good Morning Nigeria. Here is a sample:

Allow me to offer comfort and solace with regard to the passing of your friend Mr. Sugimoto. If he were alive I would compliment him on the wisdom of depositing ten million dollars in a bank in Togo. Too many people foolishly place their savings in American banks with locking doors and flush toilets.

You say you are a civil servant. I am unclear on this. Were you Mr. Sugimoto’s butler? I only have one servant, my maid Consuelo. She is usually civil, except on mornings after her days off, when she arrives with rum on her breath and spends half the day lying on her face in the laundry room, pretending not to hear the intercom.

Here is a little more:

I humbly apologize for being so late to respond to your email. The problem was midget-related. As you probably suspected.

On Wednesday, I went out in the yard to exercise, and during my fourth set of pelvic thrusts, I spotted a feral midget leering at me from under the porch. Then I saw the garbage strewn about the driveway. At least he didn’t uproot my Brussels sprouts, baby carrots, and Tiny Tom tomatoes. For some reason midgets hit those pretty hard.

Other people take on spammers, but no one does it like that. Other scam-baiters are funny because spammers do and say funny things. As far as I know, I'm the only scam-baiter who carries the weight of the humor in his own emails. That's the big difference. The other guys do funny stuff, but they're not really writers. That's why I think my book should do well.

I'm hoping that if I can get the piece published, a good number of people will be exposed to the work itself, instead of me talking about it. I know that will sell books. The question is whether I can get the piece accepted anywhere. It has to be a high-volume magazine or newspaper. Like a million-plus. It can't be the Coral Gables Gazette.

I guess if you devote your time to improving your work and not to figuring out which butts to kiss, a career takes a while to build. But I can't imagine doing anything else. From the first time I got feedback on my first website in 2002, I felt that writing was my real job.

Last night while I was giving Marvin his "out" time, I found myself watching Donny Deutsch. I'm not a huge fan, because I have no idea how he got the show or who he is, and sometimes he comes off like Joe Franklin, the old cable MC whose show was like watching a random individual who broke into a studio, barred the doors, and figured out how to work the cameras. And when Deutsch had Bernie Goldman on his show, he let his guests crucify him like peasants getting their licks in at a witch.

The show was good last night, though. He went to the Ringling Brothers circus and talked to the nuts who worked there. And they were a surprisingly happy crew, given their close relationship to carnies. Deutsch kept repeating the same thing. He said the common thread he had found in his interviews with super-successful people was that they loved what they did. I don't know if that's true or if it was just hype, but I'm inclined to believe it. I could not make myself stop writing if I wanted to, and I have to believe it will eventually pan out.

I think you see a lot of successful, passion-driven entrepreneurs on cable these days. American Chopper. Good Eats. Monster Garage. There are an awful lot of people who are doing well now largely because of their persistent and contagious love of what they do. Sometimes it works even when they stink at what they do.

Right now, I could be charging people $350 an hour to handle their intellectual property problems, or I could be suing more employers on behalf of employees, pocketing an hourly rate which has almost no limits. But I do this instead, because I feel like this makes me count. There are literally millions of good lawyers, but no one else can do what I do, in my unique way, as well as I do it. Even today, when I'm struggling and pushing, I would rather see my books on a shelf at Barnes and Noble than a Bentley in the driveway. That makes me persistent and hard-working, so maybe in time the Bentley (or at least a nice Lexus) will follow.

I know it will sound funny to a person who doesn't write, but I get tremendous satisfaction from doing my job--for which there is no degree program or graduate school--well. And as crazy as it sounds, I believe what I do requires a level of skill as rare as the ability to perform brain surgery. Last night, at eleven p.m., I found myself happily working on a chapter for the cookbook, and even though I've been doing this a long time, it amazed me how much difference tiny changes made. Adding or removing a comma can make the difference between treasure and nothing. It's like DNA. A tiny change, in relative terms, makes the difference between a chimpanzee and William Shakespeare.

Maybe all I do is make people laugh. That's not the point. The point is that something unique to me gives it special value. I hope that one day, instead of asking what a book is about, people will just ask if I wrote it, and if the answer is yes, that will be enough to make them want to buy it.

Sorry to drone and drag and generally not be funny, but this is what's on my mind this morning.

Thanks for all the sales and the comments and the links. The downside of all that is that if I get where I want to go, I probably won't forget about you. I'll still acknowledge your existence and put up with your crap.

Think how embarrassing that will be.