I’ve been so preoccupied with my heating pad that I’ve completely forgotten to make arrangements for next week when I’m on vacation. I have no guest bloggers lined up and these things don’t write themselves.
Here’s what I’m hoping. I’m hoping that one of you motherfuckers will FINALLY write a vampire novel for me to sell in April at the INTERNATIONAL London Book Fair for seven figures. And here’s what I’m thinking (and you’ll notice I’m GIVING THIS AWAY), do not make the vampire beautiful with pale skin and large incisors, or zombie-like with rivulets of blood escaping the corner of his mouth, or mashed up with Pearl S. Buck. Why can’t the vampire just be a normal guy who sucks the life blood from you, shits on your face, and then leaves you when he finds someone better. We could call it Harvard Vampire or Vampire Empire, or Drink It.
And here’s the ideal client: please be younger than 25, please be going to Harvard, have graduated from Harvard, or dropped out of Harvard but not because you had a run of the mill nb, but more in the G/Z fashion. Please have a story published in the New Yorker or work at the New Yorker or New Yorker. Please don’t get an MFA unless it’s from Iowa. Be hot! Have lips! You could also look like Colin Firth. Be striking! You could have a British accent. You could be Eastern European. Or from Fond du Lac. Please do not have worked a gillion jobs including anything on a freighter or short order cook and feel the need to talk about it. You could date a top writer on The Daily Show.You could write articles in New York Magazine about sex at private schools. You could have soup with Lorin Stein. Or share Tina Brown’s acupuncturist. Or you could be the child of someone famous like the one of the Farrows or Hailie Jade Mathers or Frances Bean.
Have a great writing week. I’ll miss you more.
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A lot of people ask me why I, Betsy Lerner, read Daily Variety. Excuse me? I’m a baller. Do the words executive producer mean anything to you? Have you understood nothing, that I would gladly wrap my legs around a television and fuck it to death. And here’s another reason: the announcement of new pilot orders. I think my favorite this season might be the one where Amanda Peet stars as a recently divorced mother who tries not to fall for her surfer-dude contractor. I have one word for the casting director: Keanu. Another one that sounds really spooky involves a family recovering from a brutal murder who move to an island off Maine where they discover a mystical doorway. We had one of those in the house where I grew up only it led to a Polish pogrom. I also like the pilot where two young, smart female detectives who are bff’s can “discuss fashion while solving crimes.” I know it sounds good, a little like Legally Blonde. But hey, there’s nothing new under the sun lamp. I would kill to have my show listed in Variery and while I couldn’t really opine on hemlines, I could fall for Keanu and remind both of us while we’re making love in a dental chair that when God closes one door, that door is closed.
This could still be the oxy talking, but I’m fed up with the whole blogging mishegos. People are mean, the stats go up. I clean up my act, the stats plummet. Are stats all you care about? Yes, motherfucker. I can’t see the forest, the trees, the leaves, the vein in the leaves. Am I really working on my “other projects?” Is Vince Passaro really commenting about the asking of questions. Vince, there is only one question. You told me years ago. Plastics. Rosebud. Mergers and Acquisitions. And that angel Al Desetta with the Robert Lowell hairline and the Buddy Holly glasses and the Levis that fit like love in a bottle limned with luminous sex. O Dear Heating Pad! O Beautiful Books! O darling young writer with beauty and gifts beyond reason, long may you wave. You could be doing anything but you are doing this: this.
Whenever I was set up on a date or about to meet a boy, I always imagined it was IT. You know, the Big Love. The station wagon with a blue peg and a pink peg and a golden retriever if I weren’t allergic to dogs. We wouldn’t be like anyone we were, flawed and ugly and twisted with shame. We wouldn’t have terrible secrets, or the calloused hands of others all over our bodies. We would be like the stiff spine of a new bank book, a virgin passport, something to swipe for the first time. We would be the first man to ever touch a woman there, the first woman to slip beneath a wave of pleasure. With french fries dragged through thick ketchup, your fingers in my mouth, fat thumb!
The Hose and I sent out our script to two more readers for notes and they were excellent. One had the forest in mind, forcing us to take a closer look at our main character.The second reader saw the trees. Like a dowser, he picked up every piece of dialogue that was off, every bit of illogic, and stuff that simply could and should be better. He also, without knowing who had written which sections, praised all of the Hose’s writing, while mine were meh.
I always promised myself that if I ever sold a book, I would buy myself a Cartier tank watch. I got the idea in my head from reading 
This is so fucked up, but I hate it when people recommend books or movies to me and say, you are really going to love this. Or, this is right up your alley, or: you have to read this, it’s so you. I may not be a mystery wrapped in an enigma, but how the hell can you possibly know what I would like or why I even read or go to movies in the first place. Look, I’m perverse. Everyone loved Mr. Burns in seventh grade, the hip history teacher who talked about Jethro Tull in his plaid polyesters. Everyone loved ET. And Elton John and Joni Mitchell. I do not do. I don’t like something because it’s dark or mentally ill or self-hating or Jewish or calorically challenged. I have inexplicable prejudices, pet peeves, and I read with a glow in the dark ring. This weekend I read a book that three separate friends said I would love. I loathed it.
Do you ever wish you could just give up on this whole fucking thing and join the human race? Why do you have to write shit down? Why do you have to set yourself apart and pledge your allegiance to sentences that, like bratty children, didn’t ask to be born? Why must you pull your pants down, raise your freak flag, let it wave? Why do you have to sit all alone up there in your office while we are playing whist by the fire? Why can’t you walk down a city street or through a field of thistles and leave it alone? So what it if looks like something else? So what if your life is a perfect metaphor for being an asshole, or an ass wipe, or a door mat? So what if sentences are coiled in your soul. If you could turn the world on with your bile? Or cross Narcissus with Icarus and watch yourself burn? So what?
Betsy Lerner 