Letter from Cancun:
So while I was winning every wet t-shirt contest up and down la playa, this 29 year old young writer scores a seven figure book deal for her YA paranormal series. What’s wrong with this picture? It could have been us. We could have entered the feathery serpent’s grasp together, the equinox burning its true face on Chichen Itza where girls in embroidered white dresses danced and boys trembled.
I’m so impressed with Amanda Hocking for self-publishing nine novels. Apparently, she tried the traditional route, couldn’t find an agent and then said, fuck it, I can just publish these myself. I haven’t been able to find out how she grew her audience (apparently 900,000 copies of nine book sold) and while it’s tempting to imagine that she’s the love child of Laura Albert and Dale Peck, so far it looks like another garden variety twenty-something out of Minneapolis jacked up on Red Bull has slapped it!
I read three books on vacation: (do you give shit?): Iphigenia in Forest Hills by Janet Malcolm, Carrie by Steven King, and The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano (I would have finished but I watched six consecutive episodes on the plane of Two and a Half Men).
Tell me about your week. Did you finish a piece of writing? Start one? Send something out? Get rejected, accepted, in waiting hell? Did you write your own acceptance speech or deliver a death sentence? Did you write for your morning hour, or just before you went to sleep? Did you steal office supplies? Make love to yourself? Eat pie?
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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.
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.
To be stuck inside of Memphis with the heating pad blues again. Friends, because I am a bad ass, I turn it up high. All the way. Green. Gold. Orange. Red. I cannot read. I cannot sleep. I cannot swallow. I am in agony without ecstasy. It took me twelve hours to read the NYT front page review of the 25 year girl from Ponashe whose book is being called all the things I hate: luminous, numinous, transplendent, oracular, fablicity, concatacious, obliviosimous. I am as jealous as two slugs fucking in a snot can. Okay: I am weening myself off the oxy. And I promise that if I go to Silver Hill or Betty Ford or wherever Charlie Sheen scratched hash marks into the walls with his purloined Bic pen, I promise that I will not accept a power greater than myself, that I will not admit I am powerless over daisies, that I will not make amends especially to anyone I’ve hurt the worst. They are luminous enough, they are limned with light, they are dead to me.
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!
Why do you write, why do you write, why do you fucking fucking write. No one cares. No one is waiting. There is no soundtrack, no young men, their legs flexed with sinew, no field of green slick with slugs. Who cares if you find terza rima, or sonnets or villanelles. You can fill hundreds of notebooks and lose them on trains, planes, in Courtyard Marriotts without a courtyard where you rent a three way and get bored bef0re the cum shot. You think about it all day long waiting for a cab, you think about it all night long writing in your underwear, a pack of smokes, a glass of watery gin with lime rinds sucked dry. You will not take a long walk on the beach, you will not binge on orange food, you will not see a Liam Neeson movie you have seen ten times no matter how desperate you are. You will not stumble around in your rented room as if you have a brain injury, you will not change your clothes, you will not open a can of soup the last tenant left behind with crusty opener slick with snail snot. You will remember something you can’t remember. You will stop yourself from starting something. You will touch yourself until you cannot cry. You will not write. No writing allowed. Writing publishable by death.
Betsy, 
I pulled out my back yesterday and I write to you from a raft of valium, percocet and ibuprofen pills the size of horse tranquilizers. I am drifting in and out of consciousness and I am reminded of my twenties. Only now I have shit to do and this actually isn’t any fun. Was it fun then? Not for me, not really. I just wanted out of myself. I never really partied so much as tried to stop my brain’s overdrive. Tried to stop the train I desperately wanted to get off. All those afternoons in my backyard, the Dead blaring on crappy speakers, a frisbee snapped from my wrist floating into an eternity of self loathing suspended for an instant. I spent today drooling on a pillow, a recurring nightmare visited upon me: a faceless person chases me and I can’t call out. A terrible sound escapes from my throat.
