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.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 89 Comments »
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.
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.
Betsy Lerner 