Thank You Lindsey Long...

I was out to dinner at Hirozen last night with a dear old friend of mine - not Lindsey Long. We did sushi Omakase and finished our 4th round on Sea Urchin - have you ever had this? Fucking yikes. Takes a brave palate. Anyway, this has nothing to do with the dinner and more about a conversation we had when we were sitting down and of an e-mail I got from my former African Queen (Lindsey Long) a couple days prior. See, I always had something of a loose understanding with my dinner companion that I would give him any scripts I wrote before I gave them to anyone else. The reasoning was two parts, I think. The first is that I am wildly talented. The second is that he was humoring me. So we get down to talking and I'm telling him about this book I wrote and the response that's been coming in and of the big names that may or may not be taking a look at it. Then, I came out and told him the secret behind it - that isn't much of a secret but could definitely spin one's head if one would so allow...and he fucking turned on me. He dropped a word like juvenile and began to create these sticky scenarios of my flying to New York and going into meetings and the problems that would ensue and I started laughing and actually asked him if he was serious before getting serious and saying exactly - you haven't even read a page...you haven't even looked at it. He was really worked up and I was laughing in my head, asking myself if he was creatively bipolar and thinking back to the random e-mail Lindsey had so recently sent me that went something like this and by a guy called Kurt Vonnegut...

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

When I managed to settle the dust, we agreed on the fact - which is pretty absolute - that a novel is either good or it isn't good...and that someone will either want to publish it or they won't want to publish it...and that I am absolutely fine with that, confident with that. This morning, I was thinking back to the encounter...still marveling in it a little bit. I thought if I could count on one slam dunk person to be in my corner, it would have been him. Not quite. Let me stress again - not one page read. This morning, I'm thinking he must've had a really tough time when he found out Santa Claus (or the religious equivalent) was a fake...and the tooth fairy...and the Easter Bunny...and Cinderella, Snow White, Pinocchio, God...

It's not my job to win world...just to be relevant in it.