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Tuesday, October 15, 2013

What's for sale here?





I'm sorry, I just haven't invented a better mousetrap, yet.  If I do, you'll be the first to know. I have written a book, it's a sort of memoir-history about Amagansett and my family's life in that little hamlet, but I don't expect to make any money from it. I wrote it out of personal need, though it was like self-root-canal to get it done; to the extent that it's done. I also felt that I couldn't write about anything else because I lack educational credz. That's cowardly I know, but I've always been chicken about being challenged.

Once upon a time, when I was in my early thirties, I had a girlfriend who was very well-off and well connected.  I was struggling to make a living, and one day she said to me, "I'd like to help you Tony, but you don't have anything to sell." I thought that was brilliant. I struggled with the idea for months, maybe years, I'm not sure, but within weeks I signed up for a creative writing course. I thought I'd try to write a book that could be made into a movie.
It would be a Somebody-Done-Somebody-Wrong story.  I wrote a few pages. And a few more. I never completed anything. I drifted around the country like a beatnik, struggled, wrote a few poems, met a few poets and writers, and, while I was still young and good looking, became a project for several talented and well-placed women in the art and culture socio-economic class.
My adventures at that time might make an interesting book, but in the meantime I've gotten very old and I'd be competing with a population of young memoirists just out of Iowa Writer's Workshop and associated places; a population only exceeded by the young abstract expressionists that crowd every mini-Soho in every city in the country that has more than one tall building on it's skyline.  Anyway, to be honest, I have all the notes and letters and if I live long enough I probably will write that What I Did book. 
The reasons for my not having anything to sell, then, are many and varied. It's my intention to go into some of those reasons as a part of the theme of this blog, 'Me, and why I find Myself so Fascinating'.



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