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Committing the cardinal sin, that’s where: I let it get to me.

And the worst thing? The most inane? It was the robot that did it.

A month or so ago, I finally let just a little bit of Bunk out to play on this website. I was hoping it would make friends with a few of you. Trigger some responses. Up the conversational ante. Lure a few more of you over to play.

Instead, it brought crashing silence, and then a spam-bot, which infested the blog with virus, got it temporarily restricted on google, and ensured ongoing invisibility for the book on which I’ve pretty much staked my career. Or at least the last decade and a half of my life.

Naturally– this being a writer’s website, where even katydids are supposed by some to dream, where silence lays steadily against the pixels and characters of glenblog, and whatever walks here, walks alone– it was the robot, not the commentless post about the novel, that triggered the existential blizzard. The why-bothers (not with writing, can’t help that, but with showing, with selling, with sharing). The poor-mes (because the book deserves to be read, damn it; or, worse, because I’ve somehow convinced myself it does when it doesn’t). The I’ll-just-take-my-blog-and-go-homes.

That didn’t last long. Longer than robot-driven dark nights of soul should have, but just a few days. Then finals happened. Then news about furloughs and the very possible reality of having to reconstruct completely the other, supposedly more stable girders from which I’ve built my family’s life.

And then, of course, the new project. Of which I’m saying nothing at this point. I’ve learned my lesson.

And then the embarrassment. Not about not selling the novel yet, or anything like that. But about my little panic-attack. Because I’m 43 years old, have been at this all my life, and should know better.

Do know better.

And the whole point of this blog was to document this process, partially to keep myself sane (cue laugh track) but at least as much to provide others going through it with some company. No advice. No secret passwords to the promised land, wherever that is and whatever you’re imagining it promises. But stories for the road.

I forgot that, momentarily.

I won’t again.

Hackers temporarily banished. Wolves chased from door. Only howls now are me, singing my Book of Bunk song.

Will resume regular posts shortly.

Not for me. Not for Bunk. But for the world, maybe.

Sharon Pomerantz, a friend of a friend (I’m pretty sure we met once) and a stellar writer, spent the last eight years wrestling with her first novel. She just sold it to Twelve. It’ll be out later this year. Which means her year just got a lot better, and so did yours. Her writing is funny and wise and sad and smart and sly and worth your time.

An actual work of actual fiction, actually sold and published in 2009.

Of course, the fact that Ms. Pomerantz spent less than a decade slaving over this particular book marks her as a bona fide overnight success here in Bunk Country. A streaking meteor.

But that doesn’t diminish our pleasure in this one little bit.

Okay, enough tap-dancing.

Yesterday, in front of the closest thing I’m likely to get anytime soon to a home crowd, I let just a little Bunk out into the world for the first time. My voice shook a little when I started reading. It wasn’t the reading that frightened me, but the material. I was scared that, having been away from it a few months, I would finally see this book for what it is. Finally see that after fourteen years, I’d missed it still. Messed it up for good.

Five sentences in, my voice stopped shaking. If I’m going down, I’m going down singing. Right here. Riding the deck of the good ship Book of Bunk.

So here you go, you loyal and opinionated and patient (or skeptical, or curious) people. Thanks for waiting. Thanks for letting me work my way up to this. Here’s just a taste. A hint of what this book feels like.

This isn’t the section I read. It doesn’t really get at the big themes (whatever they are) or reveal much about the plot. But this, I’m pretty sure, is the flavor of the thing.

All I ask in return is this:

If you like it, tell somebody. Other than me, I mean. You can tell me, I’ll be thrilled to hear it. But tell someone else.

Steer them here. Write about it somewhere.

Part of the point of this blog is to blow off some nervous tension, walk myself through this process. Part of it is to have some direct contact with actual readers. Part of it just might be to write The Book of the Book of Bunk, the story of the sale of an unusual story in a terrifying year.

But also, it’s to try and make just a little noise. So please. If you like this. Help me make some.

And now…

This section comes from the middle of the book. Your narrator is Paul Dent, age 23, a talented but naive and inexperienced drifter from Oklahoma who through a chance meeting has found himself attached to the North Carolina office of the Federal Writers’ Project. His job is to capture whatever might be unique or notable about the mill town of Trampleton for the guide book the Writers’ Project has been assigned to create.

In Trampleton, Paul–like pretty much everyone else in town– has met and become infatuated with Melissa Flynn. Melissa works in Mr. Gene’s Barber Shop. She’s plump, joyful, elusive, carries a black bag she never opens. When she passes, people generally say, “Hey, now, Melissa Flynn.” And she answers, “Well, hey.” You’ll also hear mention of Paul’s brother Lewis. He’s a piece of work. A major player. Maybe you’ll get more of him next time…

My good friend M.Z. Ribalow calls this section “The Night of the Knives.” I suppose that will do for the time being…

(from The Book of Bunk)

May, 1936

One blossom-scented, bee-swarmed evening in late May, Melissa finally agreed to meet me under the lacy shadows of the Sherman Street elms. She arrived in her work clothes: a plain cream skirt and yellow top, a pale blue ribbon tied in her ash-blond hair. She stood maybe a foot away with her arms crossed, pulling the loose-fitting top close against the curves of her body, and I imagined that I could feel her heat-slick skin on my arms, like a banked fire from across a room. Her eyes were brown and quick.

“Hey, now, Melissa Flynn,” a mill-man said, biking past and raising one soot-gloved arm.

“Well, hey,” Melissa said.

“Where’s your bag?” I asked.

She raised an eyebrow. “Want me to get it?”

“I want to know what’s in it.”

“You’re a curious sort, aren’t you?”

“That’s my job.” I grinned. “But that’s not why I’m curious.”

Melissa glanced down the street toward the gas station. I followed her eyes and spotted Danny on the sidewalk in front of the petrol pumps. He was staring back. I started to lift my hand but decided not to.

Melissa blew out her breath. “I think, tonight, let’s just walk. Okay, Paul?”

She took me up the Back, a path that began at the southern edge of town where the sidewalk and gravel road gave way to overgrown grassy fields and foothills. Over the first mile or so, we met half a dozen people, some with dogs, most alone. One couple, colored, aged seventy or more, kept their eyes lowered and edged into the grass as we passed. They were the only ones who didn’t say “Hey, now” to Melissa.

Then we were alone, tramping through cicada-buzz so intense that I kept checking the ground, half-expecting to see downed power lines snaking through the dirt. Soon the grass dropped away, and we came into a dense stand of pines that pricked and brushed at us. It was cooler in there, less buggy. Melissa began whistling. I didn’t recognize the tune and asked her the words. She said she didn’t know them.

“They used to sing it back home.”

“Who? Your parents?”

She smiled distantly, and we went on walking. When we cleared the trees, we were higher than I’d expected, way up on the tallest rise rimming Trampleton, in low brush already baked brown and brittle. The last daylight had bled away, and the moon had risen. I saw half a dozen owls perched like gargoyles in the trees.

Melissa sat down, breathing heavily, and I sat beside her, not too near. The skin under my shirt felt viscous, and my lungs kept clutching up, blocking air from getting in or out.

“Thank you for coming,” I said, and looked over. Her cheeks had gone blotchy, and midges clung to her ears.

“I should have come sooner. I’m sorry. I have…people who need me to tend to them.”

“Seems like you do a lot of that.”

That distant smile ghosted over her face again, though this time she looked at me. “That’s my job,” she said.

She slapped at her forearms, and I whacked at something crawling under my knee and squashed it. In the trees, fireflies flickered like train windows passing.

“So, Paul,” she said, after a short, pleasant silence. “About your brother…”

I winced. “What about him?”

“Well, I’ve got to admit, I’m curious.”

“You and everyone else he’s ever met.”

“He just seems so…I don’t know. He’s sure a hot topic at Mr. Gene’s.”

“He’ll get hotter if he stays. You never know what he’s going to do next. I’ll tell you a true story about him this time. My mother left us to go back East when I was barely two. Lewis says he remembers her oatmeal cookies, and that she sometimes hit our father with wooden spoons. But I don’t remember her at all. We were born four years and eighteen hours apart, so we usually celebrated our birthdays on the same day. By celebrated, I mean our father would give us each a dollar and tell us to come home without it, and not before dark. Then he’d push us out the door.

“One year, when I was maybe ten or eleven, he announced he was throwing us a party. But his idea of a party was to put us on a caboose and get one of the drivers he worked with to push us two miles out of town on a hundred-eleven degree, windless day. Lewis and I were supposed to jump out of the car and race back. First one home got cake. All of it. Loser got nothing. Well, my brother, he could have beaten me running backward. I can’t breathe very well, so I’m not much of an athlete.”

“What a bastard.”

“Yeah…well, you’ll see. When the caboose stopped moving, Lewis said he’d give me a head start. He waited until I was at the door of the caboose, then shoved me out onto the grass, jumped on my back, hopped off, and waited for me to roll over so he could make sure I saw him wave. He likes doing that when he’s done something he’s especially proud of. Particularly at me, for some reason. Then he took off.

“I didn’t even bother running. The point is, I wouldn’t have run anyway, and Lewis knew it. My father knew it, too. So I took my sweet time. I was maybe three hours getting back. It was quiet out there except for the biting things. Kind of like here. But here’s the complicated bit about my brother. The first thing I saw when I got home was a plate full of cake squashed on the road and Lewis standing on our stoop, laughing.

“’Saved you some,’ he said. ‘Happy birthday.’

“I started past him into the house. But he put a palm on my chest, reached behind him, and handed me a huge heaping plateful. A corner piece, smothered in icing. Chocolate, and really good, too. My dad actually made great icing. Lewis sat outside and watched me eat it. Then he clapped me on the back and went inside.”

“Weird,” Melissa said.

“Normal for him.”

She was silent a while. The blotchy spots on her cheeks had faded. She still had that odd half-smile on her wide face. The last time I’d spent so long sitting with a girl, just talking like this, had been with Ginny Gunderson on Dust Cow Ridge. Half a decade ago. Eventually, Melissa said, “If he were my brother, I think I’d hate him. You must hate him.”

“I used to think a lot of people must feel that way about Lewis,” I said. “But you can’t hate him.”

“Anyone can hate anyone,” Melissa said softly, and I realized I didn’t understand her smile at all, and wondered if anyone in Trampleton did. “Easiest thing in the world.”

Somewhere in the long silences and occasional chatter that made up the rest of our first evening together, my elbow brushed up against hers and stayed there. Her skin felt cool. She didn’t move away.

“So who are all these people you tend to?” I asked.

“Just one person, mostly. Danny.”

I didn’t want to ask the next question, but I did anyway. “He’s your boyfriend?”

The smile Melissa flashed then was closer to the one she used on Sherman Street. Quick and light. “Danny?” The smile vanished. “Danny is my leatherwing bat. My black-hearted magician. My closest friend. But he will never, ever, be my boyfriend. No matter how much he thinks he wants to be.”

She went quiet again. The breeze drifting out of the pines had a furtiveness to it. By the time we began retracing our steps to the fields at the bottom of the mountain, the moon had filled the sky behind us. I’d been planning to take Melissa’s hand, but didn’t actually try to do it until the Sherman Street elms loomed overhead. Her fingers accepted mine but didn’t squeeze around them. Above us, warblers chirred and trilled.

“Okay, Paul. Time for your personality test. I’ve had a lovely night. So I’ve decided to grant you one of two wishes. You can kiss me, or you can find out what’s in my black bag.”

We were standing in front of Mr. Gene’s. For once, my eyes made no move toward the leafy canopy above.

“Is this a trick question?” I said. “I mean, is there a right answer?”

“Only your answer.”

My mind raced. My strained lungs tickled, which made me want to cough, but I managed not to. “Does what I answer determine whether I get another night?”

Melissa rose onto her tiptoes, then settled back down. “No. But it might determine what kind of night the next one is.”

“Get the bag,” I said.

Melissa burst into a grin. At the shop door, she fished keys from the pocket of her dress, then disappeared inside. She came back holding the bag, which she dropped with a clank at her feet. Kneeling and tugging at the tie-straps, she reached in and withdrew a black leather sheath. From the sheath she pulled out a knife.

The blade alone must have been eight inches long. Melissa tipped the point at me, and I could see the icy, silver curve of the thing, like a scratch in the summer air. Then she turned it, trapping the moonlight in the blade’s flat surface.

“You…spend a lot of time with that, don’t you?” It wasn’t just the shimmer of the blade, but the way the wooden handle nestled in her palm.

Wordlessly, she withdrew a second sheath, then a third before laying all the sheaths in the street and the blades along her thigh like a half-open fan. I glanced in both directions. The road was empty. We’d been up the Back a long time, I realized. It had to be midnight, maybe later.

“You might want to step back,” Melissa said, untying the ribbon in her hair and then tying it tighter.

Gathering the knives into one palm, Melissa stood, rolled her head around her shoulders a few times, flexed her arms, and motioned me another foot or so away. “Hum something.”

“Huh?”

“Something fast. I miss the music.”

Miss it? The only fast thing that came to mind was the half-tune my father used to bray in the morning to get Lewis and me out of bed. I didn’t mean to sing it so loud. I just couldn’t imagine it any other way.

“Laying tie, laying tie. In the black October sky. No reason for to cry. There’s stations by and by. We’ll lie here ‘til we die.”

The second time I hit reason for, Melissa flicked her right wrist and launched all three knives into the air. I caught my breath but didn’t dare stop singing for fear of disrupting her rhythm. Her hands flew up to snatch one handle, then another, release, snatch, darting forward and back, left and right while her body stayed ramrod straight like the trunk of a tree whipping its branches in a twister. The knives sailed into the elm canopy, tipped over, somersaulted down between columns formed by the others as though performing a square dance up there, then plunged into some impossible springy place on Melissa’s palms or sometimes her forearms or even her chest, and rebounded upward again. She started to move her feet, twirling and tilting, shredding the air around her into ribbons, and it was only at the end, as my singing edged toward panic and grew even louder and the knives flew higher and dove down harder, that I caught a glimpse of her face. Her smile looked wide enough to swallow the whole damn street.

Somehow, on the final toss, the knives went up together, reached an apex, leaned back in formation, and dove toward the earth in a sort of inverted V that looked like a falcon’s spread talons before alighting lightly along Melissa’s forearm as she dropped into a bow.

“Shit,” she muttered. When she straightened and opened her palm, I could see that she’d closed her fist around the lower blade of the last knife to land. A thin thread of blood, much less than there should have been, was seeping from a tiny nick. But that ravenous smile still dominated her face.

I had my hands in her hair and my mouth against hers before the song had died on my lips. The knives dropped to the ground. I heard her grunt, felt our teeth clink together, and half-expected a knee to the groin or a rake of fingernails down my cheek. Instead, Melissa kissed me back for a short, sweet while.

“Don’t step on the knives,” she said into my breath.

We eased apart, and I looked down at the blades arrayed all around us.

“I said you had a choice.” Her hands tightened in my hair.

“But I wanted both.”

“Cheater.”

Kneeling again, she swept the blades back into their sheaths and the sheaths into the bag in a practiced sequence of motions, then zipped the bag tight and slung it over her shoulder. She didn’t kiss me again when she stood, but having moved away, she turned. Her nod was different than her Well, hey nod. Then she glided down Sherman Street toward Danny’s gas station.

It’s already happening. How can that be?

The signs are unmistakable. As inexplicable and colorful and eerie and awe-inspiring as the aurora borealis. My own private one. And the truth is, I’ve been waiting for this to happen– wanting it to happen, really, dreaming of ways to make it happen– for at least twelve of the fourteen years I devoted to writing The Book of Bunk. And now it is happening. And all I want to do is scream.

Or dance for joy.

Or scream.

A couple weeks ago, a longtime reader wrote me privately, concerned at what he perceived as a touch of despair creeping into some of these posts. His note was intended to encourage me, and it absolutely did.

But I don’t consider anything on this blog an act of desperation.  It’s more mouse-waving-tiny-mouse-middle-finger-at-descending-eagle. A (possibly ridiculous, but genuinely joyful) act of defiance. A declaration of determination, maybe even independence. A flair shot from a lifeboat (I’m still here…). An X on a treasure map I’m rolling up and setting adrift, in the hopes that I can launch it past the shore-breakers of indifference and economic annihilation into whatever the internet equivalent of the Gulfstream is, so that someone, somewhere, might fish it out one day, unravel it, and come here. And find the treasure– and it really is treasure, this book, I promise– that I’ve buried.

Today, though, when I sat down to post, what I really wanted to tell you about was the new project I finally kicked off on Tuesday. An all-new, wildly different, linked set of stories, light and sweet and funny and odd, very possibly the Thing that eats the next two or three (or, god help me, ten) years of Glen’s life.

And that was the moment I realized it was happening.

See, the X I’m putting on that treasure map isn’t really for you. It’s for me. Because for me, The Book of Bunk really is– was– Calypso’s island (which, uh, makes me Odysseus? Oh, I can hear the next note from aforementioned letter-writing conscience now…). That is, it was somewhere I foundered, and found a kind of love, and got mesmerized, and couldn’t leave. For fourteen years. I need to be able to find the thing I finally made while I was there. It’s too important to me to lose.

But somehow– so long before I was expecting it, and to my surprise, before I was ready to go– I’m suddenly off the island.

There’s no despair in these posts (okay, okay, but really, only a little), because you have to realize: most of what Bunk is going to give me has already been given. From it, I got a quest. An impossible challenge. A piece of writing I really didn’t think I’d be able to pull off, and then did.

I want you to read it. So badly. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be bothering with these posts. But if you never get to, what do I lose?

Validation? Feh.

The chance to see it surviving in the world, discussed and dismissed and maybe even honored or at least welcomed? That’d be nice.

Money? (Cue sitcom laugh track here.)

Today is the day I realized I no longer live in Bunk County. I am adrift once more, on my way somewhere else, the next stop on my way home, wherever that is, to get bewitched by something else new and wondrous and terrible and strange. Today, I’m free, to go where I will, and I’m not looking back. Bye, Bunk County. We’ll be back for that treasure. I promise. I swear, on my life. And soon. Even though it really is time for the creative part of me to be elsewhere.

But I need you to know that I loved it there.

I loved it there.

I really, really did.

I loved it there.

Why blog? Why, especially, about something so grueling, nonsensical, and potentially even humiliating as trying to sell a book you somehow decided was worth 14 years of your life?

Well, when’s the last time you were likened to a bighorn sheep, for starters?

Tremendous thanks for that one, Kay Murphy (see comment on Baby Steps, below), and to everyone who has taken the time here or on my website or my facebook page to send feedback and encouragement and suggestions about this blog and the future of The Book of Bunk. Your humble host-sheep has decided that these Void-Chatter response-posts will be a regular feature from here on out.

About your “American Idol” for writers idea, Kay: it actually has been done. Not on television, but online. Amazon and Penguin are running the 2009 version right now, and calling it the Breakthrough Novel Award. Basically, you post sections of a book. People vote. Every little while, low vote-count books are escorted off the website into the ether. Last novel standing gets a contract.

I’m all for it, in theory. That is, I’m for anything that gets any new writer a chance to have his or her work read, and maybe even published, at the moment.

Of course, this contest isn’t really for the writers any more than “Idol” is for the performers. It’s for Amazon and Penguin. One virtually foolproof way of ensuring that at least one novel they publish next year will have built-in buyers. And it seems likely to breed a certain crassness, a taste for the shill as opposed to an attention to and love of craft amongst writers. On the other hand, if you’re not up to the shilling (“Hey,” notes some clever reader of this post at this moment, “Isn’t this very blog kind of a…”), and you consider yourself above the crassness…well, I hope you and the rest of your private bighorn herd enjoy what you’ve done, because no one else is likely to see it.

Megan, the Stephanies, Craig, Kelly, Eric, Pete, Mom and Dad, David, Courtney, Jen, Jonas, Amanda, Gabe, Gregg, Monique, all of you who’ve taken the time to write me or to blog about this on your own pages or to tweet about something you’ve read here or to warn me against rash acts of publishing derring-do (or to egg me on), you have no idea how welcome your voices are, echoing off the rocky walls of the valley where I appear to have wandered.

Perhaps the most fascinating note I have received so far about this blog comes from a wonderfully articulate, thoughtful Serb who has written me several lovely and provocative notes over the years. This fellow is needlessly shy about his (excellent) English, and therefore reluctant to post publicly here. But in one recent e-mail, he had this to say about one of the not-intros to Bunk that I posted a month or so ago:

Maybe it’s the same all over the globe, but I hope you realize how eastern european this sounds like. During fifties and sixties we had writers in Yugoslavia who specialized in war literature, filmmakers who were sponsored by the state to produce uplifting, socialistic features about ‘common workers’ or ‘talented, but strayed individuals who put themselves in front of the rest of the nation and were somehow punished for that’, we had composers who calculatedly invoked ethnic pathos to their operas and symphonies, in order to ‘lessen the abstract component of the art and get it closer to the common man’. My mother and father lived their whole life in such a regime, and although it’s gone now, i can easily identify with it.

And here I thought I’d finally written a novel so hopelessly committed to its uniquely American solipsism that even Americans might want to read it.

In all seriousness, though, I’m thrilled to find echoes of some strain of Eastern European writing in my own, because certainly, the tragicomic, mesmerizing work of authors such as Tibor Dery, Danilo Kis, Jerzy Kosinski, Bohumil Hrabal, Geza Csath, Stefan Grabinski, and so many others have been a massive influence on me. That region has also provided me with the most fertile ground for literary discoveries on the planet (outside of Canada– go figure). I will be forever grateful to Ivan Sanders, the marvelously enthusiastic and kind professor at Columbia, who introduced me to this phantasmagoric, devastated, love-swept literary wonderland. And told me that I wasn’t the writer I needed to be in order to walk there, yet.

Keep the comments and notes and ideas coming, y’all. Feed the sheep. The chatter isn’t just reassuring. It’s inspiring.

Today– 24 hours after a complicated but decidedly reassuring conversation with Paul Miller, the passionate and clear-eyed founder/director of Earthling Publications, and more on that as developments warrant — I find my thoughts revolving, endlessly, around Jill Sobule, a pleasant-enough songwriter. And Kristin Hersh, still sometimes a dazzling songwriter. And Paul Williams, founder of Crawdaddy, who loves Bob Dylan more than you, or me (and I love him, too), and certainly more than Bob.

In April, Jill Sobule is going to release an album she financed entirely through fan Paypal contributions on her website. Perks– aside from the existence of the album itself– included guest-singing slots on the record for large contributions, and living-room concerts for almost-as-large contributions.

Last year, Kristin Hersh’s zealous and long-lasting fanbase bought her the custom guitar she’d always wanted after a brief campaign. Hersh has spent the last several years experimenting with a direct and two-way artist-audience relationship, posting not just songs but stems that invite listeners to remix her music,  cutting out labels entirely, and allowing contributing listeners to track the development of each new piece through posted demos and alternate drafts.

Before re-starting his legendary, seminal rock music criticism mag, Crawdaddy!, as a web-only journal, Paul Williams successfully lobbied his fans for financial support as he hammered away at his life’s work, an exhaustive and original and sometimes brilliant assessment of every musical move every single one of the Bob Dylans has made.

These people and these developments fill me with admiration. And they make me uneasy. They inspire me, and they scare me to death.

The admiration/inspiration part is easy, and obvious. There is a part of me that desperately wants simply to hang out my shop shingle right here on this site– all the Bunk you can eat, wrapped in your choice of covers and also available for download– and see what happens. I am seriously considering a preliminary step such as a pledgeless, moneyless pledge drive, just to gauge interest and offer an extended glimpse at the opening of the novel. Details on that when and if I decide to do it.

The fear is easy and obvious, too. Throw a party, no one comes, that’s bad. Throw a free web-party and offer samples for nothing and no one drops out of the ether and asks for one… that starts to sound like qualification material for the Ed Wood Really-You-Thought-You-Could-Do-This? Society. Sobule, Hersh, and Williams all have had long careers sustained at least in part by small(ish) but rabidly loyal fanbases. Sometimes I think I have one of those, too. It’s too bad so many of its members apparently speak Russian.

Harder to create that artist-audience direct connect.

But I have misgivings, too. And I can’t tell if they stem from cowardice, or something else. Maybe I’m just afraid.

Maybe I’m not quite ready yet to let go of the notion– drummed into us by critics, editors, agents, parents, colleagues, universities with tenure to offer, the whole publishing machine as we know it– that only selling the book to someone else (and preferably a New York someone else) constitutes an honest and legitimate sale.

Maybe I fear the fragmentation of the literary world. Look at the music industry. There is probably more good and varied recorded music proliferating out there than at any time in history. And less discussion of most of it. Even– I greatly fear– less interest in it. Because there’s no central marketplace of ideas (to paraphrase Al Gore from his excellent book of a couple years ago). Remember that Lester Bangs essay about the death of Elvis? “Along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others’ objects of reverence… [W]e will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.”

Maybe I’m too ornery an artist to offer the opportunity to name a character in exchange for a $200 pledge, and am uncertain of likely takers for living-room readings. Even if I bring my Rolling Dark pal Pete and our traveling lights.

Or maybe there’s a part of me that, rightly or wrongly, has learned to place a peculiar sort of trust in the unwieldy, maddening, soul-crushing, money-draining process of selling my writing. With all three of my existing (see, there I go again– I mean published)  books, some small or not-so-small thing has happened along the way– a suggestion from my agent, a compromise with an editor that turns out to be a wise one, one last two a.m. revelation– that has not only made the work better, but has allowed the work to finish the process of separating itself from me. Of becoming itself, getting up on its own legs, and walking out into the world to meet whatever awaits it.

And maybe what I’m referring to above is the last vestiges of a process that no longer exists, and can no longer be trusted.

End note: I know logging in to this blog to leave comments is a pain. But weeding through thousands-deep spambot comments again to find the two legitimate ones is more than I can bear. So if you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them. This particular marketplace of ideas is officially open for business. And it’s staying open. Even if I’m not entirely sure yet what or how we’re going to be selling.

What’s worse– no, not worse, but harder– than a week with rejections? A silent week, of course.

By this time next Saturday, several things will have happened. Maybe. I will have heard, definitively, from a couple more people in New York. I will have had a chat with a longtime professional partner and just maybe hatched radical plan #1 for the publishing of The Book of Bunk. It’s very possible, if I sense the interest from you all, that I will hatch radical plan #2 right here on this page. That one may lead to the posting of the first sample from the novel, so you can finally see for yourselves whether all this blather is worth the ether it’s floating on.

This week, I waited. I finished my new story Monday, and I can’t start the next one– very different, playful, wait ’til I tell you about it, no ghosts but some magicians and a tow truck and the revenge of Glen on valet parking– until I’m finished grading my students’ end-of-quarter stories. Classes are over, which means all that marvelous, rejuvenating student energy has also gone out of the days. No one has abbreviated my name in some appalling new way (H-Dog, Hirsh-blurg, Proffo) in more than 72 hours, except on Facebook, and I’m not counting that yet. Just hasn’t Kindled the same response in me. There’s no real spring break on the quarter system employed by CSUSB, just a stretch of quiet that nags more than it soothes. The only cure I know for worrying over the fate of the writing I’ve completed is to write more. And since I can’t yet, I’m drifting.

Yesterday, I gave a talk via teleconference to a class at the University of Ottawa about The Snowman’s Children. The students asked excellent questions, and the hour passed glitchlessly, pleasantly. Until the end, when one dark-haired head-back (the camera in Ottawa was aimed toward the professor’s desk at the front of the room, so all I could see of the students was their very stylish, Francophone headbands) asked that most inevitable and familiar and important of student queries: “What advice would you give to a new writer just starting out about getting published now?”

And the answer that fell out of my mouth was, “Run.”

That got a little laugh. Enough of one for me to recover myself. Smile, as if I’d meant to be funny. In a way, I did. I started to say what I always say– do the writing, all the time; never say no for anyone; keep the rejections or don’t, but get your work back in the mail or someone’s e-mail in-box the second it is returned to you; hang around; write some more, every single day– and then I stopped. And I think I smiled. And I said, “It’s going to be hard. And you’re probably going to have to be as creative about that as you are in producing the work.” And then I said, “It’s worth it, anyway. Do the work. Keep writing.”

And the thing is, I still meant it. Do you know the Guy Clark song from which I filched the title for this post?

“There ain’t no money in poetry

That’s what sets the poet free

I’ve had all the freedom I can stand,

You got your cold dog soup and rainbow pie

All it takes to get me by

Fool my belly ’til the day I die

Cold dog soup and rainbow pie…”

If you want to write– if you love it, and it fills your days, and you realize the wonder, the genuine joy, of attempting to make or at least impose a semblance of sense out of waking and breathing and loving and suffering and Facebooking and headbanding and drifting and dreaming– the writing itself will be enough.

It will even get you through weeks like this one.

Cold, as in Siberian, as you’ll see below.

And very real comfort, too. Though not quite enough. At least not yet.

This is what has been happening in every other corner of my writing life during the past month, while The Book of Bunk has traced its whistling, blind arc through the black void where New York publishing used to be, and which now resembles the sky near the end of last year’s “Doctor Who” finale where the stars are going out, one by one.

The stars not named Blagojevich or Niffenegger, anyway (and may both of them write books worthy of the money they’ve been handed):

1. Roughly eighteen months after the fact, I’ve been informed by the wonderfully thoughtful, literate, and kind Larissa Zhitkova (admirer of Henry Miller, translator of The Snowman’s Children and other, worthier works into Russian) that The Two Sams has debuted in Russia to solid sales and decidedly enthusiastic press from radio, print, and internet alike. Supposedly, I’ve been called “Lovecraft’s disciple” and have “outdone King or even Poe.” Best of all, if funding comes through– a huge if, given the world– I have been invited to give readings and talks at the Modern Book and Literature Centre and the University of St. Petersburg there, which will also give me a chance to research, rethink, and finally get right my nearly-there ghostly novel, Sisters of Baikal.

The Lovecraft/King/Poe comments are ridiculous, obviously. Not ridiculous enough for me to decline to mention them here, but still…

2. “Esmeralda,” my first story in a new series tentatively called “Book Depository Stories,” has been selected by Ellen Datlow for Best Horror of the Year, the book that will take the place of the late, lamented Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

3. “Like Lick Em Sticks, Like Tina Fey,” my story for last year’s Rolling Darkness Revue tour, was also apparently a strong contender for that book, and will soon be reprinted in Shivers VI from Cemetery Dance.

4. I’ve finished a new Book Depository Story called “After-words,” which I’m having my circle of readers take their chainsaws to before shipping it off for hopeful publication before the end of the year. (This is the single best piece of news, as far as I’m concerned; the first totally new thing since I finished Bunk, and the only work to clear my head of everything else since then.)

5. The fine people with my novella, “Mr. Dark’s Carnival,” currently under film option, wrote with their latest plans. “Mr. Dark 3-D,” anyone? I know my son liked the idea. How do I know? He hopped, that’s how.

6. “After-words” marks the final story I needed to complete The Janus Tree and Other Stories, my next collection, which I will be shaping and sending off within a week or two.

That’s a good month, for me. A great month. A month rife with evidence that I do in fact have a career, that there are at least some people out there who are interested in what I do.

I also know the following things:

1. Of all the insane times to try to sell a novel (and they’re all mad), this may be the worst.

2. The surviving New York editors mostly are functioning under professional death threats: buy the wrong book, join the water-cooler chat at the guillotine.

3. For better or worse, The Book of Bunk has no obvious ragingly successful best-seller which it strongly resembles.

4. Even if it was a straight rip of The Time-Traveler’s Wife, I have a three-volume Bookscan record that doesn’t add up to 50,000 copies. Lots of nice press, some lovely prizes. That’s all.

5. Even if no one, anywhere, buys Bunk, one of the wonderful smaller presses who have been so brave with and good to me will pick up The Janus Tree, and so I will have a new book soon, one way or another.

6. The Book of Bunk will come out. And not too long from now. Because radical options are surfacing all over the place. And I’m damn near ready to jump and swim for one.

7. Very little of the work stamped by the current cadre of tastemakers in New York as either great literature or a great read proves to be either, for me, so it’s unrealistic to hold out much hope that those same people will suddenly turn around and anoint my work.

8. For twenty years, I’ve been telling my students –and myself– that the work itself is the only thing that matters. Prizes are lovely, but you don’t want to peek too closely behind the curtain at the processes that produce them. Ditto for good reviews. Ditto for bad ones. The reason most of the writers I know, contrary to popular myth, are among the healthiest people I know is that most of them have realized that they have no choice but to accept that they’re going to have to assess their own worth for themselves. This is something I truly believe. Believing it has helped me build a life I would not trade to be one of the last stars left.

9. I know– in a way I have never known before in my entire career– that The Book of Bunk is a book worth reading. Worth talking about. Worth arguing over.

10. I know that when it does come out, little about my life will change. But there will be readers here, and in the Balkans, and in Germany, and in France, and in New Zealand, and in Russia, who will be happy to see it, and who will write to tell me blunty and directly what they think. Because they have with everything else I’ve written.

And these aren’t things I have to remind myself of. They aren’t even things I believe.

I know them.

So why can’t I sleep?

Not far from my home, there’s a single, short block of stone-and-brick-and-shingle houses tucked back amid the cactus and the citrus trees. A sign proclaims the place “Russian Village,” though it’s hardly a village and, as far as I know, not a single Russian ever lived there.

The story goes that in 1923, a young Pole named Konstany Stus bought a few parcels of land just outside the town of Claremont. When the Depression hit, according to Elizabeth Pomeroy in her guide book, Lost and Found (which comes remarkably close to painting the Inland Empire as a cornucopia of hidden marvels, and is therefore a marvel in itself), Stus then sold off his land to families for $10 a month, payable whenever the families could pay. Together, using materials salvaged from anywhere and everywhere, they began building one another’s houses.

Material really did come from all over. When an earthquake leveled sections of Long Beach in 1933, Stus was there with trucks to collect rubble. He picked sandstone from a demolished courthouse in Los Angeles, scraps of wood from the Claremont Colleges construction sites, old telephone poles,  slabs of shattered sidewalk destroyed in the flood of 1938. No one in the neighborhood had an architectural plan, or any artistic vision to impose on the rest of the group. This was suburban development with no Model House, no homeowners association, no granite countertop buy-in bonus. The only guiding principle was to create a place. Make homes to live in.

What they made is a place, alright. A block of gray houses with decks that blossom from unexpected corners, yards of chipped stone that flow from the gaping cave-mouths of garages wide enough to have served as carriage houses or barns, roofs of shingle here, tile there. The more you stare at the houses, the stranger they become, seeming to flicker in and out of tangibility right in front of you. It’s almost impossible to imagine real lives being conducted in these jury-rigged, lopsided, eerily beautiful structures. Even with the DirecTV dishes now sprouting like toadstools from the tiles, and the pick-up trucks and dusty blue Inifinitis in the stone driveways.

Bunk County, in The Book of Bunk, is an imaginary county invented by Grace Lowie, a disaffected novelist working for the Federal Writers’ Project.  Over a period of almost a year, Grace invites many of the farmers, mill-hands, shop owners, vagabonds, displaced housewives, truck drivers, and former slaves from the actual North Carolina mountain towns she and her colleagues are meant to be documenting to invent characters and alternate lives to populate the place. Eventually, Grace plans to slip Bunk County into the WPA Guide to the Old North State, where it will nestle quietly, a little mirage of nearly-credible lives set in almost-real locations that none of the motor travelers using the guide books will ever quite be able to find.

Just another Russian Village, in other words. A place that wasn’t ever a real place, except to the people who lived there. A patchwork quilt stitched from leavings. A salvage job.  Somewhere that was always at least as much a story to tell as a community to live in.

Sound like any countries you know?

One of the places I’ve been dreaming, lately, is situated somewhere in the great north woods. There are cabins, snowsqualls, winter winds, a town square. And every clear night, in between storms, the people lucky enough to live there take blankets and baskets of food (none of which is poutine–I don’t know what anyone up there was thinking when they came up with poutine) and camp under stars you can still see and wait for the Women to come.

There’s the shatteringly brilliant, austere, and dazzling Ann-Marie MacDonald, who wrote The Way the Crow Flies and Fall on Your Knees. There’s the grimly wry Gail Anderson-Dargatz, whose wonderful books will never quite live up to their titles (The Cure for Death by Lightning, A Recipe for Bees).  A newcomer–just in my imaginary Canadian town, she’s actually been known in her own country for a decade or so–is Eden Robinson, the warmest, and just maybe the strangest, of the three. Her book, Monkey Beach has been my insomnia-companion this past week as I’ve wrestled with the self-doubt (not about my novel–not this time–but about my ability to sell it) that always accompanies the bludgeoning process of getting one’s writing into print.

What an odd, charming, loving, quiet, gorgeous book this is. A troubled sister, a dreaming brother lost at sea, good parents (what a rarity in the Age of Grief–good parents), endless stories, a sasquatch sighting that not only doesn’t wreck anything but somehow threads itself effortlessly into the tale.

What are they feeding their women authors up there? If I take back that crack about the poutine, do you think they’d ship some down?