No sales.
A few smiles in my direction – and the check for “Schiz” (and postage) arrived from my high school classmate in France.
In other news…
My article/story “The View From Schrebnick’s Seats” will appear in a forthcoming “First of the Month”
And I have been asked to review a recent biography of Maxon Crumb and to contribute an article on EC Comics or Victor Moscoso to a comic arts magazine. At the same time I had begun work on an new project.
This is all inter-related and lights up the portion of my brain devoted to planning ahead.
This story begins with my as-yet-unpublished-by-Full-Bleed article on Andy Kaufman and his biographers. As this article developed, certain segments were written as standard-issue, third-person, outside-the-action journalism and certain with me as a first person participant (“I”) and certain as if about a fictional character (“Goshkin).
I enjoyed writing Goshkin, so I wrote a short piece or two centered upon him. Then having written “Seats” as a first-person “true” narrative, I decided to re-write it as “fiction” with him at its center. Which is what FOM will publish.
Writing fiction again – after, pretty much, a 30-year hiatus – was fun. So I decided to write a “novel” about Goshkin. But rather than begin from scratch, I would substitute him into existing pieces, replacing whomever had been at its center previously, without establishing continuity between these pieces or resolving contradictions between them, including an unpublished short story I wrote in 1969, the Kaufman article, and an unpublished article I wrote a few years ago devoted to determining who killed John Kennedy. (Spoiler Alert: It was Oswald.)
The question was already present as to whether this was a burst of artistic genius on my part or if I ought to adjust my meds when these new offers presented themselves, offering opportunities for more Goshkins to arise.
My way forward is unclear.