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Date Posted: 15:38:43 06/05/02 Wed
Author: Papa
Subject: Re: Welcome to forum X!
In reply to: mr.d 's message, "Re: Welcome to forum X!" on 11:52:16 02/10/02 Sun

"Lissen," the man says, sweating heavily, "Yuh gotta have a hook to hang this stuff on." His office is on the second floor of an old house and the windows were painted shut long ago. The air conditioner on the far wall has leaked its fluids into a baking pan. You sit in a straightbacked wooden chair watching the flies buzzing on the dusty glass behind the man's desk.

You explain, again, that the story is really sexy. Read it over one more time, you plead.

"Naw. I see a hundred stories just like it ever month. Look here," the man says. He picks up your manuscript and fans his moist red face with it. "Look here. Yuh got to have some personality and some interest. Something unique, see?"

But, you say, I get excited every time I read it. Isn't it a sexy story? you ask.

"Sure yuh get excited. Course yuh do. When you're writing you imagine the whole scene. Yer mind fills in all the details and makes the scene come alive in yer brain and yer gonads. But then yuh write down the action and fergit the details that make it come alive to a reader. Hell, that's the most common mistake I see coming across my desk." The man tugs his shirt to ease where it binds across his big belly, and shifts to a more comfortable position in cracked Naugahyde chair. "Now, take Cheever. Yuh take somebody like John Cheever. He don't never bother with who's got whose pecker stuck where, 'cause he knows damn' well that he can be sexier and more interesting by writing the details nobody else thinks of. He knows damn' well it's all personality and ambience and evocation."

The man opens up a desk drawer, pulls out a wad of napkins marked "Señor Puerco's Mexican Restaurant" and wipes the sweat from his fat face. "Shit," he mutters, "I wish to hell Cheever was still alive and I was his agent." He pitches the soaked napkins in a round and rusty metal trashcan under the window. The flies buzz. "I tell yuh," he says, "yuh can write stuff like this story of yours fer years and years, and all you'll get outa it is a bad case of the blue-balls. That's 'cause it's yer own personal fantasy, see, and it don't come through to the reader. The reader don't get no thrill from it 'cause it don't paint no picture for him. It don't evoke nuthin'"

So it's no go, you say, getting up. You don't like it, you say.

"Nope. Sorry, fella, I got no market for this." He tosses you the manuscript. "No offense. I just got no market. Now I got some work I gotta do. Take a look at this." He holds up a 3-inch-thick stack of papers. "Whence the Eagle Never Shat: Memoirs of a Brit Among the Esquimaux. Go figger. But the kid that wrote it is the son of a friend of a friend, so's I gotta read enough of this here abomination to not only tell him it's a goddamn abomination but what's so abominable about it. Keerist. Like I don't already got eyestrain and gasterintestinal reflux to beat hell."

"Yuh have yerself a good day, fella. Bet it's cooler outside than it is in this here dump. And no offense, OK?"

As you go down the stairs toward the street you can hear the agent talking to himself through the thin walls: "'They called me Ishmael'? Keerist, the kid thinks he's Melville. Yuh can't tap the same vein twice, kid. Jaysus Keerist..." Then you're on the street, and the man was right: it is much nicer.

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