Home from the nightmare that is my professional life at the moment. The editor gave me the perfect good-bye words: Stick to your fiction. On top of the lot I also learnt that I will be getting a grand less of my fee, 23% than what's in the contract due to taxes, because perish the motherfucking though anyone should ever fucking create anything in this God forsaken county. This rendered me so incredibly defeated, I didn't even say goodbye back. It was like the last bitchslap. I got so sick I needed to cry so badly I just fled. Later I talked to the literature professor who told me I deserve no applause for the (professional) decisions I am making. How I should thoroughly rethink my ambition if I am to stop feeling stabbed. He told me it is not only common practice to give a professional's idea to a student for nothing but peanuts and gratitude and ultimately treat the pieces as no different. In this case I am the fool. As proud as I am, thrilled as I was, grateful for the opportunity and changed over the past year, I am less than an amateur. Allowing things like these to happen is nobody’s fault but my own. Editor told me many people think this book to be poorly executed and inappropriate for their publishing palate. She said they didn’t know whom they were hiring and that my drafts and blogging seem fine, but my writing is faulty and messy at the best of times. This was probably a warning that I should expect negative press and hate mail. Well, we exist in the world where 50 shades of Grey is the bestseller of 2013. My one bright light, my one extended hand of greatness and triumph in all this is my mock copy of the Gorgonaut I'm keeping on the desk (and in my mind as I go around). It is the finish line for which all this bile and sulfur is worth it. Nothing is as important as the Gorgonaut right now. After that, I'm free. And I'll be deciding what to do next. Either a novel, Goose, picture book Tree or my dad's autobiography which I would ghost- write. I'll give myself till summer's end to decide if I want to continue being the writer. The reviews will be out by then. We’ll just have to wait if real life happens while I'm making other plans.

            No idea how my Reader's Digest interview will turn out. That was the one appointment today that pleasantly surprised me. It was less an interview than a two hour fast talking coffee date with someone who speaks my emotional span lingo and who made me think that if being a writer was any easier, we'd probably just find ourselves something more fucked up to do. There's always a chance my behavior will backfire, but I think I'm fairly original and stand by my work, so ... Fuck it. All of this can go either which way. Once they removed the Celine Dion from the tray, we even had two really good songs in the soundback: Mad world and Iz's Somewhere over the rainbow... Appropriate. I know now I desperately need more portraits. The missing grand cut the new lens from the list, tho. That much about that.