What is the sound of one hand slapping? Part II

On the slap-but-no-tickle side of life, however, I have been struggling with writing lately, something I really enjoy doing but which, like physical exercise and good nutrition, has not appealed to me much recently.

I set out at the beginning of the year with two articles being published back-to-back, writing another review which was set to be published this month (or so I thought), and having another query accepted for an article due in July. For one shining moment, I felt as though I might actually get back to regular creative writing, something I hadn't done seriously for ten years or so. This time, though, I would be more consistent, publishing something every couple of months, and cleverer, even getting paid for what I wrote instead of giving it away for free. No whore I, I'd work my way into a self-pimping literary prostitute before long.

But it feels like it's all going wrong now. For one thing, I'm bored by the idea of the article I pitched for completion in July, and even though there's money attached to its successful publication, I just can't be bothered to do the research at the moment. The proposal also involves talking with people to get information out of them. Now I can talk with anyone, but I always feel a little dishonest in trying to glean information from someone for my own benefit. It somehow seems rude or unseemly. Very un-Southern. Don't ask, don't tell.

So I have pretty much decided to postpone the magazine piece for July, instead concentrating on reviews, the blog, and some creative think-pieces I might somehow work into a regular column or an occasional personal essay for some (paying) little magazine or website. When I fantasize, I fantasize big and literate.

The review I completed in April, on the BBC America TV show, Footballers' Wive$, was easy enough--I just had to write what I thought ("It's camp! It's tawdry! It's fab!") and contact the BBC for some photos. No problem.

I thought the review turned out well. It was a little overwritten, a little overly alliterative (who me?), but still, it was good, solid, entertaining, and under 750 words, which seems to be the criteria for the editor of the gay publication for which I wrote it. Said editor told me he'd publish it in May, and I thought, whew, I'm still on schedule for publishing something every other month, even if I don't get paid for this piece. However, with a couple more clips under my belt, I can use those to bargain for a better assignment for a more up-market publication.

Imagine my surprise and disappointment then when I received the most recent issue and failed to find the article within its pages. And because it's a fairly time-sensitive review and the publication is only issued bimonthly, I think it's doubtful that it will be published at all.

Pooh.

Now I've had issues (if you'll pardon the pun) with this publication before. The first article I wrote, a review of the gay cable channel Logo, originally came in at a little under 800 words. The editor, however, cut it back to 650, noting that the article wasn't in "newspaper style," which apparently means he would add in subheadings (fair enough) but also recast the original premise of the piece and edit it so that it not only didn't make a lot of sense but was factually inaccurate.

I'll grant you that I don't know a lot--I don't give a rat's patoot about the sciences, I'm not sure I get the point of the major philosophers, and I struggle with figuring out the tip at a restaurant on a regular basis, even when I'm the only one paying the bill. But as a life-long homosexual, I'll be damned if I don't know about the appeal of an all-gay TV channel and, thus, I can surely string together some entertaining sentences about it. I'm not often confident about much of anything, nor do I insist on my way too many times, but this much I know.

So I re-edited and corrected the piece, getting it back up to 700 words. I wasn't happy with the results and haven't shared it with many people because of this, but still, it was done, it was published, and my figurative foot was in the door.

I pitched a few other ideas to him, film, music, and TV reviews, mainly, but he didn't go for them. Instead he came back to me to ask whether I would do a 600-word, "investigative" piece on coal mining's effect on the environment in Western Pennsylvania.

Uh, dude, do I look like Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein? Or even Alfre Woodard or Carl Sagan? If anything, I resemble an odd combination of Bob Barker and Karl Marx with a heavy dose of Jack McFarland and Karen Walker (from Will and Grace, R.I.P.) thrown in for good measure. Hard-hitting facts and environmental analysis ain't my thang, especially when only 600 words and no money are involved. But TV, campiness, bitchiness, and some opinionated (although incompletely formed) political and economic commentary most definitely are. Go with what you know.

Unsurprisingly, I'd have a hard time keeping an introduction to such a piece to a mere 600 words. I explained this, told the editor about the Footballers' Wive$ review (which kind of says everything you need to know about my intellectual interests), and he accepted the idea. I submitted the finished piece on time, clocking in at around 730 words.

But now I've gone from Logo to no go, apparently.

I thought perhaps I misjudged my audience. Am I too camp? Too obscure? I pitched more "approachable" pieces earlier on, but when they were rejected, I went for something a bit different, something I would consider enjoyable to know about and entertaining to watch. Plus the show I wrote about has a bit of a buzz behind it, has been covered by some other mainstream mass media, and has identifiable (if scandalous) gay and lesbian characters.

Still, in the same issue of the paper, there was a review of recent Marilyn Monroe releases on DVD and current club-kid-interest-only releases from obscure dance labels. So . . . maybe I'm not too obscure or too camp. Maybe I just suck as a newspaper writer.

Or maybe newspaper editors suck.

When I first graduated from college, I worked as a newspaper reporter in a small North Carolina town, eventualy fleeing after several months for life in the big city and more than $9,000 a year income, which even in 1983 was paltry. The editor for the "Scum-Urinal," as we reporters nicknamed our paper, put me, the least qualified and least interested, on the cops and courts beat, where I spent all my time trying to cajole one particularly asshole-ish police officer into letting me see the daily log (a legal requirement under North Carolina law) and fending off another from showing me the latest grizzly crime scene photos from child abuse and murder cases. He put another reporter, a young woman who really wanted to be the cops and courts reporter and had the wiles and testicles to handle it, on the features desk. Talk about being blinded by gender. Stacy could've whipped those cops into shape in no time, and I could have made the features section more fabulous than anything anyone in Hooterville had ever seen. Their loss. But it meant that my full-time writing career came to a premature end.

Not getting published and not getting paid for a goofy little review bothers me, obviously. But I think what troubles me most is it means I have to--once again--rethink my future goals and secret dreams. You see, lately, I've been taking intelligence and career satisfaction tests, and they all point me to a different line of work. While my present line isn't completely unsatisfactory to me or to my abilities, at the moment, I feel that I'm a bit out of sync with my profession and my interests. My career tests point me toward being an ill-defined artist of some sort, a creative writer--or maybe a recreational or psychotherapist, or even a minister. (Is there by chance a Church of Secular Humanism? Other than the Unitarian Universalists? No?)

My results sound like those biographical sketches of bubble-headed contestants from the Miss USA pageant, who vow they'll either be an opera singer or breastfeed the children of Africa one-by-one, then go on to showcase their talent at ventriloquism or tap dancing. Or it's like the time I opened a fortune cookie as part of a Chinese take-away, and it told me I should be a political leader--or a hairdresser.

Cheese and crackers, folks. Careerwise, I am all over the freaking mental map.

But then maybe this is nothing new. It just indicates that I desperately need to rethink my original plan: To retire in the next year with the goal of building a time machine to return to 1980s and '90s Britain and take over the editorship of the entertainment section of The Face, Q, Select, I-D, or some other hip, trendoid magazine. For you see, despite the fact that Kurt Loder's sagging face and heaving carcass are still flogging music news on MTV, editing a trendoid British magazine for twenty-somethings is really a young man's game.

At times, I'm not sure I have a lot going for me--although there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. I have a great apartment, some very good friends and family members who I care about and who care about me in return, reasonably good health, a functioning automobile, a sufficient amount of income, wonderful colleagues, an engaged boss, and a lot more control and flexibility at work than most. And then there's this blog, which gives me a lot of pleasure, more than I can say. That should be enough, shouldn't it? Yet like a slow leak in a raggedly Michelin tire, still I whine as I travel down life's road.

Thus, perhaps the sound of one hand slapping is the cold, hard smack of reality against my cheek. A smack that says wake up and smell the midlife crisis and the need for counseling, bucko.

As Cher told Nicholas Cage in Moonstruck as she smacked him across the chops, "Snap out it!"

Goodness knows I need to.