Delusions of the Non Published Wanna-be Writer

10) I'm the next Hemingway...well, I'm more wordy than that and I tend to use ellipses...but I'm writing the next great American novel.

9) I'm going to be richer than J.K.Rowling and Stephanie Meyer put together.

8) It will be easy to find an agent. So easy, the agent will seek me out rather than the other way around.

7) Edits? What edits? The editor will understand my prose is an intentional choice of style and not the result of sloppy writing mistakes of craft.

6) Oprah will love my book. She'll restart her book of the month club just for me.

5) The book tour will be financed by the publisher and include my whole family on one of those very cool million dollar Canadian buses.  The kids will love seeing the country. We'll eat well.  It will garner a lot of great press and buzz.

4) The New York Times will love my book. They will say nice things about me, my books, my style and my dog if I had a dog, because they love the book. 

3) My book will be a movie and it will be nominated for best adapted screen play and I will go to the Academy awards ceremony and get my picture taken with Oprah, George Clooney and any other stars that stop me and say, "Can you autograph my book? I love it and have read it over and over again."  I will have writer's cramp by the end of the evening because I've signed my name so much.  I will start signing books S.A. to deal with the pain but be true to the fans.

2) A prestigious university, (its English department weeping with joy), will offer me a position teaching writing and a course just on my book alone, which I will accept.  They will also give me an honorary Ph.D. because of the book.

1) It should only take about a month or two to write.

Writer of the not yet finished book and this blog note: Yeah.  I'm setting a time of 5:00 a.m. every day to work an hour on the Beast that is Helen.  Did my time yesterday and today.  Decided to have an indulgent moment of non billable writing and this is the result. 

Having a Youtube Moment

First, a disclaimer: I don't watch Youtube.

I know what you're thinking: You lie.

No. I really don't. My computer still putts around on dial up, so unless I want to experience processing information in real time as if I have ADHD, I'm not going to link onto any video type material, no matter who sends it to me.

It's not that I've never seen Youtube. I've been at a friend's house and seen the One Semester of Spanish Spanish Love song --a great humor short if you've never seen it. I've driven home my kids friends and heard about Chad Vader in the Grocery store, and about the puppet versions of Harry Potter singing about Severus Snape.

My main problem with Youtube is the absence of a filter to prevent personal public assassination of an individual in the name of showmanship, put downs, cruelty, smugness, immaturity and indifference to causing humiliation. That, and having dial up, I can't see any of it.

You're thinking...so switch to broadband, cable, wireless, there are ways.

But you see, I know myself well enough to remember, I yell at phone service people who are indifferent to my pain. Appliance man, this means you.

I have been known to roll down my car window when someone took the parking place reserved for new mothers and pregnant women. As the guy sprinted towards the Radio Shack, I yelled "That's Funny, You don't look pregnant!"

Caught at the wrong moment --say during dinner time, after I've been on hold for fifteen minutes, or when pressed and stressed, I can be, and I'm sorry if my mother is reading this, rude.

As Youtube becomes more ubiquitous than it already is, I predict an increase in the percentage of women dressing up and wearing professional type makeup, as daily footage of our everyday becomes more and more posted on the internet. Maybe I should start dying my hair or at least brushing it. If' I'm caught today on TV, Mom will be calling. "Why didn't you at least get a haircut before you went off?"

"I was at the hair dresser's."
"Well, put on some lipstick if you're going to talk like that. It's Clinique bonus time, go in and get a pack."

The reason for all of this, is that in our area, a woman lost her temper and made an ill advised return phone call to a high school senior that had called her home to nag about a snow day. Her husband was/is superintendant of Fairfax schools. That rant in its ugly entirety has even been run on CNN.

While public humiliation is not exactly the modern day equivalent of feeding the Christians to the Lions, it is a public blood sport. People watch and participate in the feeding frenzy because it seems there's nothing wrong with a good public excoriation of another, as long as it appears that the person was deserving of such treatment. No one thinks they'd want to live in a society where scarlet letters are sewn on people's shirts, but having a trail of websites that reveal any and all past discrepancies and personal failures is pretty much the same thing.

What is never asked, is if that treatment was warranted, and that is because the answer would almost always be "No." And then if it were asked, People would shrug their shoulders and say "What can we do?"

We are going to have to as a society learn to manage our "God's Eye" viewpoint that can turn the most intimate and private of conversations into one of the most popularly downloaded clips of the day. We are going to have to remember that at any moment, we could be the one on candid camera, not just in syndication, but forever available, to us and our posterity. What we can do, is not watch. What we can do, is decide before we post, email, film or depict, would we want this done to us?

In the meantime, I'm going to buy some whitening toothpaste and some conditioner. If I'm going to be made infamous for my flaws, I want to look good for Mom.

P.S. and as if to punctuate this slightly serious post, I just discovered my daughter. Apparently, she tried on all the pull-ups to find the one she wanted while I was typing. There are thirteen discarded ones in the bathroom. On Youtube today...