Technical Difficulties: "Night Of The Living Dead Writers"

"Writers? They are terrible people"
-Henry Rollins


11:00 PM

Fuck. Fuck, fuck fuck. I should have never went to this writer convention. I had heard legends about those, but I guess my skeptical self couldn't do with a simple warning. There are some wannabe YA writers in the street still. They are eating the brains out of some poor drunken dude that was outside the tavern near my apartment building. In a few minutes he's going to start rambling about his long lost ghost lover. Goddamn it, I have to go get the rifle.

11:15 PM

I think they are gone now. What a terrible night. Donald Maass and The Rejectionist have warned me about this. Never go querying without a complete manuscript. How the fuck should have I know it was to open the doorway to hell? All I wanted to do was to pitch Solace to an agent so I could finally know how to classify it. An utilitarian visit you know?

11:41 PM

Josie axed an urban fantasy writer that was hiding in the ceiling of our bathroom. She doesn't take well to invasion of privacy. Before she threw his head by the window of our second floor apartment, I had a chance to check him out. He's one of the three writers that chased me down in the street on my way back home. I had to clothesline another survivor off his Bixi to lose him. I still can hear his ghastly voice: "Have you ever wished you could summon a dragon?" he said. I'm going to nightmare about this.

12:02 PM

Am I going to turn out to be like them? Was it some kind of germ that was in the air at the convention? Am I going to wrap myself up in my own bullshit so tight that I'm going to roam aimlessly and ramble about my 60 000 words YA novel that nobody wants to publish because they can't understand? Am I going to expose the hardships of my life in hope to squeeze out a pity publications?


12:09 AM

Fuck, who changed my start up web page to Lulu.com? Josie says it's not her. I'm losing it. I think I have been poisoned too.

12:44 AM

After a talk with my loved one, we settled for a potential solution. Kill the primordial pretentious writer. That should make the others go away. We called up AT. Somehow, this tough SOB managed to survive He's coming over with his car he changed in a deadly plowing machine.

1:31 AM

We're on our way to Nick's house. He's the first scary writer I have ever met, so there's a good chance he's behind all this. Like all the supernatural creatures I know he's living on Masson Street in a big, overpriced apartment that his purveyors pay for him. I have to be careful though. He's the primordial shithead writer so he's infinitely smarter than the others. After all, he's a playwright.

1:40 PM

I met Nick at University. He was smart and a good reader. Better than me even. But Nick was so far up his own self that he lost it. There was no discussion to be had with him if it didn't turned around him or the writers he worshiped. Somehow, people were attracted to his "artistic" temper. I should have known he was Writer Alpha all along. He almost singlehandedly made me quit school because he made me realize the emptiness of intellectual debates on Deleuze and Hegel. I should have known!

3:06 AM

I am lucky to be alive. Nick didn't go down without a fight. There's no worse writer than the ones who have an author-persona. He kept trying to wrap me up with quotations from Heidegger and Derrida. He also read me some extracts of his plays. He almost made me go into a white noise mode. Josie and AT were there to keep me in check though. We tied him up to a chair, stabbed him in the eyes with his Mont-Blanc pens and read him the first ten pages to Mystic River. He went down in flames gurgling something like: "Aaaargghhh...noooo...plot....witty dialogue..existentalistmenangstlyotardpostmodernism...glllllllll".

4:10 AM

I'm watching the local bikers burn the last standing writers in the street. They are running around like headless chicken screaming "I'LL SELF-PUBLISH ANYWAY". Their dead meat is going to be good lunch for my dog. Now I know where I went wrong, how this whole catastrohpe. Writers write and wannabees want. The life of a writer is to write. Anything related to publishing comes when it's ready to publish. Getting a story out of you means to detach yourself from it and make it good enough to share. When I went to the convention, all the negative energy of Nick's image reverberated across the room like an atom bomb. He was also present to try and hook a publishing deal for his existentialist stuff. It made all the frail and weak hearted spin out of control, hungry for the hopes and dreams of everybody else.

Josie is already sleeping the sleep of the righteous. She was amazing tonight. I will go and tomorrow I will do better than bouncing over to conventions and ask for review of my unfinished manuscript. Tomorrow I will write.