It’s 2:50 a.m. and I am starting to feel the pinot noir. I still have a couple of glasses to go.
I am getting back to working on Shadows and Stars. I have been working on Lycanthrope since January, because ideas have been coming to me for Lycanthrope, while Shadows and Stars is becoming increasingly complex and ideas are not coming, if at all, as they once were. I am re-assessing Shadows and Stars and am trying to come up with a denouement that is more all-encompassing, more pervasive than my original idea. I want to have the denouement to be powerful, to explain/reveal more than I had originally envisioned, which was just to reveal the protagonist’s true nature.
Damn, it feels so good to have had a glass of wine too many and be watching clips from the old Tonight Show, which I loved as I was growing up. It’s too bad that it’s 3:00 a.m. and I have to get up at 7:00. It’s nothing I haven’t done before many times. Right now, I am watching The Tonight’s Show 17th Anniversary special (on YouTube). I miss the early 1960’s Tonight Shows, when guests would not only smoke and drink on set, but would often be outright drunk. Right now, Burt Reynolds is squirting a can of whipped cream down Johnny Carson’s pants.
Now Sally Fields, then Burt Reynolds’s girlfriend, on a later show is squirting shaving cream onto Johnny Carson’s head and face.
Carson returns the favor by squirting shaving cream down Sally Fields’s cleavage, on her head, and down her shin.
Today’s television is so damned staid.
This pinot noir is not great, but it’s good enough. It gets the job done.
Steve Martin is on there now. The original “wild and crazy guy”. Today’s generation will never know just how wild and crazy Steve Martin was in his early years.
Anyway…on with The Chamber.
The Chamber is going great guns. I have ten stories in draft. Most need just minor fine-tuning before I post them.
Pie -in-the-face gags now. Hilarious!
Now, back to The Chamber. I am getting a lot of submissions from a lot of great, professional authors. Even the stories I am receiving from authors that have only a few publication credits for a few short stories in a few magazines are really go. It is rare that I have to turn a story down. I feel that I am rather lucky in comparison to many magazine publishers.
I am also learning a hell of a lot about marketing and publicity, too much to write about in this short article. Maybe I will write about it later. The key, though, is to publicize whatever you to the max. I hear something about Bieber (even though I really despise his a**), Megan Three Stallion, Brittney Spears, or whoever, I realize he/she is publicizing himself/herself to the max, which is not only necessary, but essential, to get to the level of the upper strati of the public consciousness that they occupy. I have often thought that every time Madonna farts, it makes the national news. After having studied marketing and publicity for only a short while, that that extreme of self promotion (I am rather humble and backwards, very much an introvert, by nature) is necessary to reach the level of exposure they have in the public’s eye is necessary to their financial success.
Anyway, I have had enough Pinot Noir tonight (it’s 3:45 a.m.) that I am calling it quits while I am seeing only double.
Au revoir. Hasta manana. Bis spaeter.
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 