Writers Drink Too Much and Then They Kill Themselves or Die Young

I am going back to 1,000 word a day commitment.  It keeps me writing, and it keeps my garrulousness in check, sort of.  I am too windy, I know.  I will really shoot to keep the limit.  I really will.

I've been reading sad things today about how the book is going out of style and soon will be nothing but trash heaps and memories or somethings.  People like Jane Friedman, media specialist, media critic, writer and professor with a new book, The Future of Publishing: Enigma Variations, you can read a free excerpt from on the future of publishing.  You can get 39 pages of the book for free if you follow the directions and go pay $1.99 to Scribed.   She thinks the end of normal published books you just buy in stores is within shouting distance.  She blames Google, Apple and Amazon for taking over publishing and leaving writers in the dust.  She says that multimedia is the future of writer's writing, and look for more online and Web site multimedia non-books.

That is exactly what my brother is intuitively doing with his book that I am editing, "A Fairy Tale Life Is No Fable, by Michael Grady.  It is aimed at teenagers, and he knows from having his own kids, now young adults, how hard it is to get them to read a book that's good for them.  It seriously would save any teen agony and tragic mistakes and show them how to lead a joyous, responsible life and be a contributing member of society.

Listen to this.  Mike was a C.P.A. before he retired and he knows a lot about investing money.  When he wrote the first version of this book, he put in a surprise for his wonderful children whom he knew were just waiting with bated breath to read his book.  He wrote right in one of the later chapters on investments that he was giving each kid a big sum of money to invest as they wanted with the advice in the book.  He also told them where and how to get the money.

Neither kid ever got that money because neither read the damn book their father spent all that time and energy writing. I begged my son, a teen too at the time, to read it.  I wrote him a long letter about all the mistakes in my life that I might have avoided had I read this book as a teenager.  I implored him to save himself some misery and just read the book, which I view as the instruction manual God didn't think to give us when we were born.  He would not read it.  He has a second chance now and not much is different in his sleep all day party all night life.  We'll see what happens.

Jane Friedman's newsletters and blogs are the greatest thing.  She writes about writing for writers.  She also gives away rare nuggets of goodies and information like the old drunk lady on the corner used to give out Halloween candy.  She is so generous.  If you don't get anything else, get these five free ebooks  she recommends and links you up with. If you're a writer or media entrepreneur wannbe sign up for her newsletter too.

About that title of this post...  I just recently submitted this blog to Top 100 Sober Blogs Directory.  The blog has to be about that. Hey, this blog is sober and so am I:  Two years sober this month--today for all I know. I am a proud recovering alcoholic/addict and I do try to instill hope and recovery from several things. I try to  help others find their purpose in life, grow and develop as human beings, and learn more about my personal story, what kinds of things I write in Chicago Alcohol &; Recovery Examiner, and recover from everything that keeps you a slave and doesn't let you be fully human, alive and bursting with joy, and free.

So the title, "Writers Drink Too Much and Then Kill Themselves or Die Young," is about what I most aspired to when I was in college.  I wanted to be like these writers--"Top 10 Drunk American Writers."  Check out those quotes below their name.  At least they were honest:

""First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you." -- F.S. Fitzgerald.  


I wanted to go back in time and hang with all those expatriate drinkers/writers in Paris in the 20's and 30's like Fitzgerald, Hemingway and go visit Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin (not a drunk), and just be wild, free, creative, brilliant and drunk. 


Like this quote from a recent New York Times review of "Midnight in Paris."


"Many a writer or artist has longed to travel back in time to the sizzling Paris of the 1920s, to sip absinthe with Hemingway at Les Deux Magots or dine on choucroute garnie with Picasso at La Rotonde. Imagine the conversation! What has beguiled audiences about the new Woody Allen movie, Midnight in Paris is that the protagonist, Gil, a disenchanted Hollywood screenwriter played by Owen Wilson, gets to live exactly that fantasy."


It goes on with all the delicious details of drinking, writing and carousing in Paris that I know so well since I think I believed when I was a coed that I was not just some drunken, obnoxious, know-it-all but one of the hippest pack of them all.  If I had to be a woman I would be June Miller or Anais Nin.  I preferred to think of myself as that poor, tragic souse Fitzgerald with his partially glamorous life when he wasn't bankrupt, taking Zelda, his wife, to mental hospitals, or puking on his shoes while trying to get a loan from somebody like Max Perkins.   "Those were the days.  I thought they'd never end."   


My glamorous fantasy fueled by non-stop drinking and drugging (and the occasional college class) came to an abrupt halt.   I had to sober up at 28  or die.  I had to accept my complete ordinariness that came with homelessness, poverty, a liver that stuck out and hurt, an extra 50 pounds of beer bloat, a head so fogged I couldn't remember what address and phone number I was using when filling out job applications, and nursing a broken heart because my true love had just drowned.   Oh, yeah, and I didn't write shit, just as I had written not a whole lot of anything  in college in my creative writing workshops.  I cared too much what other people thought.  I worried the  hip cat graduate students might mock me, scorn my writing and pass swords through me during the public evaluation of my writing.  


What a crock!  


And that's 1,127 words, but some were quotes I didn't write.  See you later alligator.


Peace, 

TIME TO GET BACK TO FREELANCE LANCE WRITING TIPS AND RESOURCES

Photo: 

Books behind the bed, by zimpenfish

Creative Commons Share and Share Alike 

What happens if you want one from the bottom?

That's what the Vasoline is for.

Better in full size, about 390 books, about 40% zimpenfish

I am as a fired up about a new freelance writing blog I discovered in my email today, and I was the first time I read "Make A Living Writing," which I did not even know at the time was a top ten writing blog winner from a national contest held by Men with Pens.   Perhaps for best writing blog of 2011 we will see Writer Profits.  Susan Carter, author and blog owner, certainly seems compassionate and committed to seeing freelance writers get decent payment for their work.  If you doubt it, sign up on her blog for your free report on what to charge for your writing services.  This relatively short .pdf book packs a mighty powerful punch, and doesn't leave anything out  that I can think of offhand except I wished she had given editing rates.

 I am telling you, I have only done a handful of press releases for my own support group, but I am once again brushing off my free ebooks on how to write them.  It's remarkable what you can charge for writing a press release, and there really isn't all that much to it.  I can't imagine what they teach in courses on it.  I read one free ebook and was off sending them out to free distributors to the newspapers.

I am now going to make your trip down here worthwhile by sharing some of my best links.  I collect them in address books after learning the hard way, several times, that bookmarks drift away and disappear.  The last free bookmarks system I used went out of business and took my bookmarks with them.  The company offered to let me have some of other people's bookmarks, but fussy me, I wanted my own damn bookmarks back.  Now I write them down in my address books.

I collect links on everything I think is useful, interesting, will come in handy, or I might need down the road.  Here's a sample.  I will set them up as links so you can just click on them:

40,000 free online books.

Top 20 blogs for writers 2010.

Free Books & Articles, World Catalog

Alltop: Blogs By Category

Newsletter-Plain Languge-Everything You Need to Be A More Readable Writer.  Be sure to download "Principles of Readability.pdf"  It's all there--everything you need to know to make sure you are reaching your readers.

Cliche list.  (Hope you don't find any of your old reliables.)

Consumer Action Web site:   Get a free copy of the latest Consumer Action Handbook, invaluable.

Get paid to work as a Digital Journalist.  All the revenue goes in the "money pot" and everyone splits it up. I want to write for them and do photojournalism. No big clips or experience necessary. Just submit.

Mindful, spiritual entrepreneurship that sounds like the real deal.  Subscribe to the Mindful Business Newsletter and get your Free Mindful Business Visioning Toolkit!  It really helps you understand your spiritual/business goals and how they might work together for good.  


Okay, that's all for now.  I want to close by stealing a piece from Garrison's Keillor's "The Writer's Alamanac" for today, June 7, 2011 on Louise Erdrich.   I love how she describes the books, the writing life, and making up children to write about because we all know we can't write about our own.

"It's the birthday of novelist Louise Erdrich (books by this author), born in Little Falls, Minnesota (1954). She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Her mother was French-Ojibwe, and her father was German; she and her six brothers and sisters were raised in a close, loving family. Instead of watching TV—they didn't own one—the children were encouraged to write and to memorize poems.

She went off to Dartmouth in 1972, the same year the university started admitting women and the first year of its new Native American Studies program. The program's director was Michael Dorris. Years after she graduated, Erdrich was invited back to Dartmouth to read some of her poetry, and she became re-acquainted with Dorris, and they ended up getting married.

She started off as a poet. Her first book was Jacklight (1984), a book of poems based on the thesis she wrote for her master's degree in 1979. She said, "I began to tell stories in the poems and then realized that there was not enough room." So she moved on to fiction. She published her first short story, "The Red Convertible," in 1981, and "Scales" in 1982. Later that year, Dorris convinced her to enter a new fiction writing contest, so in the space of two weeks she wrote "The World's Greatest Fisherman," and she won the $5,000 prize. Two years later, she publishedLove Medicine (1984),a novel made up of 14 interrelated stories.

Love Medicine is populated with characters who live in the fictional town of Argus, North Dakota, or its nearby reservation. There is Marie Lazarre, who starts out life convinced she wants to be a nun—"I was that girl who thought the black hem of her garment would help me rise. Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing—that was me." And her rival Lulu Lamartine—"Lulu Lamartine was usually controlled as a cat, and got her way through coaxing, cajoling, rubbing against your leg. An old woman who remained infuriatingly pretty, she bent others to her will before they knew what was happening." And Nector Kashpaw, the man who loved Lulu but married Marie anyway: "Here is what I do not understand: how instantly the course of your life can be changed. I only know that I went up the convent hill intending to sell geese and came down the hill with the geese still on my arm. Beside me walked a young girl with a mouth on her like a flophouse, although she was innocent. She grudged me to hold her hand. And yet I would not drop the hand and let her walk alone. Her taste was bitter. I craved the difference after all those years of easy sweetness." After Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich wrote many novels set in the same fictional universe, and Marie, Lulu, and Nector all reappeared, along with others connected to them. Her novels include Tracks (1988), The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001), The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003), The Plague of Doves (2008), and Shadow Tag(2010).

She said, "We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif—books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantities and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench. Advance Reading Copies collect at beside, to be dutifully examined—to ignore them and read Henry James or Barbara Pym instead becomes a guilty pleasure. I can't imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers, and there it is."

She said, "By having children, I've both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. [...] With a child you certainly can't be a Bruce Chatwin or a Hemingway, living the adventurer-writer life. No running with the bulls at Pamplona. If you value your relationships with your children, you can't write about them. You have to make up other, less convincing children. There is also one's inclination to be charming instead of presenting a grittier truth about the world. But then, having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I'd have written with less fervor; I wouldn't understand life in the same way. I'd write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I'd probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I'd have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I've made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor."