So I was thinking today about all the damn things that get in the way of writing

It started with seeing the name of an old pal in the credits for a movie ad. Bill Monahan, who I haven't spoken to for a few years, wrote the new Crusades movie that's coming out, Kingdom of Heaven. All the contact info I have for Bill is out of date, so itracked down his current agent and sent off a note. Stamps! Post office! Good lord!

So that's amusing. Figured I'd write a little thing about it. That's why I started doing this thing, to get the fingers stretched out and bumping across the keyboard. And I've got a bunch of funny Bill stories from back when I was living in NYC, and he was yanking back and forth between New England and NYC. Maybe I'd tell a couple.

But then I thought about some of the pages I had run across on the Internet, already talking about Bill. And I figured, why put out stories for them? No need. Who needs some creep grabbing up personal stories about Bill without him knowing?

So I wasn't going to write anything. Until I thought of one Bill story, one that's about not writing. Which seemed awfully appropriate.

Bill spent a lot of time working on his novel Light House, making it good and funny. But Bill is a goddamn artist, you know. So when it made the initial rounds, it didn't sell because of the art. I think at least three editors, and Bill's agent, told him: "If you cut it in half, we'll buy it." But the half they had in mind was very specific. The original novel alternated the more-or-less straightforward funny story with beserk , highly stylized chapters about an organization that went back in time to change the world to their liking, but continually failed to do so. I may misremember those details, because I only heard one chapter at a KGB reading. The point is, Bill was told if he cut out the beserk chapters and kept the funny story, the book would sell right away.

It took Bill a year and ten minutes to make those cuts.

The year was:
to try and sell the book again, as-was;
to mull about whether he should just write a different novel;
to debate whether cutting the chapters would be a sell-out.

All that kind of nonsense. (I've rewritten my first novel three times, and still haven't made it more saleable, so I know about that nonsense.)

After that year of Hamletting, it took Bill ten minutes to cut out all the beserk chapters and change one sentence in the funny story. I think Light Housesold about two weeks later. The movie rights sold a bit later, and now Bill's name is appearing in TV ads for Ridley Scott movies.

Writing is a weird gig. And not writing is even weirder.