Flowers in the attic

Apologies to my readers for missing the obvious joke in my last post regarding Bill Moro’s incredible feat on 9/11: “While terrorists were crashing planes into buildings, Bill Moro was crashing a 14 pound ball into bowling pins,” or some variation of that.

I must do better. We all must do better.

But I’ve finally accepted my fate as the Orson Welles of third-rate literature. In other words, much like the auteur’s inability to complete a film, I too cannot complete a short story. For artists like Welles and myself, this is frustrating. But like Citizen Kane, widely regarded as the greatest film of all time and was largely misunderstood in 1941, I’m sure The Detective James Series: Vol. I will find favor with the critics and be hailed as a pioneering piece of literature rivaled only by Hemingway and Melville. But for the time being, I will degrade myself by appearing drunk in wine commercials and bantering with C-list celebrities on Hollywood Squares.

As a result, I regret to inform readers that PEENER and whatever I named that story about people shitting themselves in an auditorium will not be completed anytime soon. That’s the bad news.

Clearly it’s time to hit the reset button. I’ve decided to jettison whatever content I’ve been consuming to find inspiration and start afresh. I’ve now been spending most of my time listening to Hollywood Crime Scene hosted by Rachel Fisher and Desi Jedeikin. Through this podcast, I’ve been introduced to Jennette McCurdy’s memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died which at face value might not seem to be in my wheelhouse. But that’s where you’re wrong. I was shocked to find the book to be very Bukowski-like in it’s almost semi-biographical, self-deprecating style (no shade to McCurdy. One has to take artistic liberties to tell a story, biographical or otherwise, and with the names changed, you can discover their real life counterparts with a 30 second Google search) with individual stories and incidents broken up into numerous short and easily digestible chapters. Reading this book almost, ALMOST, made me start writing again.

Thankfully, through Hollywood Crime Scene, I’ve decided to branch out my reading material. If a writer is to get any better, they must learn from the masters. That’s why I’m reading something completely different: Flowers in the Attic.

Giggle giggle, brother fucks sister, we all know that, but what I didn’t realize how horrifically tragic…and ultimately trashy….the book is. VC Andrews was trying to do the things that I’ve attempted, and failed, to do here.

So we’ll see if this does the trick.