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Going all the way back to the beginning, much farther back in fact, the Way of the Writer was a time honored tradition of
writing in a vacuum and the excruciatingly slow and ineffective program of sending out manuscripts via US Mail and waiting
months and sometimes years to hear from magazines and even worse, publishers. Back then the slush pile was a very real pile
of dogshit sitting in an office of an editor, heaping each day, growing to the ceiling and overflowing into broom closets,
laundry rooms, homeless guy's cardboard refrigerator boxes, forty-foot international shipping containers, and God only knows
where else. There was no mystery as to why literary editors--especially the ones who cared and tried really hard--had the
second highest suicide rate in the civilized world. Even car-jackers were afraid of accidentally stealing a Chevy Celebrity
full of wanna-be JD Salinger onion- paper mimeographs. The entire industry of psychoanalysis and psyciatry were built on the
disfunctional lives of these men and women who knew, deep down, they would rather be propelled and banished to an eternity
of punishment and damnation than continue to show up in their garbage infested workspaces. Interns were worth their weight
in cut grass clippings, and rejection slips sent blindly in all directions became salvation that could be bought at discount
prices from Office Depot. Each year a new issue of The Writers Market descended upon the writing community, and provided a
blueprint for the systematic assault on the already fragile sensibilities of these haplessly dysfunctional legions. Beauty
could be seen in that, ironically, each previous edition of The Writers Market did not automatically self-destruct at midnight
on New Years each year, and writers, a generally financially downtrodden group, continued to use previous editions for years
and years--sending in manuscripts often addressed to the last and sometimes second to the last editor before the one that
was actually still around, reminding those remaining constantly what their fate would one day be--seeing flashes of the double-barrel
shotgun or Saturday Night Special muzzleblast in the back of their eyelids each time they blinked, knowing one day, by the
time the writing community caught up and had started addressing the manuscripts to them it would no longer be the right name,
that they would in fact be dead of self-inflicted apathy long before such a turn of fortune. Editors buy lots of lottery tickets,
bullets, red pencils, and get really really good deals on graveplots and vacations to warzones in third-world countries under
general travel restrictions from the World Health Organization. Looking back to my childhood and adolescence, I remember a
time when public shooting sprees only took place in post offices and at publishing houses, and that was a world we could all
feel safe in.
Starting in 1994 I joined in the fray and began sending in poetry and stories to these massive mountains of grief, with the
hope that by the time I was thirty-five or forty years old perhaps I could expect to hear back from the magazines and publications
that I was so eager at 14 years old to one day be able to credit in my entry in Writers and Authors. I was so low on the rung
of things that I cannot remember ever even recieving a rejection slip, although once my accompanying Self-Addressed-Stamped-Envelope
returned with a scribbled suicide note on the back of a grocery list, and I pondered the irony in lactose-intolerant milk,
TV dinners, and beef-broth soup as the desired last meal of the recently appointed and already outgoing editor at Isaac Azimov's
Sci-Fi and Fantasy Magazine. My best friend Andy Dale Hill had a lot more luck in recieving the rejection slips, and I helped
him arrange them in a pattern on his den office wall.
My 1988 copy of The Writers Market was only finally retired once the internet came into vogue, roughly 1996, and I got in
the bottom floor of a new sort of literary organiation--the electronic magazine, forever known as the "ezine", not to be confused
with a "zine", which is where most stuff that was not accepted into any other print publication ended up. A Zine had been
the outlet for writers for years to feel worthy--often xeroxed on the sly and cheap in some underground punk's office at their
day job, or traded for drugs with hardcore junkies on Times Square, Zines were a fine and disreputable way for writers to
release the frustration of rejection slips, accidental suicide notes, and the loss of hundreds of self-addressed-stamped envelopes
each year that we all secretly held suspicions were being steamed and our stamps stolen and being used by the editors to send
international love letters to their mistresses in the USSR. Most editors did not plan their suicides very much in advance,
instead they fanticized about defecting to beyond the Iron Curtain and marrying disease riddled beautiful and horribly untrustworthy
women whose husbands were dying by the tankload in Afghanistan. After the fall of Communism in Europe, Johannesburg South
Africa became a fan favorite, and the 3500 police officers a year that were being murdered in that city was one indication
that this tourist paradise was just dangerous enough for an editor on the lam to feel right at home and fit in.
The beauty of the ezine was that I must have discovered them before most other writers, and I was a prolific enough writer
that all my stuff that was tied up in submissions via snail mail and whose destinies I was uncertain of was not a great deterrant
to my ability to create more stuff to submit to these new, marvelous, and highly inconsequential organizations. Early on,
I once provided all the material for one publication in one month, using a variety of pseudonyms to prevent the reading audience
from realizing that the entire issue was written by a high school sophmore with little or no regard for syntax, grammer, plot,
or talent. I was published literally hundreds of times in the years 1996-2000, and because I had failed to keep track of these
scientifically and reliably like I do today, most of these credits are lost, and for this reason I will always consider my
bibliography incomplete. The new breed of online literary editors were a strage mixture of refugees from third-world countries,
previous print-magazine editors who had failed in their original suicide attempt and had ironically found a new lease on life
and reason to live, and former drug addicts still on parole or probation. It was like the Wild Wild West, the Gold Rush, The
South American Marxist-Narco Revolutionary Movements, the African Diamond Wars, 1980's Pol Pot Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and Star
Wars (the Reagan Variety not the George Lucas sort) rolled into one self-gratifying event. It had to be the most interesting
and exciting time of my life. I could rip off a story a day, email it to some lowly editor at some publication I had never
read on some website I was not even sure existed and recieve an acceptance letter in a matter of hours. There was probably
about twenty of us writers for every fifty ezines, and we all knew each other well. I have never purchased a stamp since.
The problem that we saw was in the fact that the Print Publishing World was very snooty and refused to acknowledge or accept
that their quickly failing world of Literary Relevance was falling apart faster than the 5-Day Waiting Period allowed them
to create volcanic Astronomical Observatories in the back of their heads--the only people that were noticing the revolution
afoot were dying faster than they could be replaced, or joining in our cause, which made the shift in circumstance even less
apparent to the eight or nine actual civilians who still wasted a few hours a year reading something purely for literary interest.
Deadly combinations of prescription drugs, alcohol, firearms, depression, illicit narcotics, and late-model irresponsibly
fast moving vehicles were eroding the foundations of the vast monolithic empire of the Print Literary World that suddenly,
after the initial thrill of online literary publishing and ezines wore off, we realized we needed for there to be some reason
for us to continue to enjoy the artistic masterbatory reflex of self-agrandizement and mutual aide and action. Our Revolution
had to be directed at an actual object, organization, or beauracray who would not only recognize our sudden emergence and
dominance, but subserve to it.
Us of The Vanguard and The Leading Edge were like a tidal wave without an ocean, and each week or month a new smorgasboard
of ezines would crop up, based out of such weird IP addresses as Omaha, Flagstaff, Shreveport, Billings, Springfields in eight
states--New York City and Los Angeles, NyLa, was no longer the center of the universe, and as time went by, NyLa became more
and more on the periphery of things. The first person and organization to really recognize The Revolution and to take action
was Francis Ford Coppola and Zoetrope Studios, and like a tidepool in the rocks by the ocean, the choas of nature in motion
drew us to him. We now had our platform, our sounding board, and our great benefactor. FFC was not just a name or figurehead
on top of something that he simply stamped his approval on and ignored, instead, he was actively involved with the development
and expansion of the online literary movement, and soon, with regularity, members of our group were hitting it big in The
Print World. Several I can think of off of the top of my head went on to great fame and fortune, movies were optioned and
some even made, and our Hall of Fame grew. Now our sabre-rattling was not being done in a damp and dingy alleyway in some
fly-over state capitol village like St. Louis, but was resounding out of the alternative creative ethos of Zoetrope Studios,
based in San Francisco, California, and backed by one of the greatest renegades Hollywood has ever known. The more I learned
about FFC, the more I came to respect and eventually idolize him. Aside from my passion and energy, which was highly renowned
and well-known, I was also notable in The Movement for my substancial youth in comparison to everyone else involved. At first,
I had no idea who FFC was, other than he had been director of the The Godfather Trilogy. After a dream I had about him, and
the corrosponding comedic story I submitted to our workshop a few days later, I ended up on his personal map, and I started
to connect a life-long series of dots that had perhaps been in motion since before Christopher Columbus, gravitating me nearer
to The Man. The biggest piece of the puzzle, which I eventually although quite ignorantly had missed for a year or more,
was the connection of FFC to my most favorite movie of all time, Apocalypse Now, and the background on the making of that
film reminded me more and more of my own creative struggles, summed up in the famous FFC quote, "We were in the jungle, there
were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane." After using
all of the studio's money, all of the investor's money, all the money he could borrow from banks in multiple countries, FFC
had mortgaged everything he owned and spent every dollar he made from The Godfather and The Godfather II to finish Apocalypse
Now, and by the time it was over, FFC had quite literally almost lost everything.
I could see it in myself, I could see my own life spiralling into an oblivion of lunacy and creative purgatory. I became so
wrapped up in The Revolution, in the movement, in the interconnectivity with my fellow artists that all other things faded
in significance. The way our Artist's Salon was created with Zoetrope Studios was, and even today, ahead of the curve in innovation.
It broke new ground in social networking, creative expression, and in retrospect, many of the things that Our Revolution necessitated
and predicated fore-ran many of the larger scale and much later advancements of The Internet as a whole. I stopped writing
new things, or what I wrote, I did not publish, as I focused more on the relationships and struggles of Our Revolution than
my own creative development. My first marriage fell apart, and a great deal of it had to do with my obsessions and the dichotmies
of these obsessions and their results, or lack thereof. Inspiring dozens of other writers and artists, working behind the
scenes to break the stranglehold The Print World had on The Literary World--and being within the only small group that saw
the two as totally seperate things--degenrated progress I had been making for myself. I retreated into an abyss of madness.
After the marriage broke up finally, I cut myself off from the internet and Zoetrope completely, trying to focus myself on
creating a complete work of art that could get me into the next stratosphere with the dozen or so people I had worked with
and watched blossom into mainstream talents. Before I had completely found my Muse again, my life started to go in different
seperate tangents, I went back to college, and slowly I realized I had to start from scratch once again, artistically, and
in The Real World. My own literary ezine, High Contrast--Literature of the Digital Evolution, which I started in 1999, came
to a halt, but I saw the symptoms in myself of the disease of Print Editorship. Maya developed in this time period, but I
knew it was not the mainstream work that I needed. I worked on several projects that all sort of petered out, and my personal
life--the chaos of emotional and chemical turmoil--overwhelmed my creativity urges and drowned my talent, which I started
to second-guess and eventually doubt and turn away from. I tried to take different paths toward The Amerian Dream, and even
wished I could be normal and have a normal everyday life, the very thing I had always feared and decried and worried I might
be relegated to if I failed with art. I prayed for it. I dreamed of defecting to Cuba and marrying some beautiful latin woman
and being a fisherman or political advisor to Castro. For the first time in my life, the actual crucible of pain and disillusionment
was failing to produce creative works of beauty and profoundness. I was sure I was lost.
For the next few years I would pop up out from under the life-ocean surface, trying to quickly gasp in the state of affairs
with Zoetrope and my creative friends and artistic connections like it was life giving air, but never with permanance--trying
to fill the void in my life of trying to replace my first wife, or overcoming the distractions of a life of hedonism (which
the Delusional Complex convinced me was accomplishing tasks in both strivings--for companionship and artistic creation) always
led to a breakdown at some point before lasting progress could be made in any department. I watched Apocalypse Now and started
to become confused as to which character I was, Willard or Kurtz. The two sides of my identity, the Apollonian and Dyonisian,
warred incessantly for possession of my soul. I joined The Navy because I was out of things to create, I went into import/export
after that because I needed to replace The Navy, I entered the Car Buisness because I needed to replace import/export, and
along the way I created little of anything of lasting value. My relationships with females, the two in particular who I married
in these interwoven years, were larely superficial attempts to fulfill myself and convince myself of the illusion that I had
achieved The Dream, "the empy, shallow, hollow, intangible American Dream"*. The biggest part of myself was gone and I did
not know where to look to find it, and thought maybe I had never had it at all. I replaced The Void with chemical, material,
and emotional strivings I did not fully comprehend.
Maybe it was this Void that Solara saw better than anyone--as the person who came closest to the center of my heart, she must
have had to hover around The Void like a black star, knowing there was a part inside of me that was dead--perhaps this was
what drove her away. One of the final things she told me was that I needed to find myself, which at the time seemed to be
the cheapest of cop-outs, but after the period of darkness and then the return to light, where on the other side I regained
my ability to capture the love, the hate and the absolute total bliss of life, I finally found myself in a way I had not known
since before I could remember--suddenly I had regained my ability to rip off three thousand or more words a day, in whatever
style or subject I desired, without the pressure that I used to have to push on myself to get anything written. It came naturally,
and while the circumstances of life were not ideal to say the least, and the sum total of my life experiences embarrasing
on the Apollonian scale, I knew I had refound whatever I had lost before. The landscape of the ezine has now come to resemble
what the Print World was once--I send off submissions to ezines with regularity, and only rarely recieve a response, and maybe
if I had not disappeared from the scene for five years I would not have to wait like every other writer out there, but I know
that I am happy with the possibilities that exist, and as long as the sun still rises, there will always be more stories to
tell. I can be both comfortable and prolific. I am complete, have found myself maybe for the very first time, and am at ease
now with life in a way I have not been since I was young. Instead of dreaming of a way to go back in time and wronging mistakes
made, I am secure that The Path has been refound, and I am in possession of it in a way I never had before.
* From the poem "Maya", 2001.
Story by Michael J. Bernard
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