Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

-Frank Zappa

Rewrote 3 chapters of the book yesterday. Again, for the third time, whatever. This story has become my P90X, my sun salutation, my downward dog. What joy there was is long gone, replaced by an inexorable sense of duty to everyone who ever believed in it.

I'm through the hard stuff. Of the 169,000 words written, there are only 18,000 to go. Of the 71,000 rewritten, I expect maybe 12,000 or so to be added. It'd be interesting to find a plagiarism detector or something to compare manuscripts. There might be a paragraph that survived largely unchanged. I'm pretty sure that there are a couple instances where two or three sentences made it from one rewrite to the next. POVs change, dialogue changes, and it gets tighter and tighter but you don't do that by editing. As E.B. White said, "writing is rewriting."

My big show summoned me back for the tenth year. That means sixteen weeks of luxuriant payment in air-conditioned luxury... in Los Angeles. It'll be four solid months away from my family, but this is what we do to keep the lights on. I've got six weeks or so to wrap up my affairs here, finish the book and get a first pass done on a feature. It's impossible to do anything substantive while the show is on. If I don't finish the book before, I won't finish the book until October or November. With any luck it'll be done before May and I can spend occasional effort on the thankless task of "and selling it."

I realized the other day that "and selling it" is the most divisive thing any artist has to do. It's the cause of more fights than any other artistic discussion in my life and if there is to be blood, this conflict is the knife. There's this soft sentimentalism around "artists" that suggests that the act of creating is enough, and only those callow opportunist gloryhounds that require external motivation would bother to seek the validation of a paying audience.

It's not because of any absolutist moral principle. It's because it's fucking hard. It's the hardest fucking thing an artist has to do.

The world is full of better writers than me. It's also full of worse ones. My take is that if I'm going to give my life over to such a tedious, thankless task as writing a quarter million words, I owe it to those words to try and get them read. And that means convincing hostile gatekeepers that my labors have merit. It means convincing people to spend money on my scribblings. It means believing that the shit from my head is worth ca$h M0ney to go into yours and I think most "artists" aren't willing to sully their perfect Aristotelian idealism with the crassness of the market.

I've got the backing of two NYT bestselling authors. My editor has a Wikipedia page. My agent works for Stephen King's agent. And I'm scared shitless.

Because you aren't an artist because you call yourself an artist. You're a poseur because you call yourself an artist. You're an artist when someone else calls you an artist, or more specifically, when someone else spent money to call you an artist. And that divide is a cast-iron bitch, my friends.

I've crossed it twice. I hope to cross it again. But that fuckin' divide is a harder chasm to cross than the journey of turning 170k words into 85k because your editor says you have to.

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Also my mother is coming to visit tomorrow and staying through Monday. At least she's manic right now.