It's been a week, Hubski. Sunday started the week off with a bang by throwing my new Porsche into a 720 degree spin. Or the better part of one, at least - coming down an on-ramp I goosed the throttle (in 2nd, a little spirited but a long way from reckless) and had the car kick left into the better part of a 360. it refused to catch until I was about 20 degrees shy of a full revolution at which point I straightened it out only to have the car continue into another 3/4 revolution. We (me, the car, my wife and my daughter) came to rest about 40 degrees from straight. Fortunately we didn't so much as kiss a curb. It's worth noting that Porsches are known for this. It's worth noting, however, that I drove that car up 1500 miles of the PCH in all weather and can only describe its handling as "predictable." There are no surprises whatsoever to be had from that car; you can break the ass loose and catch it again as if you had a cutting brake. The back tires are P-Zero Rosso Asymmetricos with less than 2,000 miles on them; the fronts are Conti Extreme DWS with less than 500. I spent the better part of Sunday breaking the thing loose everywhere I could under any conditions possible before I realized that the blessed little thing will happily crawl up the 50% grade mud hill next to my garage with nary a complaint, let alone manage wet pavement with no surprises (other than this one). It also took me more than a day to realize that the '77 Skylark with bald tires I drove in High School was so miserable on ice that I could turn the bitch 90 degrees by stomping the gas and lunging hard in the drivers seat to one side or the other. Miserable traction or no, I could never get that Buick more than 180 out and i once lunged it down an ice-covered hill and lurched it on purpose. I ended up on a friend's lawn but I never got a 360 out of it, let alone two of them (with barely 40mph of momentum). It had to have been diesel. HAD to have been. But dayum. It took me from distrusting my car to distrusting every road. Shit coulda been really bad. Monday I discovered my book was dead at my agency. It's been a long road. It's been a lot of work. It's been the better part of a year convincing my ex-agent's boss that her email eats attachments. But we solved that three weeks ago and I no longer have representation. So go find another agent! Something rarely mentioned to beginning writers is that the act of writing is far and away the easiest thing about being a writer. It's the act of selling that will kill you. The guy who talked me into writing a novel is on the NYT Best seller's list right now (for like the 8th time) and he's told me that if he were growing up in the climate right now, he'd never make it. And of course, it's NaNoWriMo, that one month a year where all your loser Facebook friends post their fucking word counts every day without caring one fucking iota that their bilgewater is why I'm not allowed to ask my agent if she got my book except for every twelfth week. That if there wasn't so much shit in the sewer rats like me would be able to get around easier. Know how you become a successful writer? Ask Anne LaMott - be independently wealthy and have a successful writer as a father whose agent will happily read your shit for ten fucking years. I also got notes back on the short film I've been mixing. They make it abundantly clear that my involvement is resented, that every creative choice I've made has been rejected, and that really, they would like me to put it back exactly the way I found it. Which would not be a problem except that I took on this mix as a favor to my best friend and he's had to fight so hard to get any changes that whatever instruction the director gives, my friend browbeats me over. They've formed an insular little cadre over there where it's their film and I'm the interloper and I had to have a 3-hour fight about this before my friend even heard himself yelling at me for making a change and wouldn't even let me explain why I'd made it. Once he gave me the opportunity and I spent fifteen minutes explaining my thinking he acknowledged that I was being completely shut down and belittled but not that I might not want to do that for fun for every single improvement I've attempted to make to their fucking film. So that's basically a month of my life I'll never get back. Meanwhile, they're the squeaky wheel which means the actual paying project I've got has taken a back seat. It's shit too, of course, but at least I'm appreciated... which made me realize that pounding fucking Pro Tools for appreciation is a shitty-ass business model. It also made me realize that all the clients I used to get good work from have exited the industry and all that's left are Premiere Punters that are not at all interested in my help. I finished Monday never wanting to mix again and never wanting to write again. Frankly, I'm still there. And, of course, I have to execute those notes within the week. And the guy I wanna bitch to? he's the guy who caused the pain. yesterday he suggested that I could turn some other fucking screenplay into a novel and I told him "fuck writing forever". He responded that nobody ever hits on their first movie (he's wrong) and I responded "fuck movies forever too." Yesterday I had to go fix shit at the birth center. Turns out birth educators are less gentle than fucking high school students. One of the women who rents our space for classes legit pushed an HDMI cable into the wall. I measured; it takes 8 lbs of force to do that. So I was left with the choice between making my wife tell everyone who rents there to stop being gorillas or gorilla-proofing my birth center. Now I'm left wondering what else is going to break; I need to switch the entire fucking network over from Netgear to Ubiquiti (we've blown the mind of a Nighthawk through the simple application of a few cameras) but I can't do that until I've systematically erased every creative touch I've put into this fucking film over the past month. The wind is so bad here it ripped the cover on my motorcycle, which I haven't had a chance to touch in a year because I've been too busy dealing with other people's bullshit. So here I sit. Drinking coffee and venting because the alternative is removing my work so I have time to gorilla-proof a business where every customer resents me. It's fuckin' great. Where's the drambuie.
We appreciate you KB. You're a damn fine writer. Never quit.
Well, shit. All of that sucks. I wanna point and laugh that you are surprised that a rear-engine vehicle with three people in it failed to respond predictably to steering input, when - practically speaking - there was basically zero weight over the front wheels... but I am, quite honestly, talking out my ass with information probably gleaned from a combination of Top Gear, my father, and Elliott, who all hate Porsches with a passion. (Well, except for Hamster.) And, more importantly, I would also be laughing at a potential car wreck involving your lovely wife and angel of a daughter, and even I am not that much of a dick. So let's stick with "diesel spill". The book and the movie? It's shit when you knew that this was the most likely outcome for both projects from Day 1. But getting to the end and seeing them actually turn out that way has got to be defeating. Sorry about that, man. I've always expected you to have success along the lines of Andy Weir, (but without Reddit). Maybe it is still coming down the pike... The same wind that took your MC cover destroyed my RV cover too. Now the side mirrors are sticking out like ears from big gaping holes in the fabric, and a tear along the roof seam will destroy the whole thing the next time we get anything over 15 MPH. There's another $300 to Amazon coming up during the holiday season... Sorry for the shit sandwich, my friend. And... who the fuck drives an HDMI cable through the goddamn wall?!?
So from a physics standpoint, there are four wheels on two axles. If there is an engine behind the rear axle and nothing up front, there is a load of - not zero, for sure, but we'll call it "neutral." Put a driver in front and the weight loading is neutral plus driver on the front axle - there is more load on the front axle than there would be with no driver. Obviously, the car is not designed to be driven with no driver. But just as obviously, when you put two extra passengers in, there is more load on the front axle, not less. More than that, the argument is that Porsches spin the rear wheels, not the front, which is exactly what happened, but c'mon. The car weighs 3000 lbs. A woman and a 4yo is the difference between drivability and doom? You went where I did - "well everybody knows that Porsches suck and obviously you're a bad driver if you don't know that." But really? Bad enough that you can get a double pirouette in street conditions at 40mph in 2nd gear? 'cuz I'll bet you could give me the keys to a Corvette and point me towards a skating rink and I'd have a challenging time repeating my performance. And once more with feeling - I drove the damn thing 1500 miles in wet and dry, with a passenger in the front seat (a passenger who outweighs my wife and daughter, I might add). If I can do this at 50mph in the rain with no surprises, I should be able to do this at 40. The book was at a top tier agency, was given over to a top-tier editor of their choosing, was edited to reflect the changes of that editor and then, because of the bullshit rules that have grown up around NaNoWriMo and its ilk, I'm not allowed to contact my agent more often than every twelve weeks. This was not the most likely outcome - until my agent decided not to be an agent, and her boss wasn't as enthusiastic as she was. It's really easy to say "well what else were you expecting" when clearly, I wasn't expecting this.
Sorry. Text-based medium. I agree that the car should not have spun. I also know the reputation of Porsche better than I know the cars themselves. (Hence my equivocation.) And you and I both know that 99.999999% of all books written don't get published, and work done for free is always treated poorly by those we do it for. We know both these things, and yet we still do them. The fact that you started at the 75-meter line in a 100-meter race, and were still eaten by a tiger before you crossed the finish line is just the world sticking in a final fuck you for good measure. And that sucks.