A Match and Some Kerosene
Having failed at making money with other forms of creative writing, I have recently decided to write and self-publish a mystery. I know what an odd thing for a woman in her mid-forties with nothing going on. A book! Sadly the exercise of writing has triggered by need to scratch out some autobiographical pieces and I feel like if I don’t get them out of the damn way my detective will never solve the crime. Years ago, when I thought that stand up comedy was the thing to do I squeezed out a one-woman-show about being both agnostic about blackness and also a very amateur practitioner of it. I was also, apparently, very inspirational for people who never felt they fit in to their cultures or simply didn’t want to. At the same time a lot of Gen X writers (thinkers who could type?) who had zero accomplishments in their rearview mirrors were churning out autobiographies based on the alleged strangeness of their upbringing/addiction/dress size/sexuality/mental illness/travel habits/ancestry/skin tags…you name it. A few well meaning friends and partners in the crime of supposing we could craft 15-minute rambling blue rants into a tight late night tv set suggested that I write a book about my life. These suggestions were earnest and I figured that since every other asshole was doing autobiographical stuff why shouldn’t I. (Correction: every soap dodger with a Brooklyn rental and a solid background in improv. Jokes on us, they now run the shows.) My story deserved to be heard my friends said. Okay, it didn’t deserve be heard and a decade later it still doesn’t, but maybe it deserves to be put to ink.
The farthest I got back in the day, when I was on the right side of 35, was a bunch of titles. Who wouldn’t rush to order a book with a titles like these?
- Disappointed: The Tragic Jones* Story
- I Never Heard the Laughter: The Tragic Jones Story: Part One, the Good Years
- See You In Hell: The Tragic Jones Story
- Like an Asshole: The Tragic Jones Story
- Tragic Jones, Amateur African American
- I’d Love to Help You Out But…
- Side Stepping: The Tragic Jones Story
- A Match and Some Kerosene: The Tragic Jones Story
- I Can't Get Arrested (up in this piece...)
I’ll tell you who- publishers and readers. Hence, this blog. A-oh.
*Not a real name, I hope.
