In a day where journalists are regaling the world with Michael Jackson encounters, Lucian K. Truscott IV trumps them all on another topic: "I was perhaps the unlikeliest person in the world to cover the Stonewall riots for The Village Voice. It was June 27, 1969. I had graduated from West Point only three weeks earlier and was spending my summer leave in New York before reporting for duty at Fort Benning, in Georgia. After a late dinner in Chinatown, I was about to enter the Lion’s Head, a writers’ hangout on Christopher Street near the Voice’s offices, when I blundered straight into the first moments of the police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar a couple of doors down the street. Even a newly minted second lieutenant of infantry could see that it was a story." Truscott is also blogging his new novel, which he introduces, in part: "Being under contract is a nasty business in the writing game and should be avoided if at all possible. What used to happen was, you signed this lengthy document of many paragraphs… referred to quaintly as “clauses”—by which you surrendered pretty much everything deriving from the fruit of your labors other than your byline, which the employer reserved the right to fuck up in every way up to and including misspelling it, and then you went into a room and you closed the door, and you were allowed out when you are able to carry, depending on the nature of the contract, 30, or 120, or 800 pages of manuscript, which you would then deliver by hand or dispatch by mail to the employer in question. Today you are instructed to send the same numbers of pages with clicks of a mouse, but otherwise, the task expected and the toil extracted and the rights surrendered by the resident of the writing room–whomever he or she may be—remain the same. Then at the leisure of the employer, some weeks or even months in the future, they send you a check for an amount which will buy you significantly less beans and rice than the same amount would have when you first entered the writing room and began the work which earned the paycheck. And then they send you back into the writing room so that days or weeks or months from now you will come out with even more fucking pages, and they send you another fucking check at their fucking leisure that will buy even less beans and rice than before, and so you go back into the writing room in order to maintain some fractional modicum of hope that you will be able to keep yourself and your family in beans and rice until… well, until when exactly? Until you reach retirement age? What fucking retirement age? In his 80s, Gore Vidal is still lashed to a chair in his writing room and they had to pry Norman Mailer’s fingers from his pencil the day he was found dead at age 84 and when Philip Roth finally goes into the ground his publisher will send out a crew of interns to dig up his corpse and tie 14-gauge wire to his big toes and put a zillion watts into him hoping that he’ll rise from the dead and crank out another masterpiece and get maybe one more chance at the Nobel and thus double or triple or maybe even quadruple profits from his final masterpiece and then there’s the explosion of earnings to be gleaned from reprinting his backlist with the fucking Nobel emblazoned on the cover bigger than his name…"
