But seriously, it’s badnews all around. I’m keeping track, and with todays job cut announcements, I counter 100,000 people since last Monday who’ve been axed.

Still, what’s a poet or writer to do in these harsh times? The paperworks all say that entertainment flourishes during a depression. Entertainment might be the only recession proof job. But how does that trickle down to us fiction writers? In an already stark market, rife with brutal competition and bleeding critique, how does one cut ahead from the pack?

I don’t know. You tell me. I’m still stuck in the pack, racing neck and neck with Joe Schmo, the alligator writer, and Findlekeen Morbosa, the chump down town who hacks out the film reviews for the local paper (who, incidentally, loves everything).

How does one get ahead in the most writerly of ways during one of the most unwriterly of crises?  Maybe this is a writerly crises. Maybe it’s just that desperation writers need to get and stay focused, rallying around the dim blue light of their computer screen, huddled close together for warmth, tip-tapping out line after line of improbable but very accurate real world experience, telling gruesome and vicious tales about corporate espionage, plots and misdeeds. Lurid tales about the indiscretion of their former employers while gambling, drinking, dancing girls, martinis, the bodies in the desert, the page marked plot point three upon which nothing is written, and of course the epic climax, the falling action, which heretofore and beyond the reach of memory and the times of recession, shall be known as Pormax Matrugen. In the future, teachers will say “Have you written your Pormax Matrugen yet?” Classes will be solely dedicated to the fine art of Pormax Matrugen.

But the art of Pormax Matrugen, is today just a fantasy. Today, in these harsh realms, we’ve got to focus on the here and the now. The fact that writers are scrizzled, no matter which way you slorg it.