Hammered into Obscurity
Years ago
when I wrote
Flying to
Cambodia someone
wrote Swimming to
Cambodia in the
same time frame
& it rocketed
straight onto the
New York Times
best-seller list.
Not too long
after that
I wrote
Tripping in
America &
simultaneously
some college
professor wrote
Blue Highways,
which became
an overnight
best seller.
Years later
I wrote a
drug book,
Children of
the Sun &
Earth,
& damned
if some
writer of
pot-boiler
crime novels
didn’t crank
out a
drug book
of his own
called Savages;
the New
York Times
declared it
a breakthru
in the genre.
This
run of
bad-news
syncronicity
is like a
punch in
the face
when you’re
80 & your
whole life
long you’ve
been writing
novels that
get hammered
into obscurity
by the
American
money machine.
truth. and someday Tiregrabbers will eclipse anything Neil Gaiman ever did. there was another movie that almost followed Children of the Sun plotpoint for plotpoint. love you John.