An excerpt from Can’t You Get Along With Anyone? A Writer’s Memoir, and a Tale of a Lost Surfer’s Paradise by Allan C. Weisbecker

I well remember the phone call itself, even now as I write from my idyllic little Caribbean island some three years later, and two years after Mom died. The call was from New York, from Penguin Putnam, Inc., the company that was to publish my previous book, In Search of Captain Zero. It was my new editor. The original editor, who had acquired my manuscript for the house, had left for another job, something outside of book publishing as I recall. (In publishing jargon, I was “orphaned.”) The new editor, whom I had not yet met or talked to, introduced herself, then immediately told me that my book, my manuscript, would have to be cut from its present 120,000 words to 80,000. Said this without asking how I am or anything like that first.

Before I could even respond, my writer’s queasy gut flared.

I should explain about my writer’s queasy gut. Sometimes when I’m writing or thinking about writing or talking about writing to someone like a movie producer or studio executive or even just to a normal non-writer – if he’s saying something about writing as if he knows anything about it – I get a bad feeling, which I refer to as my writer’s queasy gut. In fact, just writing this paragraph has caused a flutter of my writer’s queasy gut, the full-blown version of which is like you have a swarm of terrorized centipedes down in your duodenum writhing maniacally, trying to get the fuck out.

I exaggerate only slightly.

Until this phone call, a full-blown attack of my writer’s queasy gut was a rarity, especially since I’d quit writing for the movies and television, left Hollywood altogether. Since then I’d mostly just get flares and flutters of it.

So my new editor leading off our first talk with the bulletin that 40,000 words would have to be cut from my manuscript resulted in a flare of my writer’s queasy gut. (A flare is more serious than a flutter, but nothing like a full-blown attack.) Imagine that the centipedes, having been snoozing, are now stirring, some of them stretching their legs, of which there are a bunch; about a hundred, I think.

“So you’ve gotten around to reading it,” I said, referring to my manuscript. Before leaving his job at Penguin Putnam, my old editor told me that my new editor had not yet read my manuscript.

“No, not yet,” my new editor said. Then this: “I don’t have to read your book to know how long it should be.”

The centipedes were rudely awake now, and getting edgy.  

 

From Can’t You Get Along With Anyone? A Writer’s Memoir, and a Tale of a Lost Surfer’s Paradise by Allan C. Weisbecker

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