The Pitch

Days and nights spent with new acquaintances in the business, I try to keep my head on my shoulders but fail no doubt. These people with their perfectly tense muscles, their perfectly tense teeth. They smile big, slip you their card like it's a five-dollar bill and maybe you can get them in, get them out, get them somewhere they can profit from being. So what do you do? and always ready with their pitch, with their end of it, with their cleverly crafted words and success stories. They sold to a Japanese company; we go nationwide early next year; she signed with that Big Label. So what do you do?

I know this business, and that makes me feel at home. I was raised in this business, but that also makes it so foreign. I have no pitch, I have no cleverly crafted words, when words are all I should have, really. I try to describe my pages, my ambitions, and they fall flat by the wayside.

In somebody else's eyes, how could these words be any good? In somebody else's ears, how could I possibly call myself a writer? I can't take such liberties, and I quietly sink into a corner and smile. I do not write for you, it's true. I write because the alternative would drive me to madness, to a boil, to deflation. I write because I can't not.

But if a tree fell in the forest, and no one was there to see it, would it not have fallen in vain?

I brace myself, I open my book, and I open my voice to the world.