Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Continuing my Fiction

           This is a secret, don't tell anyone this.  You know the internet?  Of course you know the internet.  Let me stop trying to be funny.
          Well, you can look up any celebrity on the internet.  You know this as well.  You can find most celebrities email addresses on here, sometimes their PR teams.  It does not take very much energy to write an email, and some celebrities are susceptible to personal appeals.
          Find someone who has done some minor work, someone who does not feel like they are famous yet.  Maybe someone who wrote an article that you kind of enjoyed, not one that will change your life or leave any kind of lasting impression, just a decent story.  They probably slaved over this writing for longer than you would ever imagine, to them it's probably the equivalent of one hit wonder band that has been touring for 30 years and playing that same song over and over.  Write them and tell them that you enjoy that article, maybe break that article down sentence by sentence, apply it to real life situations, tell them that it made you feel better when you're having a bad day, something like that.
            Let them email gestate for a few months.  Maybe drop one here or there about their recent goings-ons, google them occasionally.  Tell them you do a lot of writing but you aren't confident enough to let them read it, they probably will offer to.  This is called a personal connection. 
            Now you can use this relationship for whatever reason you want.  At any given time, you can send them an email with a humble topic line like:  "Remember me?"  or "Your biggest fan."  (Your biggest fan in the outro line is a winner every time as well).  If it turns out somehow that this person is extremely successful, atleast at whatever place they happen to work, write and ask them about available internships, random writing advice, if they have any friends who are looking for personal assistants, etc. 
            I'm writing this because I did this.  Not me, the blogger, me the character in this fictional essay.  This is a fiction blog, so everything contained here is fiction.  Even the real stuff.
            So this woman who was a quasi-successful writer in the late 50s (came in second for a Pulitzer, something like that) has offered to lend me her tutelage.  She has a basement room with wall to wall file cabinets of correspondences with other semi-successful writers, newspaper articles of importance, dirt on the now defunct newspapers she worked at, and many more odds and ends.  She doesn't do anything now, doesn't even write (picture a wilted flower), but she still has a name that semi-famous people in the area will recognize.
           It's called networking.  It works retroactively this way.  It's about getting your feet into as many doors as possible, metaphorically as well as literally.
          Then the problem sprang on me:  What do you do when you get there?  You wonder if she's worrying about the same things, but it's the next morning already, and this is when you planned to get together.  You watch The Graduate that night, and wonder if she's going to be attractive.

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