Sleepy John

I wrote about him and it’s published!

And I sold a story this weekend. Some day, when I’m feeling more certain that it’s not some huge faux pas, I’ll give you a sense of how grueling it can be to find the right market for a story. It’s hard enough to know when a story is good. But say you do know. You can know a story’s good and still it’s hard work to find the editor who loves it.

I will say this for rejection, though. It is ongoing. It’s a thing you can get used to. Whereas the thrill of being published is like fireworks–beautiful and wonderful and over too quickly.

My niece has a mullet. Very, very short, fine hair all over her head except in the back where she’s got a curl.

Yesterday, I took some friends on an informal tour of Mt. Olivet. It was really fun and some women drove by and tried to get in on it!

And then there was a thing on NPR about a guy who’s written about occultism and rock & roll. I feel like this review will give you a great idea of why I’m dying to read it.

And we may even have Thanksgiving plans that make sense. So, score one for a nice weekend.

6 thoughts on “Sleepy John”

I really liked your Sleepy John Estes piece, Betsy. That’s a really interesting way to think about him that never occurred to me before. There must be other songwriters you could say this about (to some extent), but I can’t think of any…. Mississippi John Hurt has his “Avalon my home town, always on my mind,” but Avalon and its citizens aren’t a motif in his work.

I know he can’t be completely unique. I mean, obviously, there are other songs about real people and there are songs about places. But I can’t, either, think of another songwriter doing exactly this. It seems literary (not in a value sense, just in a genre sense), like a ton of writers write about people and place–Stephen King, David Simon, Edgar Lee Masters, etc.

But, if other songwriters have done what Estes does, my feeling is that they either must be more subtle about it (they have a familiar landscape they’re writing about over and over, but it’s not obvious to the listener) or they suck and have faded into obscurity.

Good Sleepy John story. Dale Watson has an album (or two?) of little snippets of songs about people he knows, mostly in Austin. But it’s not his life’s work.

Also, you sold another story? W00t!

Congrats on the story sale!!!

I read a jack Neely (new blog since the demise of MP) story today about “Satan is busy in Knoxville” that had an interesting journalistic place-connection and seems to slant wise go with your story. But I can’t link it bc his poor new web page is kind of overloaded. Maybe google it tomorrow? It’s interesting, promise.