Julia Park Tracey

absent…but I’ve been swamped with work, extra projects (a newsletter, a fund-raising gala, sick kids), etc. and a new beau besides, and now going away for the weekend. I will be back Sunday night with another Muse. Cheers, mates.

…from complete exhaustion after another deadline day, but I just want to add that the cow-giving-birth story was really gross. I forgot to write just how disgusting it was when I passed that cow. It was an eeewww moment. And yet… …nah, it’s too late, I’m zonked and goodnight.

…or maybe not. I was driving to work the other morning, on my hour or two-hour commute (depending on traffic, of course), and passed the huge dairy on the west side of Highway 101 north of Novato. I saw this dairy cow, black and white spots, in a weird squatting position, and I thought with morbid fascination, “Great, just when I look, it’s going to pee,” or worse. And then I saw this grotesque red mucus sac protruding from its hindquarters and I realized as I flashed past at 70 mph that this cow was giving birth, standing on four legs in a muddy paddock with hundreds of other cows…

…to my own malaise…that is, sloth. I have been sitting for the past several hours, very, very busily addressing my bills, my e-mail, my other pressing concerns — and not writing one stinkin’ word. I mean real word — real writing, as opposed to bread-and-butter e-mails that say thanks for lunch yesterday, when are we meeting, can we reschedule, what’s on the agenda. That’s not Writing. And as I was taking out letters to the mailbox and hauling in the recycling bin, I realized that I have been procrastinating. Even this is procrastinating. Isn’t it? Aaaagh! Nothing like the taste of crow, or at least one’s own advice. “Just apply…

Harsh words, yes? No. Trying to sell one’s writing is an act of prostitution, the same as any other kind of solicitation. I’ve been working the strip, as it were, trying to get my work out there, and friends, newbies who have that Great American Novel fantasy, veterans, writers of the world, hear me: it is prostitution, plain and simple. For example, I went to the fabulous Books by the Bay last summer, which was well publicized in an insert/booklet in the SF Chron, supposedly sent all over the Bay Area. My bio is in there, coincidentally in an upper left corner, the first one on that page, so if…