A confession: I don’t really like blogs. In fact, I hate the fuckers. A second confession: I’m rehashing material I wrote back in March 2010. Remember then? Then, when times were good? I don’t, not really. At the time though, I wrote: I don’t particularly like blogs, writers, writing, blogs about writers, or writing a blog about a writer.
Little has changed, except now I have the after-effects of a head injury to deal with as well.
I’ve lost rather a lot over the last year – wife, mind, home, hair, dignity, muscle definition – but losing consciousness at the weekend was the most disturbing. I’d been drinking for 30 straight hours and on the way to the pub – the pub, for fuck’s sake – I just collapsed and was out, with my eyes wide open, for at least a minute. Friends who were there were “terrified” but thankfully paramedics and doctors put me back together again and after four to five hours of being checked out and monitored and silently (and deservingly) scolded I was let out onto the streets of Archway to carry on flying around like a banshee.
Ridiculous, isn’t it? Don’t answer: I know it’s ridiculous. The second most ridiculous part was falling asleep in a wheelchair whilst waiting for a chest X-ray. The first most ridiculous part was that as I was drifting off I thought: “I bet this happens again. I bet this isn’t the last time I fall asleep in a wheelchair.” This is kind of worrying and makes me think that I must be completely out of my fucking idiot mind.
But before I find myself falling asleep in a wheelchair again, I’ve decided to wrestle this ill-fated joke shop of a project to the ground. It wasn’t always going to be this way. Since I landed pretty much the best agent in the country, the idea was to let the pitching part of Pitching the World just kind of evaporate. My book, when I get round to writing the book, was going to gradually insinuate that the idea of pitching 642 magazines is a ridiculous one and one that can’t really be done, but what can be done is to use that framework to make some hilarious swipes at the journalism industry whilst simultaneously losing my wife, mind, home, hair, dignity and muscle definition. Seriously, if you have a copy of the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook and flick through it, you’ll realise that pitching all of those magazines to a not-dog-shit standard is impossible. They’re too specialist and particular and seemingly impenetrable to lay people. It really is impossible.
Which makes me determined to do it. It makes me determined to do it because I’ve flapped around and fucked up everything I’ve ever tried and I’m not going to flap around and fuck this up. If I do this, I realised, I’ll be the first – and quite possibly last – person in the world to individually pitch 642 magazines. That, I hope, is something to be proud of. That, I hope, is something I can carry around with me forever. That, I hope, is something I can smile about the next time I find myself sleeping in a wheelchair in a hospital.
Pitching the World 