The Thursday Downer and not-Downer

Mrs. Stroock is doing the taxes. 'How many articles did you write for that Russian guy last year?' she asked.  The answer to that question is 38. That's right, 38 columns for Moscow, totaling about 30,000 words.*  Just last night our GRU handler asked us to write about America's most famous African American motorist. We took a hard pass on that one. It profits a man** nothing to write about race in America. It's nice to be asked, though. We'll have something for the commies on Monday.

Last year we also published three novels and wrote hundreds of blog posts. Heck of a year, heck of a payoff. The money ain't bad, not for novels, not for Moscow. While we see a daily sales number, the actual money we make, we don't look at the tally. To put it another way, we don't know till we get the actual 1080 form how much money we make in a year. 

Yeah that's about it. 

When writers are young they have an image in their mind about what the gig is like. For the record, we've never seen a movie that conveys what the actual job is. Anyway, that image usually involves having a flash of inspiration and pounding the keyboard. Ok, sometimes it's actually like that. We've been at work, bottle of whisky by our side, cigar clenched between our teeth and cranked out a couple of thousand words. It's fun. It makes us feel like Hemingway.

But mostly the gig is staring at a screen and asking oneself, 'Why doesn't this work?' Right now we have two chapters that we're going over and over again in a flailing effort to make them work. That's about ten thousand words. How do we make them make sense, flow, set up the things we need to set up? Etc...etc. Bust you hump and people will still tell you how much you suck.

We had a long streak of winning reviews, at least a dozen over the last month. But the last couple are just terrible. We don't know what we're doing, you see. Everyone knows the Irish don't use 'limey' when referring to the Brits and the Dutch army has never used M-14 rifles (read closer, bitch. That was the West German Polezei). Reviewers had the time to grognard about these details? Lol, get fucked. We are very good at what we do. In fact we are among the best there is. Over at Goodreads Three Seas is closing in on a hundred and fifty reviews and Nederland 100. Both average over 4 stars. Did we say lol, get fucked?

We don't have a day job, you know why? We're a writer, that's what we do. Writing is our day job. Oh, and we are very good at our job. Readers can't get enough of us. And neither can Moscow. To put it another way, we sell lots of books and you don't. 

*We collude so secretly, we declare it on our taxes

**Jew, white. Whatever