Mr. P,
I am in total agreement with you as you say.
"Because any true artist should take offense at crap being published to appease the mass market sheep. I play original music. I cannot tell you ow many times and how many people have told me I am 'wasting my time' by doing original music and that I should be doing cover songs. Cover bands make money at bars, but ya know...sometimes people want to create. There is a drive to be original and creative that trumps money.
What people fail to realize is that if there was no original music, there would be no cover bands. So I am all for truely creative people who toil over what they produce to make it the best it can be speaking out against crap that just sells books.
Our society is becoming stagnant and un-original in so many ways. We have very little to offer the future at this point. We are contributing garbage to future history."
You should be original. And credit shoud go toward that way of thinking. There are too many 'copycats' making money from 'The Originals'.
I too have been berated and rejected for my writing(s).
George Orwell once said, "All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some powerful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."
I remember when we were young the society had a lot of respect for writers. They were treated with awe, respect and looked at with wonderment. Today if the writer does not have a foreign publisher and is not making more money on one book than R.K.Narayan made in his life time, he doesn't get a second look. Even if he gets one, it is more a look of commiseration than admiration. "He is a writer," you can hear people mumble. It is almost as if they were saying, "Poor fellow, he suffers from flatulence."
Many people think writing is fun or it is easy. All they see the writer doing is scribbling in his notebook or hammering away at the key board and more often than not staring out of the window or into space. They don't realize that for a writer there are no holidays. 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year, it is work, backbreaking, gut wrenching, soul stirring work. Red Smith hammers home this point when he says, "There is nothing to writing; all you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." Gene Fowler put its even better, "Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until little drops of blood form on your forehead."
My fellow writers if my words have left you feeling a trifle depressed and desolate, cheer up. Even if the world doesn't acknowledge you now, one day it will. Your words will live far longer than you.
So I say, Mr. P, don't give up it is a beautiful thing that you are doing and your work is immortal.
As far as Mr. King and his so called opinion, we all know what they say about that ... they are like A-- H----, every one has one. And, not even to mention, publicity of any kind is better than none. even bad publicity will get a person noticed.
Thank you for letting me have my say.