The truth is that, in the United States, maybe as few as two hundred writers of prose fiction make a living at it. Every Thursday, in USA Today’s entertainment section, there’s a list of the top fifty bestselling books. Non-fiction is grouped with fiction, hardbacks with paperbacks. Fifty books. A longer list of 150 books is available on that newspaper’s Internet site. The lowest book might have sold only a thousand copies nationwide. Seen from this perspective, the figure of two hundred fiction writers who make a living at it seems huge. A couple of years ago, I came across an article somewhere that said the average income for a fiction writer in the U.S. was $6,500. I believe it. The unescapable moral, I tell my students, is that anyone who wants to become a writer had better not give up his or her day job.

from Backspace– The Writer’s Place

This should be obvious, needing of nothing.

You can count on a Mountain Goat.

Song For Dennis Brown

on the day that dennis brown\’s lung collapsed, spring rain was misting down on kingston.
and down at the harbor, local cops were intercepting an inbound shipment.
and for a while there it was chaos
as they handcuffed and then roughed up some sailors.

on the day my lung collapses
it\’s not going to be much different.

on the day that dennis brown\’s habits caught up with him, school children sang in choirs.
and out behind the Chinese restaurants
guys were jumping into dumpsters.
and the stench was overbearing,
but they were past the point of caring.

on the day my habits catch up with me
I\’ll be down among the jumpers.

and when the birds come home in spring,
we will fill them full of buckshot.
and jets of contaminated blood
will cloud the rivers and the lakes.
it took all the coke in town to bring down dennis brown.

on the day my lung collapses
we\’ll see just how much it takes

This read true to lifence for me, and, as concise as it is relative to that which it portrays, thus like poetry.

**Beginning NDB recovery

**Attempting to validate header

!!End-of-file less than actual (read=2DE20000, actual=2DDE3A51)

**Attempting to validate AMap

!!AMap page @525312: CRC mismatch (read 407CEC02, computed 2C11FCB6)
!!AMap page @525312: Sig mismatch (read BF00, computed 0000)
!!AMap page @525312: PTYPE does not repeat (04/08)
!!AMap page @525312: BID mismatch (read 1888A04A, expected 80400)
!!Computed cbPMapFree of 3072, but header has 480256

**Attempting to validate BBT

!!Invalid BBT page (bid=91816, ib=4040704):

**Attempting to rebuild BBT

**Attempting to scavenge for blocks
CRC mismatch (read D2017EA2, computed 0AE28281)

**Attempting to rebuild NBT

**Attempting to scavenge for nodes

!!Invalid node (nid=898E, bidData=1D164E, bidSub=1D1666, nidParent=0):
Data block (bid=1D164E) not found in BBT

**Attempting to validate BBT refcounts

??BBT entry (4) has different refcount in RBT (2 vs 15)
??Couldn’t find BBT entry in the RBT (C8)
…
??Couldn’t find BBT entry in the RBT (1A1884)

**Attempting to validate header NID high-water marks

**Beginning PST/OST recovery

**Attempting to recover all top-level objects

!!Message store missing PR_PST_PASSWORD
!!Message store missing or invalid PR_RECORD_KEY
!!Message store missing PR_DISPLAY_NAME
!!Message store missing PR_IPM_SUBTREE_ENTRYID

!!Receive folder table missing
!!Receive folder table missing default message class

!!Name-to-id map missing
!!TC (nid=60D) missing required column (0E330014)

!!Missing template (nid=6B6)

!!HMP not found - creating

**Validiating column set of the GUST

Fatal Error: 80040818