When I was a kid, the UPS man meant one thing—comic books. My grandmother would wake at the crack of dawn and descend on garage sales like Ghengis Khan pillaging the Khwarezmid Empire. She’d strong-arm some poor fool into parting with them for pennies. Then she’d send ‘em my way. I loved getting those packages so much that if my mom had suggested I go as the UPS man for Halloween, I’d have happily obliged.

Now the UPS man brings me marked-up manuscripts, checks in big fancy business envelopes, and occasionally books. (Not mine…soon).

This week the Man in Brown brought me an Advance Reading Copy of Andrew Davidson’s, The Gargoyle. Don’t know if you heard about it last year but The Gargoyle made headlines when Davidson’s agent turned down a $1,000,000 preempt offer––because as Doctor Evil learned, one meeeelion dolarrrs just doesn’t go as far as it used to.

Davidson’s agent was revived with smelling salts shortly afterwards and negotiated a deal for $1.2 million, not counting foreign rights, movie rights, etc. Needless to say, it was big deal for a debut novelist, from Manitoba no less. (If you don’t know where Manitoba is, you go to the end of nowhere, turn left and it’s on your right. Can’t miss it. I’m joking. Put the hockey stick down, eh! I live in the hinterlands of Montana for Pete’s sake).

Anyway, since I've been given a free copy of a book that sold for a million dollars, I feel somewhat compelled to read it—the curiosity factor alone will drive sales. Kind of like the movie, Waterworld, now that I think of it.

So far I’ve read up to around the $300,000 mark and it's pretty darn good...

"Gee, no thanks mister, I don't need a ride to the candy store."You’ve probably seen, heard or read about Vladimir Nabokov’s son deciding to publish his late father’s last “novel”—thirty years after his death and three decades after his father had instructed his family to destroy it.

The “not quite finished manuscript” entitled The Origin of Laura was actually a set of 138 index cards. Now those cards will be published as a matter of public interest and financial, I mean, scholarly importance.

I have mixed feelings about this, because hypocritically, if another Tupac album were discovered in the dustbin of some So-Cal recording studio, I’d jump on it. But Nakokov didn’t want this book to be seen in a state of undress. It doesn’t seem right, no matter how many literary purists want to get their greedy hands on it like Humbert on Dolores Haze.

I’m not a big Nabokov fan, so maybe I’m just biased about the whole thing. Trivially though, he did live in my former hometown of Ashland, Oregon for a summer, back in 1953––waaaay before my time. Ashland is where he finished Lolita, collected butterflies and undoubtedly creeped out the local babysitters.

But back to unfinished business, would you want your rough draft published posthumously? Your diary? Your personal letters? Your email?

Yesterday I mentioned one of my favorite words: autodidact––basically, someone who is self-taught. I’m quite fond of the term because it captures the mojo of some of my favorite writers––staggering talents like Harlan Ellison and Charles Bukowski. Though both flirted with formal education, both ran contrary to anything relating to structured learning. (In case you’re wondering, that’s a fancy way of saying Bukowski dropped out and Ellison was thrown out).

That old-school, hard-luck, blue-collar everyman vibe never fails to fire me up about my own paltry scribblings. So I’m hoping I can pass a little of that enthusiasm along, because tomorrow I’m meeting with a job-shadow student from a local high school––an aspiring writer, I presume.

In years past, I’ve been known to occasionally upset the parents of my college interns by telling their kids to radically change their majors. So many times I’d meet with a student who is so deeply entrenched in one field of education––because of family pressure, financial expectation, whatever––but their actual dream is to do something else. And along the way, they’ve gelded that dream. Put it out to pasture. Crated it up and sent it off to the glue factory.

But tomorrow I actually get to meet with someone whose dream is still officially undeclared. Unencumbered. A rare day, indeed.

I’ll basically be telling him (or her) to become a literary Keith Richards––someone whose first and only job was pursing that original dream, minus the drugs, of course. And that college is fantastic, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of what you really want to do with your life.

Any words of advice for a high school student who wants to write?

Frank Zappa said it best: "Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts.”When total strangers find out that I’m a gosh-darned-soon-to-be-published author, they eventually end up asking about my educational background. The inference is usually that they’ve always wanted to write, but didn’t “go to school for that.” No English degree. They didn’t go to J-school. They didn’t drink heavily and move to Key West––that kind of thing.

Well, truth-be-told, neither did I. My degree is in art and design. My college classes involved understanding the subtle differences between burnt umber and burnt sienna. I drew sweaty naked people beneath hot studio lights. I didn’t write anything.

So despite the proliferation of MFA programs (which is an interesting discussion in and of itself), the fact remains that humans have been telling stories long before written languages even existed. Or even English degrees. It all starts **up here**. The rest is just desire.

With that in mind kids, the super-secret word for the day is: autodidact.

More on that tomorrow.