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Ginny Good, A Mostly True Story:

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After you write your book, get an agent and get it published, then (if your agent didn't sell it to some big, bullshit publisher with a heavy-duty hype department, in which case you do whatever dumb-ass thing they tell you to do), you have to somehow get someone to read the sucker...and review it. That's close to impossible. The pages with this notification have thousands of media boys and girls listed, one of whom may hype your book. They have to justify their existence somehow, right? G.

July 3, 2023

"On or before July 14, 2023" the host of my website is bagging it for lots of exquisite reasons. So am I. You can see the last 20 years or so here:

https://web.archive.org (stick everyonewhosanyone.com in the box).

They're getting rid of my email address, too. Use this:

gerardjones@proton.me

If you want to read my written stuff, click this:

https://gerardjones.medium.com/lists

If you want to see or listen to my video/audio books, click these or this and look around:

https://vimeo.com/showcase/9864586

https://vimeo.com/showcase/9862816

https://vimeo.com/user41893142

If you want to know how to write, click this:

https://gerardjones.substack.com

Thanks. G.

Gerard Jones
gerardjones@proton.me

If someone gave me one of these prizes, I'd tell 'em to stick it up their ass. Just to get considered you have to prove you're an ass-kissing punk. To get "shortlisted" you have to start kissing ass at least a year in advance. And whose ass do you have to kiss? The smarmiest bunch of PC, pipe-smoking, supercilious dweebs known to man. And you'd have to hang out with them! What the fuck do they know about worthwhile writing? They've been wallowing in slop since they were six, "brilliant, soaring" slop that makes me cringe and makes nothing but money. That goes for all the other so-called prizes, as well. I wouldn't accept any of them; Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, what the fuck ever, they can stick them all up their ass.

Nobel Prize in Literature
Sturegatan 14
Stockholm, Sweden

http://www.nobelprize.org

This appears to be an extra bullshit way of winning a prize. In addition to all the crap you have to go through to get on the long, long list, then you have to wait fifty years before you can find out who dissed you. Sheesh.

https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/literature

The Booker Prizes
First Floor, 10 Queen Street Place
London, EC4R 1BE

https://thebookerprizes.com

National Book Award
90 Broad Street, Ste. 604
New York, NY 10004

https://www.nationalbook.org

National Book Critics Circle Award

New York, NY 10013

https://www.bookcritics.org

The Pulitzer Prizes
Columbia University
709 Pulitzer Hall
2950 Broadway
New York, NY 10027

https://www.pulitzer.org

Pen America
588 Broadway, Ste. 303
New York, NY 10012

https://pen.org

PEN/Faulkner Award
6218 Georgia Ave. NW, #1602
Washington, DC 20011

https://www.penfaulkner.org

The guys she was used to going out with were "men" from Harvard and Yale and Stanford—guys who could afford to gamble the price of dinner at a fancy restaurant on the off chance it might get them into her good graces. She'd been a debutante. Her father grew up on an estate in Westchester County. They had a summer cottage in Newport. Her grandmother dolled out toilet paper from a locked cupboard, one square at a time. There was Frick money in the mix.

Ginny Good, Chapter Ten (45th Avenue)

There's a picture of her in the school paper at San Francisco State: The Gater. The picture was taken in the spring of 1963. Ginny's dancing on the lawn across from the library; her hair's kind of in her face, but you can still tell it's her. Jim Moss is in the background, egging her on. And the first time the word "hippie" was used to describe the sort of person who we all know now as a "hippie" was in the caption to that picture. She may even have had some flowers in her hair—which, in my book, makes her the first hippie. Merriam Webster may wish to quibble, but hey, she's got her own damn book. In my book, Ginny Good is the first hippie. Ha!

Ginny Good, Chapter Fourteen (Pacific Heights)

Eight months later, I got the last letter I ever got from Ginny Good. It was postmarked August 25, 1975. She was living in the Berkeley flatlands with a guy named Ross—one of her New Age buddies from Colorado. The first page of the letter is just a picture of a guy with knobs on his knees, playing what appears to be a zither, with a small Christmas tree growing from his forehead. Under the picture she says: "I can't write so doodles must do."

Ginny Good, Chapter Thirty-Two, (Hillsborough)

Clayton Street was crowded with tall, skinny Victorian flats, going ever more steeply up toward the address Ginny had given me. In the valley by Frederick Street, I stopped to pick some wild flowers, daisies and bachelor buttons and whatever else was growing there. I remembered I'd said I wasn't ever going to get a girl any god damn flowers again, but that had been a long time ago. Across the valley and up toward Parnassus Heights, lighted houses glittered through wisps of fog among dark hills. A dog barked. Telephone wires crackled. Golden Gate Park was a rectangle of black. The panhandle was bordered by streams of headlights from the traffic going up Fell and down Oak. The spires of Saint Ignatius Church were lit up in the background. It was peaceful and serene and unreal, like a picture on one of those big glossy San Francisco calendars.

Ginny Good, Chapter Twelve, (Clayton Street)

Elliot came back into the picture sometime in May of 1967. He'd recovered from most of the short-term effects of his father having blown his head half-off. He was going to school at the Art Institute and teaching a class in airbrush technique. He had a girlfriend, too—a cute little Korean chick with nice tits, extra slanty eyes, one of those Asian overbites and vestiges of some difficulty with the English language.

Ginny Good, Chapter Twenty-Two, (Haight Street)

It's hot in Sacramento in the summer. Even at night. You don't need blankets. You don't need clothes. Even a sheet's too much. The two of them were lying in her big bed with no clothes on. It was like "Nashville Skyline," like "Lay Lady Lay." The window was open. There were a few candles burning on the windowsill. There wasn't any breeze. The flames didn't flicker. They flared up when the wax overflowed and left a new piece of the wick exposed, but the flames didn't waver. The guy was propped up in a pile of pillows pushed against the wall. His arm was under Melanie's head. Her face was nuzzled into the side of his neck. Her hand was lying limply on his chest. His clothes were hung neatly over the arm of the couch. Melanie's white nightgown and the black panties with bunches of cherries on them were on the floor.

Ginny Good, Chapter Thirty-One, (Sacramento)

The day after our disastrous trip to see The Snow Queen, I got the hell out of the house in Pacifica and hitchhiked down along the coast highway until I came to the California I'd had in mind back in Michigan. It started just past Malibu. I didn't have any money. I ate food out of garbage cans, slept on beaches and feasted my eyes on sun-bleached blond girls in bikini bathing suits from dawn to dusk—until having no money and a third-degree sunburn had me heading back up toward Pacifica again. That was when I got the job on that yacht I was talking about. This colored guy picked me up. He was driving a white Cadillac and had a white girlfriend. His name was Lucius. His girlfriend was a nurse, "A noyse," he called her, being as how he was originally from Brooklyn. Lucius told me to show up at the Lido Shipyard in Newport Beach the next morning and he'd have a job for me.

Ginny Good, Chapter Five, (Pacifica)

Virginia Dixon Good was born on March 5, 1941. She spent her childhood in one or another of those sleepy little seaside communities down along the Southern California coast, north of San Diego. Her mother was too busy for kids. She had three daughters. Ginny was her second daughter. Sandy was her third. I forget the first daughter's name. I can't remember Ginny's mother's name, either. I might have blanked it out. Her father's name was George. George F. Good. I never knew what the "F." stood for. There were so many things I never knew.

Ginny Good, Chapter Two, (Del Mar)

I grew up in Michigan, Royal Oak, Michigan, ten miles north of Detroit. That was how the main roads got their names—by how far north of Detroit they were: Ten Mile Road. Eleven Mile. Twelve Mile. Like that. Starting down by the Detroit River, Woodward Avenue cut across each of the Mile Roads clear out to the lakes we went to in the summer; Orchard Lake, Cass Lake, Walled Lake. That was what you did in Michigan. You swam in lakes in the summer and ice-skated on lakes in the winter. The farther away from Detroit you got, the better the neighborhoods became. I lived a block from Ten Mile myself, not far from the Detroit Zoo.

Ginny Good, Chapter Three, (Royal Oak)

Donna used to come over to my house. I used to go over to her house. We sat in the car. We didn't care where we were. She had a big mirror in her basement. The mirror had a bar in front of it. There was a couch across from the mirror. We used to sit on the couch and watch ourselves hug and kiss and neck and pet. We cut school and took the streetcar to downtown Detroit—sat on benches by the Ambassador Bridge, snuck into Briggs Stadium and wandered the marble hallways of the golden-domed Fisher Building, talking and talking and necking and talking—we talked and necked ourselves silly. And even when we did go to school, all we ever did was write each other love letters.

Ginny Good, Chapter Four, (Fifteen Mile)

She seemed to be talking to herself, nodding and shaking her head at the appropriate places. "I was at school. It was Christmas. I get funny around Christmas. I have since Daddy left. Roger knew that."

"Who's Roger?"

"My beau. Ex-beau. Roger Singmaster. I was at Sarah Lawrence. He was in grad school at Brown. His father's a partner in some big law firm. They live outside Philadelphia. His mother teaches French Lit at Penn. Roger was going to be a banker. He'd been going to be a politician but decided bankers had more influence. He was charming and glib and confident, with intense dark black eyes and a shy, crooked smile—and the darlingest little cleft in his chin. We'd been dating for ages. We used to meet at a hotel across from Gramercy Park. It was all very tawdry. I had long luscious orgasms like melting Hershey Bars. Pigeons cooed on the windowsill. Mother adored him. We were supposed to get married. We were supposed to be in love. We were in love. Then I don't know what happened."

Ginny Good, Chapter Ten, (45th Avenue)