Todd: Some adventure this has been...

I've been trying to work this out for weeks.

I found out about this blog not long after I left the Inn, back in July. Obviously I've been through a lot and coping with it has kept me from jumping right in and participating. I snuck little moments to read back from the beginning trying to get some hint about what had happened, some clue as to what I should do. It's been helpful but my panic isn't exactly over and done with.

My name is Todd Casey, although I don't have any photo ID to prove it. All of my cards say...

No, actually. I'll get to it later but I'd rather, at least for this writing, my introduction to whomever is reading this, just be me. I just want these words be seen as coming from my brain, without being flavoured by what, who, I have become... which I will describe later. So just picture me. Todd.

It's October and I finally have some time to myself. I've been couped up here going privately crazy, trying to express this, and now I have the chance (and the guts) to do so.

Even if I hadn't made a fateful stay at the Inn two months ago, it still would've been a spellbinding summer. See, for personal and professional reasons, I had spent early part of the summer - from May until July - adventuring up the East coast. Seeing bands, picking up girls, indulging in illicit substances, from Miami to Maine. It was my dream job.

See, I've always, been, well... proudly, a slacker. I'd been living hand-to-mouth in a ratty apartment with Bryan, my photographer, best friend and stepcousin. I worked a low-paying internship at a Toronto underground paper where I thought I was going to write about movies and music, but I was really just doing page layout.

So when I announced last winter that I was taking the summer off to bum around south of the border, my editor smiled, handed me a laptop and said, "Great. Make it an article while you're down there." He said he couldn't finance the trip, but it would be great for my career. And for two months, I lived the dream. Bry and I bounded like maniacs from place to place, sleeping anywhere we could, occasionally doing oddjobs, working for favours, stealing. It was miserable at times, to be honest, but even so it was always a thrill, and Bry was good enough at finding us places to eat and sleep that we never went cold or hungry. There were some close calls though. And week after week I'd have a new installment for the guys back home to print. Sensational.

So yeah. Before a fateful mid-July stop at this odd little joint in Maine, it was already a legendary summer. We would've been home by August if we hadn't gotten derailed, and now...

Now, I guess, the rest of the story begins.

There's been a lot of words had between me and Bry about what has happened and how to deal with it. Right now we're stuck. And maybe my life wasn't much to look at, but I'll do anything to get back to it, because it's where I belong. And this is not.

That's a story for another time.
Signing off, Todd Casey.

Arthur/Penny: Rejected!

Man, am I glad for the team to have a off week right now. February has been ridiculously busy, as even though there were only three games (and no crazy parts of the schedule where the Stealth is playing at home in San Jose one day and then up in Canada the next), I've had to do a lot of anchor work because a good chunk of the rest of the on-air talent is covering spring training for the A's and Giants, or covering basketball and hockey. February and March are a time when the network's staff gets spread pretty thin, so I'm at the desk a lot.

And that's part of why I won't be getting to go to Tokyo. George told me yesterday, saying that since they don't actually broadcast the games, they can only really justify sending a two-person team (talent and camera/sound), and they're opting for one of the people they have who are more closely associated with baseball, who have been around the team during spring training, etc.

I guess that's reasonable, but it's disappointing. Less reasonable was the part that he sort of joked about, that the cameraman would wind up having trouble fitting me and any Japanese people I interviewed or profiled in frame. I actually wouldn't be surprised if this was the actual reason, because it does make sense from a certain aesthetic point of view - I'm a six-foot-tall woman, and there are guys who get uncomfortable being interviewed by me on-camera. I've been there, and I can say from first-hand experience that the male of the species does sometimes respond badly to having to look up to a woman. Heck, I've exploited it at times.

But this really does wind up gnawing at me, because as much as I've come to accept that this is going to be my life from now on, and I like being tall and strong and healthy, I hate being treated like a freak. I already know I am one, but nobody knows it goes deeper than being a sort of tomboy.

If that's not enough, I've been getting rejection letters for my book. I'm not totally surprised; it's my first real attempt to write a novel, and structuring a good mystery turns out to be really hard. Still, it's hard to take, especially having someone else's form as I do. I always used to say that I didn't work on spec much because it's just bad use of one's time to do the thing you get paid for without getting paid when you could be doing a paying gig, and for the most part I believed it. Of course, it's also been so long since I did spec work that I've forgotten just how painfully personal each rejection can be. It sucks being told that you're not good enough, and when you submit to multiple places, you get told again... and again... and again.

I actually cried when I got the first rejection letter, and then had a panic attack over whether that was an Inn thing - had I been female so long that I was starting to react like one? Had becoming a girl changed my body that much, so that I'd react to failure with tears and self-doubt purely because of endocrinology? I don't think so, but how can I know? And now that I have actually cried over that, what's it mean? Does it mean that my sex is asserting these sorts of responses, or would I be crying over it if I were still a man? There seems to be no right answer.

Some of the reasons really wound up bugging me, too. On the one hand, I know I'm not really great at fiction yet, so I should be able to accept being rejected on merit. Still, some of what's in the letters has really bugged me:

* "We have no place for new authors in our mystery imprint's publishing schedule."

* "As much as we like your concept, we do not feel that your name has national visibility."

* "We think the book has real promise; have you considered working with a co-writer?"

* "... a ghost writer?"

A ghost writer... I threw a bit of a tantrum at that; calling Drew and telling him not to send anything to that publisher the next time around. He talked me down from that, reasonably pointing out that it's not a good idea to hold grudges against corporations, but undid a lot of good will by saying that I'd face nothing but frustration if I kept trying to live my old life. Be a sportscaster and spokesperson, he says - you've got the face, voice, and body to be a good one and you'll be happier just going with the flow. Otherwise, you'll drive yourself nuts trying to be something you no longer are.

Suffice it to say, he hasn't been getting any for the last week. In a world where a stripper can win an Oscar, I figure I can write a few mystery novels.

-Art/Penny