Ramble. I don't know how to say what I want to say...here goes:

Writing isn't just scratching the cat until it purrs, but it seems like so many people have forgotten to scratch the cat at all that fewer people like to read than like to watch TV. Go to any bookstore that sells magazines. I'll bet you a dollar that there are more "writer's" magazines than there are reader's magazines, story magazines, and I'll bet you another dollar that both types are shelved together, and that the number of both types of titles together don't remotely compare to "popular entertainment" magazines. Isn't it a dead giveaway when magazines containing stories aren't popular entertainment?

On the other hand, I'm just not a purely cat-scratching writer. I just haven't got it in me to write the type of thing that people watch on TV. Not even the good stuff that people watch on TV. Well, unless you wanted to start up another "Twilight Zone"-type show, or an episode or two some something similarly odd, but I generally don't write popular entertainment.

Is that what fiction writing (short stories, especially?) is for right now? All the leftover ideas that are too good to waste but inappropriate for mass media a.k.a. popular entertainment? Damn it, what I need is for someone big in entertainment to start sponsoring a magazine. I don't mean Zoetrope, I mean something cheap, sleazy, and wonderful. I bet (from what I gather from people I know) if we could get Joss Whedon to stick his name on (editor-in-chief?) a reincarnated Amazing Tales, a genre could be revitalized, drift back over to "popular entertainment" once again.