Is this your true voice? Have you found it yet? Read what you have written
out loud, in your own voice. Does it sound true? Have you finally found
your true voice?

You have a talent for pastiche, and a penchant for regrettable invective,
and at this rate you may be able to make a fair go of it in the world of
magazines and perhaps television scriptwriting if you learn to curb your
excesses and choose appropriate models for imitation. I am afraid that your
true voice is not one that other people are likely to wish to hear, whiney
and intemperate as it often is. You should bin at least half of what you
write, and submit the other half to a competant editor; expect him to bin
at least three quarters of what you give him, and be prepared to thank him
for doing so. This is my advice; you can take it or leave it; you may be
richer if you take it, and as for what will happen to you if you leave it,
well, fortuna vera meretrix est.

You are approaching authenticity somewhat timidly, in fits and starts, you
self-realisation hampered by your repressed middle-class upbringing and
thwarted libido. I can detect moments of true beauty and inspiration in
what you have written - about one every three paragraphs. If gathered
together they would make a painfully incandescent and unfortunately
completely unreadable poem. For goodness, and more importantly your
writing's, sake, try to lighten up. Take whatever it takes: drink, drugs,
wild promiscuity (and don't give me any excuses about how none of the girls
will touch you with a bargepole: what you mean is, you're *afraid*, or
possibly a closet homosexual - either conquer your misogyny or get over
your homophobia and I promise you you'll do fine). Try to avoid using too
many latinate polysyllables. In fact, I suggest you try to do without them
altogether for a brief, purgatorial, period. Read some Hemingway, some
Henry Miller. Try wearing women's clothing occasionally - just a hunch, but
I think it might help.

Calling Allen Ginsburg a "NAMBLA-supporting pederastic fat fuck" may seem
to you like a laudable expression of straight-edge attitude; but to me it
just screams "Oedipal crisis". I'm loaning you my copy of Harold
Bloom's "The Anxiety of Influence", which should make a few things clearer.
If you have any more dreams about scary balloons, please refrain from
writing them down.

Man, the sonnet is just so dead. I can't believe you went and wrote
something so dead as a sonnet. I could feel myself dying inside as I read
the first few lines. I'm afraid I didn't make it to the couplet - had to go
and screw a coupla co-ed's just to reassure myself that I wasn't about to
keel over myself. Your girlfriend's pretty cute, by the way. I bet you
wrote her a sonnet. I on the other hand just shared a bag of weed with her,
told her she had very creative ankles and then balled her for about twenty-
five minutes in the underground carpark. Saves having to think of rhymes. I
also gave her a few tips on how to give better head, but you don't have to
thank me for that.

You write as if you had talent, which takes a kind of talent in itself.
Unfortunately you have no talent, apart from the talent needed to write as
if you had talent. Your writing is fake all the way through. I hated it,
although it was superficially very likeable. You could be a major success,
but history will forget you instantaneously the moment your mask slips and
the essential cruddiness and vacuity of your writing is revealed. Go ahead,
make loads of money, schtupp loads of chicks, go on loads of talk shows.
I'll be watching, waiting for the denouement. You'd better believe it.

You still haven't found your true voice. It's in there somewhere. Keep
looking. You have to be true to yourself. Are you being true to yourself
yet?