You know, there really is only one kind of award worth a shit: awards that you do not apply for!. I've done both, gotten a few of the good kind, applied for others, mostly lose, sometimes win. At the beginning of a career, you're hungry for whatever you can get in validation. But later, when you get old enough to become a judge yourself, well, you see it differently, you realize it has not so much to do with "good writing" and everything to do with your personal literary taste.
I was thinking about the different kinds of novels I've written -- maybe you can put them all into 3 categories. What Graham Greene would call "entertainments," and I have only two of those, The Deadly Doowop and Dead Body In A Small Room. And literary novels, that break into two kinds, those highly autobiographical and those not so much so.
Sodom, Gomorrah and Jones is a strange breed, with less "plot autobiography" than, say, Kerouac's Scroll or Baumholder 1961, stories based very much on personal experience, but yet which does something "autobiographical" that I've not done much of before, which is to incorporate past work into the narrative. My old man protagonist starts writing poems, for example, and wonder of wonders, they become the same poems in In My Old Age! As a young man he was a folksinger and song writer and, wonder of wonders, his most popular song is "Mississippi Hippy," which also happens to be a song I wrote and sang everywhere in the 60s. The books CJ reads are the books I read. It's all a strange mixture of fact and invention, in a different way than I've done before. I think this technique also contributes to my sense of this book being a swan song, or ending, or summary of my career -- so much of my earlier career directly contributes to it.
Of course, I want this to be the best book I can write to "go out on."
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