Category: Entertainment

At Disney World, if you don’t glitter then you’re a drone. You can push strollers, pay for ice cream, block the paths with your chubby waddle, and fill up queues to make it hard for the real merry makers to get to the Haunted Mansion. But you don’t add to the corona of happiness enfolding the place, and you’re just no fun. Today I saw a man who would kill you just for blinking, but in Fantasyland he strutted around wearing a red sequined Dumbo hat, complete with tail and ears that light up. That guy was fun.

I’ve seen more little girls dressed as princesses than I’ve seen Jack Sparrow t-shirts and coffee mugs. They were cuter than these kittens:

The little Scottish princess from Brave was popular, as you can see:

My favorite tiny princess wore a shiny lavender fairy tale dress and sparkly shoes, and her hair was done up with glitter and other girly doo dads. She was in the Pirates of the Caribbean gift shop with a hook on her hand, wrecking everything on the shelves and threatening anyone less scurvy than herself. That princess was pretty, but she didn’t take any shit. My kind of girl.

What did I wear on my journey through the Magic Kingdom? A plain gray t-shirt, gray trousers, and sneakers that I think were black five years ago. I looked like a piece of lint. I was useful for buying hot dogs and saying, “Excuse me,” to people blocking our path to the Hall of Presidents. Apart from that, I was the black hole where merriment goes to die.

I did make a tiny effort to increase the overall tonnage of fun in the park. As we hustled through Frontierland, we heard joyful, terrified shrieks distorted by distance and the Doppler effect. My wife, who’s more afraid of roller coasters than a bottle of gin is afraid of Keith Richards, said, “You can go ride that if you want to. I’ll hold your glasses.”

“Come on. Am I not man enough to make you feel safe?” I said.

“I don’t think so, unless you can reach in and make my gut feel safe.”

“I can do it,” I said. “Maybe I can be the gut whisperer.”

That was not a popular response. Twenty minutes later I was watching robot Abraham Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address. There was very little screaming involved.

Oh, and by the way, I don’t think Disney knows that Christmas even exists. You can tell from this picture.

 

 

 

 

 

Christopher Buehlman’s new medieval horror novel Between Two Fires was released earlier this month, and it’s a fantastic read. The story is funny, historically intriguing, and scary as hell. It received a great review at Publisher’s Weekly, and I can personally vouch for how entertaining it is. It’s available in hardback at bookstores and Amazon, as well as Kindle format and audio through Amazon. The audio version is amazingly well done.

 

One disadvantage of being a soulless, horrific fiend, who with a mere glance can boil the marrow in the bones of the innocent, is that people think you don’t like cartoons. Peasants, tradesmen, and scruffy German professors who should know better all clasp this flabby misconception to their bosoms, as if it were a sickly infant that only the milk of ignorance could nourish. This notion is nothing but odious rubbish. I assure you that I and four other Vampire Princes sat in attendance on opening night of Fantasia, urging that Mickey Mouse suffer damnation, delivered by a broom that surely was animated by the forces of Hell. Therefore, to those churlish enough to suggest I must disdain animated films, I say bah. May their slumber be destroyed by scorpions behaving in an entirely improper fashion.

Today I propose to discuss the film Despicable Me. I admittedly approached it with elevated expectations, since its protagonist is a literal villain, and the word “despicable” dominates the title. It is as if the filmmakers have promised ninety minutes of terror, suffering, and grinding degradation. Indeed, my henchman Nodwick squirmed in anticipation to such a distracting degree that I resorted to chaining him to his seat, and I found myself compelled to threaten him with nailing his hands to the armrests. 

The film’s initial scenes sated my hunger for an execrable, villainous hero and whetted my anticipation for greater depredations to come. True, I could wish that Groo had simply killed his horrible neighbor’s dog rather than alluding to the act in a sideways manner, perhaps with entrails artistically hurled across the lawn. But that is no more than quibbling on my part. I sensed the film urging us forward from Groo’s current loathsome, alligator and rhinoceros-filled existence into a future of shattering destruction, rushing along a story arc that would make Aeschylus blush with approval. I saw the film’s promise come into flower as three moderately innocent young persons thrust themselves into Groo’s world of devastation and woe, and I waited for him to visit profound, agonizing, and all-encompassing obliteration upon them, as certainly he must.

That which followed shocked me in a manner unequalled since Lord Zülta devoured twelve drunken gypsies and goat in three minutes. In fact, I heard Nodwik whisper, “Holy shit,” and I clouted him so fiercely he was unable to open his left eye for a month. Aghast, I observed Groo allowing himself to be cajoled and goaded in a manner that would make any black-faced lamb weep with shame. He accepted this abuse from three insignificant, barely sentient children, some of whom wore pink, if that can be conceived. I felt impelled to slay Groo without hesitation, yet I realized he was merely an image wrought by an animator and his calculating machines. I resolved to find this animator at once and dismember him, hiding each limb on a different continent like grisly Easter eggs.

As I began to unchain Nodwick, an image scraped across the screen that altered my entire perception of the film. I refer to Vector, the supposed antagonist of the film, presented as a villain to rival Groo. I came quite near to smiling in amusement—indeed, my lip might have twitched. Vector was a vapid, crass, worthless excrescence of a villain, undeniably so. Even the squid in Vector’s “squid gun” rolled its eyes at his ineptitude. The appearance of Vector’s repugnant self placed this film into its proper focus. Despicable Me is not a heroic saga of evil and horror on a profound scale, as I had initially conceived it to be. Rather, it is a cautionary tale of allowing one’s potential for hideous malignance to dissipate into pathetic ineptitude. Heedless of the peril, Groo descends into mediocrity by waging against a mediocre puff of flatulence. He embraces frailty by coddling frail and unhygienic urchins, rather than splintering their bones and stripping their souls from the flesh.

Why does Groo fail? The brilliance of Despicable Me resides in Groo’s excuses for his abject embarrassment, which he disguises as compassion and ridiculous finger puppets. Groo fails because his mother treated him abominably. That weakness then seeps into his mighty cruelty and splits it, just as water might seep into an oak tree and smash it open at the first freeze.

Good lord, Groo, we all had mothers. Having a mother excuses nothing.

Every being that wishes to perpetrate evil upon the pure and guileless denizens of this world should immediately watch Despicable Me. Do not wait until you have tortured that final shabby villager. Do not wait for that virtuous young woman to retire, clad in her ridiculously diaphanous nightgown and awaiting your mesmerizing presence to usher her into damnation. Go and see it forthwith.

Despicable Me serves as a foul beacon reminding us to master our craven weaknesses, and to slaughter every prepubescent child before it utters a solitary precocious syllable. For that, I give Despicable Me five horrific tortures involving the mucus membranes, out of five.

Really Groo? A unicorn?

 

When a new thing comes along there’s always a guy standing around expressing indignation. When the spear was invented, this guy said, “What do I need that spear thing for? My rock is perfectly good. It’ll kill anything a spear will kill. And I can’t believe you paid three muskrat skins for that thing. Don’t you know you can just pick a rock up off the ground?”

You’ll be happy to hear that you no longer have to listen to that son of a bitch, because I killed him. And while I’m confessing, I must also admit that that son of a bitch was me.

This homicide was effected over a long period of time, like stirring a pinch of arsenic each morning into a man’s Fruit Loops. One day I was standing strong, saying, “Bah!” to haircuts that cost over $8 and crying, “Insanity!” to sneakers more complex than Converse high tops. The next day I was mocking this dumb-ass “World Wide Web” thing that cost the crazy amount of $10 a month to access. Then the next day I’m signing up for my own email account, and the day after that I’m hyperventilating if my home network goes down for 10 minutes. Now I regularly send email to a guy who sits less than eight feet away from me rather than walk three steps around the corner to talk to him. I have crumbled like a tower of cheese.

It’s not that I’m a Luddite—my geek cred goes back to 1981, when my first computer had a smoking hot 48 kilobytes of RAM. It’s just that I grew up in the church of “What’s that damned thing good for?” and I considered myself a faithful disciple. My positions were clear. Why should someone lay out a bucket of money each month for a mobile phone when there’s a pay phone on every corner? I have 500 video cassettes containing all the movies I love, so why should I pay 20 bucks a pop to replace them with these DVD things? Why spend money on a digital video recorder when I don’t even watch the stupid TV that much anyway?

My clear positions have subsequently eroded. I didn’t just get a cell phone, I bought an iPhone, which is the personification of frivolous crap. I amassed a DVD collection of such splendor that I intend to be buried with it, much like Tutankhamun and his golden urns. Initially my DVR grabbed episodes of “House” and “Bones” when I happened to be out of town, but eventually I commanded it to seek out and capture gems such as “Afro Samurai”. After all of that, my indignation was grievously wounded, and I was desperate for a bulwark upon which to make my stand.

Along came Facebook. I could not imagine a single useful thing that Facebook might provide that could justify the untold hours poured into it like the blood of innocents cast into a belching volcano. I was clear and immovable on this. I would not budge. Then people posted on Facebook some things that were important to me, and I couldn’t see them any other way. So, I signed up and looked at them. That was fine, but I didn’t care to hear when people went to the cleaners, or got laid, or wanted me to farm their fish, or whatever. I didn’t need to share at that level. If I shit a titanium turd in the image of Christ I might post something about it, but probably not.

I was standing firm. I stood firm in a firm and solidly immovable manner. And so I stood for a while. Then I was possessed by the spirit of an alcoholic carnival geek from Alabama, and I posted something that I thought was important. Then I commented on someone else’s post that I thought was cool. Later on I uploaded some photos, and I answered a poll. Then I created a Facebook application. And then I did a lot more stuff until finally, just recently, I created a post on Facebook about my water heater being inspected. That was the act that murdered me and my indignation.

My indignation and I would like a tomb if you don’t mind. Marble cherubs would be nice, and perhaps unicorns if they’re tastefully done. Please lay my indignation and me to rest within this tomb, sing a couple of weepy songs, and put us in the past with hopefully fond memories. And on the tomb please carve the words: INDIGNATION – “This must have cost a fortune. You couldn’t just dig a hole and throw me in it?”

No cherubs? No unicorns? This sucks.

 

I’m watching this movie called Red Beard, and it’s a cool Japanese movie, even though it doesn’t have any sword fights. It does have Toshiro Mifune in it, who was a Japanese movie god in his day. For Japan, he was like Clint Eastwood and Robert DeNiro put together, except his face didn’t look as weird as either of theirs. He’s a doctor in this movie, and after he pounds the ever loving shit out of about 20 guys, he sends his orderly to carry them back to the clinic to get all their shattered arms and legs splinted. Then he tells his intern how bad it was that he, a doctor, beat the crap out of these guys, and how he’s a weak-willed person, and that it was an all-around awful thing he should be ashamed of. And he says it without sounding pathetic, or whiny, or preachy—like he’d do it again if he had to, but he’d be sad about it later. And you totally believe it.

That’s how god damn cool Toshiro Mifune was.

The really fun thing is that right after that scene the movie stops for an INTERMISSION. I mean, music plays and the screen shows a Japanese character that I assume says “intermission,” because that’s what the subtitle says, and that lasts about five minutes. That’s how long it takes me to jog out to the men’s room, drop off 36 ounces of Diet Coke, and jog back, so an intermission is a pretty neat thing to have in a movie that’s three hours and forty-five minutes long.

Somebody once asked Alfred Hitchcock how long a movie should be, and he said the length should be proportional to the endurance of the human bladder. The director of Redbeard, Akira Kurasawa, who himself wasn’t exactly Mortimer Snerd when it came to making movies, clearly agreed with Alfred. At one time, if a director made a film much over two hours long he showed some mercy on his audience and their urinary tracts. Long movies like My Fair Lady, Gandhi, and The Great Race all had cozy little intermissions.

But now movies like Independence Day, Dark Knight, and anything with hobbits in it give their audiences a stiff punch in the bladder. And what was up with that god damn Titanic? Three hours into the thing I leave for a five minute restroom visit, and when I come back I have to ask my wife, “Why the hell are they running around below deck with freezing sea water up to their nipples? Does this have something to do with the old lady’s necklace? Did you take notes?”

Even The Avengers pushes two and a half hours with no break. Apart from the fact that some of it’s funny enough to make me pee, I’d like to be able to hang in there to see the after-credits fun without an embarrassing accident. Come on, Joss Whedon, you’re a rebel. We know you’re on our side. Don’t be afraid to stand with giants such as Hitchcock and Kurasawa. Bring back intermissions, and help us out. It’s hard enough for young people to get a little action on a date without having to waddle out of the theater like a penguin with a crotch infection.

The spirit of Toshiro Mifune says, “We’d better start seeing some intermissions around here, or filmmakers will think back fondly on the days when they still possessed all the parts required to urinate.”

Image from Doctor Macro.

 

I will infiltrate the DFW Writers Conference this weekend. I hope to make important contacts, find people who tell me how great my work is, learn writing and publishing secrets, and meet a an agent who thinks my novel is so marketable they’ll run over orphans while rushing to get it into print. That’s what I hope. I expect to meet writers who are struggling as much as I am, find people who drop into a coma after the first sentence of my pitch, learn what stupid mistakes I’ve been making, and take a vicious pounding from agents about how much my idea, my writing, and my haircut sucks.

It’ll be fun.

In addition to taking in all the classes such as “The Wild West of Publishing” and “How to Write for Boys,” I will pitch my humorous adult fantasy novel Six White Horses. I think I’m ready. I’ve practiced my one minute pitch. I’ve practiced my elevator pitch, which is short enough for a ride from the exhibit floor to the floor with the buffet. I have business cards with my name, photo, contact info, and my tag line: “Fantasy so sarcastic it bleeds laughter.” And my pitch is printed on the back of the card.

I’ve prepared a number of flash drives containing important documents, just in case anyone sees the brilliance beneath the blotchy skin of my first novel. They contain a one page query, an overview, a synopsis, a full proposal, and the first three chapters of the book. The conference organizers warned me in authoritarian terms to bring no paper copies of anything, and to bring no full manuscripts whether on paper, flash drives, or burned into the skin of a buffalo. Electronic media it is.

The conference encourages agents and writers to mingle at a reception Saturday evening, on the patio, weather permitting. Barring a tornado or a barrage of hailstones, I hope to chat in a casual yet professional fashion with everyone in sight, if I can do it without looking like a mule’s scabby hind-parts. I may hold a drink, which I think would make me look worldly and literary, especially if it’s not a bottle of Bud Light. I’ll be able to identify the agents by the writers swarming around them like German fighters around an American B-17 bomber. I don’t think I can push my way through them without looking desperate, though. Maybe if I offer them free drinks they’ll go away—at least that’s the way it would work in a bad novel.

Like I said, it’ll be fun. And if it’s not fun, then I bet it’ll be educational.

I couldn’t find any open license photos for the conference, so here’s a photo of Tolstoy and the rest of his Ukranian Oompah band in 1856. If only they could attend this weekend.

As an actor, I love being onstage. If I could manage it, I’d spend all of my acting-related time onstage. I despise rehearsals. The only thing I hate worse than rehearsing is sucking onstage. So, I rehearse and try to forget that the Jim Butcher novels will be picked over by the time I get to Half-Price Books tonight. It’s not exactly cutting off my ear or cultivating a heroin addiction, but it’s suffering of a sort.

I’ve just survived six weeks of rehearsal, and before diving into the eight-week show I started wondering about things. I did not wonder why I spent time practicing old skills I’d already mastered, and I did not wonder why I practiced new skills until my corpse could execute them, like frog’s legs jumping in a frying pan. That all made sense. But I did wonder why rehearsal, which is so good for me, feels nothing like performing in the show.

Well, everybody knows that you’ve got to train, practice, learn, get educated, and so on. I could find about 100 billion quotes on the subject, and only 110 billion humans have ever been born. But once you’ve trained to do a thing, you then have to do it for real, unless you’re my cousin Dave, who gets by just fine living over his mom’s garage and playing X-Box. The real world is a tricky place when it comes to doing things. Different things work in different ways.

For example, let’s take something I learned and then did in the real world: digging ditches. Effective ditch digging requires a surprising amount of learning, at least if you want to be able to stand up at the end of the day. I admit that learning to dig a ditch when I was 12 years old took a lot less time than learning the alphabet when I was five, but I still had to concentrate on what I was learning. Once I mastered the skills and started digging for real, the experience was different. I had to pay a certain amount of attention to not smash a toe, but my brain had plenty of time to think about football and that car I was saving up to buy in five years. So ditch digging = low learning curve, low analytical requirements, and high potential for daydreaming.

Let’s jump forward a disturbing number of years to another thing I learned and did for real: statistics.

(To digress, it may seem odd to you that I can like acting and statistics at the same time. Yet I like all the math, and perhaps that does reveal psychological issues. You may sometimes hear physicists mocking sociologists about not being real scientists. How can you call sociology a real science when it studies people, who are appallingly random compared to, say, quarks? On the other hand, how can you call physics a real science when it studies quarks, which are appallingly random compared to the number 4? Mathematics is the only true science, and you can imagine what the mathematician in me thinks of the actor in me. I have a superiority complex and an inferiority complex about having it.)

I studied statistics for a moderately long time. During that period I probably could have learned to dig ditches about two thousand times. I found it sometimes challenging, and for a while I thought I’d be happy to die if I never had to hear about Bayes’ Theorem again. Eventually I applied these skills in the real world, and just like in ditch digging the experience then changed. I didn’t need to worry about smashing a toe with a poorly wielded normal distribution. But I had crammed a lot of statistics knowledge into my brain, and now I had to solve real problems by releasing that knowledge, as if I were the world’s most anal-retentive graffiti artist. I had to concentrate on the mechanics of it. It just wasn’t possible for me to calculate an analysis of variance and daydream about my girlfriend at the same time, and I’m not sure that would have been a compliment to her anyway. So statistics = high learning curve, high analytical requirements, and low potential for daydreaming.

So let’s get back to this acting thing. It does not take long to become a bad actor. Any four-year-old trying to hide a broken vase will prove my point. It takes hard, thoughtful training in acting techniques to turn you into an actor that people like to imagine killing, and with more hard work you can make audiences merely hate you. With more exhausting effort you can develop the skill to make audiences first unaware of your existence, then be indifferent to you, and then find you inoffensive. After an amount of training equal to several doctorates in ditch digging, you can at last entertain people, or at least remind them of someone they once liked. That’s how it worked for me, anyway. I’ve seen other people skip straight from vase-hiding to entertaining people in just the time it took me to learn the alphabet.

But when I get to the real world, audiences don’t like it if I bumble around looking for my mark. They get confused if I dither over my character’s motivation, especially when his motivation should be to say the damned words that the author put down on the damned paper. Maybe I’ve mastered the individual techniques, but I can’t be thinking about techniques while I perform, because the audience wants more than a collection of successfully-executed techniques. That’s something they could get by putting the script and an acting book together in a blender. So acting = high learning curve (at least for us remedial types), low analytical requirements (no one cares which hand I use to hold Yorik’s skull), and high potential for daydreaming. And that’s the trick for me—daydream potential is my tool for making something happen that’s fun, unexpected, unexplained, and won’t make the audience imagine killing me.

So as I ride towards opening day, I do so on the back of my new acting mantra:

“At rehearsal, think about work. At work, think about magic.”

And I can always fall back on statistics. Or ditch digging.

If I go back to digging ditches, I'm hiring this dude as an apprentice.

I can testify with certainty that life exists beyond death. I died 500 years ago, and I am still receiving bills for water and property taxes. That seems compelling evidence that I, the vampire Baron Yörg, still live. And though I gladly ravage and obliterate all that is pure, tender and sacrosanct in this world, I still cannot get the tax appraisal district to cease annoying me. No matter how many of them I slaughter, more arise like grubs from beneath a slimy stone. This aggravates me enough to consider falling upon a sharply pruned dwarf holly tree and ending my existence, but one pleasure sustains me. I adore films, and I cherish the opportunity to share my observations about them.

Today I shall discuss The Princess Bride, a modest film released a generation ago that somehow has sustained a cult following. The film is not without charms, I admit. Yet does it merit the ongoing acclaim awarded it by romantics and people who perhaps believe in unicorns and chivalry?

To begin, I am refreshed to find that the story’s hero, The Dread Pirate Roberts, has ordered the murder of dozens of helpless prisoners, and himself has likely killed a good number of unarmed men begging for their lives. He rises above the mass of insipid protagonists who save maidens, fight evil sheriffs, or perhaps fail to kill anyone at all. Though Roberts does not delve into any significant wickedness, he obviously enjoys the pain of others, and the film profits by that in my estimation. Roberts fails to impress when he allows the whining Spaniard and the unintelligible giant to live, but he excels in his lack of emotion. Indeed, though he declares the princess to be his true love, he never shows any greater emotion towards her than he would towards a bowl of tasty mutton stew.

Lest my praise become overblown, I must complain that most of the actors cast in this film are far too pretty. Florin and Guilder appear to be medieval kingdoms, so the main characters should have less than two dozen teeth between them. This shook my suspension of disbelief, as did the general cleanliness and the absence of warts. Just a few pox-ridden wretches in the gutters would have suggested misery and filth, but the filmmakers could not be bothered with even that effort.

That disappointment is compounded by the so-called villains in this film. Prince Humperdinck is nothing but a pathetic string-puller. He does not deserve to be called a villain, and indeed hardly deserves to be called a sentient being. Count Rugen fares no better. He dresses like a Florentine haberdasher on his way to the opera, and no number of extra fingers can overcome so much brocade when it comes to unleashing bowel-loosening terror. And of course the man allows himself to be slain by a melancholy Spaniard, which removes all doubt that he is nothing but a sack of table scraps with a goatee.

Allow me to move on to one of the film’s shining aspects. I of course refer to the Fire Swamp. When Roberts and the princess explore this charming locale, they infuse the middle of the film with energy and a profound sense of fun. When the fire spout set the princess ablaze I felt a satisfying glow, and when the sand smothered her I almost smiled. By the time the last Rodent of Unusual Size had been slain, my henchman Nodwick had prostrated himself to beg for a renovation to his quarters. That dank, leech-infested cupboard was no longer his ideal domicile. In an act of mercy I am ashamed to relate, I granted his request by tossing a diseased rat and a shovelful of sand on him one night as he slept.  

The Princess Bride includes only three deaths, and one of them does not count since Roberts pops right back to life a few minutes later. That is a paltry number of deaths by anyone ’s standards. If no more people than that are to be slain, one might as well watch Pride and Prejudice. Rugen’s death almost fails to signify as a death at all, since he is so lacking in consequence. Yet Vizzini’s death produces odd satisfaction. He is an annoying, petty toad of a man, and would in fact make an ideal bug-eater. Something about his tone of voice inspires thoughts of ripping off his feet and making him wear them like earrings. Thus I feel that Vizzini’s death equates to five or six killings for entertainment purposes, and I am inclined to judge the film a bit more leniently.

Other aspects of the film contest with one another, some disappointing and others charming. Rugen’s torture device is laughable. No villain with any imagination would name a torture device The Machine. What an insipid name. Strap a man to a device called The Water-Powered Testicle Crusher, and then you will see him talk. Contrariwise, any film that includes a blazing, levitating giant who bellows in what might or might not be some human language is a film to be reckoned with.

The Princess Bride’s many charms offset its failures, but it’s greatest flaw is its artistic vision. The filmmakers chose True Love as their theme, and the story whirls inconsequentially around that concept. They ignored many weightier messages already in the film and begging for exploration: The Blind Cruelty of Revenge, The Uncaring Greed of Kidnapping, and The Nether-Tingling Nastiness of Torture. These are the issues that will enlighten, educate, and entertain. Even the filmmakers must have known this on some level, since they chose a pale dimwit with a speech impediment to extol True Love’s fine qualities during the wedding scene.

At the end, when all things are measured out and damnation is visited upon the deserving, how do I assess this film? It entertained me, but it missed so many opportunities to accomplish so much more. I give The Princess Bride two horrific depredations visited upon the innocent, out of five.

Off to another charming day of murdering innocent sailors. Don't wait up, darling!

Click here to getImages &
The Princess Bride Pictures – Pictures

Before a reader can cherish a book with all his heart, the book must get its ass kicked quite a lot. Any decision along the way can crush the book into a gritty paste. The author must decide to write the damn thing, and to not quit before the story’s done. He has to decide to stop compulsively revising the story and show it to other humans, exposing his soul to annihilation should someone say that he chose an adverb poorly.

At some point an author has to decide to toss the story’s fate into the hands of other people. If he doesn’t, it will be appreciated only by his mother, his college roommate, and his basset hound. This is a risky proposition, since those people might be mean, and they might know more about the book business than he does. Agents, editors, publishers, bookstore owners, and people who want to read books will all judge his cherished creation. Sticking the story in a snappy-looking binder and dropping it into a desk drawer for all eternity can seem a lot more desirable.

I’m struggling with that decision today. I intend to expose my manuscript to the uncaring scrutiny and possible condemnation of agents in the next few days. And I’m preparing a proposal that I hope will cause them to decide that my story is just what’s needed to lift the spirit of humanity in desolate times. Or at least that a fair number of people will buy it, read it, and smile.

I will include something called a “pitch” in this proposal. It’s sort of like the description you’d find on the back of a paperback book. It should sell the book. After a person reads the pitch, whenever he thinks about the book he should feel like he’s just shot up heroin. The pitch is really important. The first pitch I wrote for my story was:

When five young mice of Briarcliff Manor venture into the harrowing barnyard, they want only three things: to find enough food to eat, to avoid becoming something else’s food, and to create as many little mice as possible. They don’t want to get involved in the travails of young Cinderella and her cruel sisters, or to dabble in the affairs of fairy godmothers. They certainly don’t plan to become horses and haul a carriage from one pointless place to another pointless place. But the world doesn’t seem to care what mice want. The tiniest mouse, Abernathy, along with his siblings and his friends, must employ recklessness, subterfuge and sarcasm in their struggle to survive. No matter what trouble that wretched cinder girl gets them into.

When I read over the pitch, I realized there was a chance that it might not be perfect. Since I hoped that other people would be mesmerized by its brilliance, I decided to use the brains of other people to help me improve the pitch. I sent it to a passel of my smarter friends and asked for their help. Some of them had even read the manuscript before. My friends delivered all the help I could have desired. In fact, here’s a selection of the guidance they provided to me:

*****

Friend 1 – “I don’t like the sentence in the middle. It doesn’t fit with the rest of it.”
Me – “Wow. That’s my favorite sentence in the whole thing.”
Friend 1 – “Get used to working with editors.”

*****

Friend 2 – “Saying ‘Cinderella’ straight out is giving everything away. And saying ‘tiniest mouse’ makes it sound like a children’s book. And I know it’s not a children’s book. You must have said damn a thousand times in that book, and you mention some really frisky mouse behavior.”
Me – “I wasn’t sure agents would spend more than four seconds looking at this, so I didn’t want to make them try to figure out it’s Cinderella. But I guess I should give them more credit. Good point about the children’s book. Maybe I could say ‘horniest mouse’ or something?”

*****

Friend 3 – “Saying ‘pointless place’ twice is kind of awkward.”
Me – “Yeah. I guess you’re not telling me that saying it three times would be better, are you?”

*****

Friend 4 – “Why should we care about these mice?”
Me – “Great question. I care about them because I’ve lived with them for months. They’re like penniless relatives I can’t get rid of. I don’t know—maybe you’d care about them if you spent eight bucks for the book? Okay, I’ll work on it.”

*****

Friend 5 – “Even though it’s a ‘sales’ paragraph, it sounds too ‘salesy.’”
Me – “Ouch. If it sounds too much like a sales pitch then I’ve screwed up. I need to go more for, ‘Would you care to see my etchings?’ and less for, ‘Hey baby, you lookin’ for a date?’”

*****

Friend 6 – “I stumbled over ‘becoming something else’s food.’”
Me – “Yeah, that whole sequence is crap. I need something more like, ‘Veni, vidi, vici,’ or, ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.’”

*****

Friend 7 – “There needs to be something between the part about the world not caring what mice think and the part about the tiniest mouse and his friends. It seems disconnected.”
Me – “But Friend 1 told me to take out that sentence! Crap. It sucks when you write just 125 words, and the first part’s disconnected from the second part.”

*****

Thanks to my smart, generous, and extremely honest friends, I have created a newer, more irresistible pitch:

The mice of Briarcliff Manor want only three things: to find enough to eat, to escape being eaten, and to have as much sex as possible. They don’t want to get involved with some stupid girl and her two cruel sisters, or to dabble in the affairs of fairy godmothers. They certainly don’t plan to become horses and haul a damned carriage from one pointless place to another. Faced with these threats to their dignity and lives, the audacious mouse Abernathy and his friends must employ subterfuge, bold stupidity, and strategic cowering in order to survive. No matter what trouble that wretched cinder girl gets them into.

Now I shall finish up the proposal and deliver it into the hands of as many harsh, bitterly practical agents as possible. Let the annihilation of my soul begin.