When my grandfather went out to eat he always put sugar in his coffee, even though he didn’t like sugar in his coffee. He did it because the sugar was free.
I’ve heard that little story dozens of times since I was a boy. It comes up all the time when my family talks about my grandfather. It sums him up in two sentences. If you know that story, you know a lot about him.
Lately I’ve been working to make characters come to life in a story I’m writing. I struggle. I create backgrounds for them so I know how they think, how they talk, what foods they hate, and what they shout when having sex. I make them do and say significant things that will show who they are. But I often fail to build the thing I’m looking for—that fundamental, defining image as stark as being caught in a lightning flash.
I think I’ve overlooked the Free Sugar Factor.
The Free Sugar Factor involves a person doing something that’s habitual, probably trivial, and always unusual. It’s the kind of thing his family would bring up when they talk about him. They might say, “Oh yeah, whenever Aunt Jane got mad she’d drive to the grocery store and sit in the parking lot for an hour or two. What a character.”
The Free Sugar Factor isn’t some pathological behavior, unless the person really is a maniac. It’s doing something everyone else thinks is peculiar, but it makes perfect sense to the person doing it. We all do these things. It’s part of what makes us real people. I’m not sure, but I think mine may have something to do with turkey sandwiches.
To illuminate this whole concept, here are a couple of Free Sugar Factor examples from real people.
My father’s Aunt Delphi, who he swears was the best cook in the world, made a gigantic pan of biscuits in her wood burning stove every morning, far more than the household could eat. The family would eat about a fourth of the biscuits, and then she’d feed the rest to her husband’s coon dogs.
When I was a boy, my father kept a perfectly tuned diesel engine on blocks in the backyard, as I’m sure everyone else’s father did too. It drew diesel fuel from the gas can sitting next to it. Every day when he came home from work he started up the engine and stood there letting it run for a while.
The Free Sugar Factor usually involves a habitual act, but not always. Some isolated acts are definitive in themselves and forever after show what that person was about. For example, when my mother was three years old, her six-year-old brother took her to the nearby store to see Santa Claus. They joined a long line, and they stood just behind an overweight woman. My uncle kicked the woman right in the middle of her ass and said, “Get the hell out of my way, fat lady, I’ve got to go see Santa Claus!”
I’m honored to provide the guest post today at the blog But What Are They Eating? It’s a fun and unique blog owned by Shelley Workinger, author of the SOLID series of novels, which you should check out now. I mean after you read my post, but before you do anything else like checking Facebook or eating those M&Ms in your desk.
But What Are They Eating? contains a regular FoodFic feature that explores how food is used and represented in writing. Shelley asked me to guest on the blog, and I’ve written Is “Kumquat” The Funniest Word In The English Language?about how food is used in my humor book Bring Us The Head of the Velveteen Rabbit. I’m thrilled to have been asked to participate, and please read the great posts in Shelley’s blog, and not just my post. Mine may or may not be great, but it’s probably the only post in FoodFic that’s ever contained the words “trowel” and “mammoth.”
Also, since no one on the planet actually knows what a kumquat looks like, here’s a picture in which kumquats appear. Just doing my part for food appreciation.
Can you spot the kumquats in this picture? Hint: they look less appetizing than anything else, including the plate.
I broke down and dove into Twitter six months ago, on the advice of several strangers. They didn’t have candy, but it turns out they did have good advice about Twitter. Here’s why their advice was good:
First of all, I don’t use Twitter to talk to my friends. Twitter’s a big place where anyone can read whatever they want, and I don’t have anything to say to my friends that I want millions of other people reading. If I just wanted to talk to my friends, I’d never touch Twitter. I’d go to a bar, like we always do.
I use Twitter to connect with people who are interested in the same things I’m interested in. That’s mainly writers, agents, and publishers. I sometimes look for actors and food service workers, which are pretty much the same thing. I find them and follow what they tweet. Sometimes they follow me, and a-hah! We’ve made a connection.
I don’t tweet that I just ate a sandwich or that I’m waiting for Popeye to show up on Once Upon a Time. Some people like to do that, but I don’t. I try to share things I think will be useful or at least interesting to more than three people.
Unlike Facebook, a Twitter profile reveals little about you. You can share a photo if you want, you can write a 160 character bio, and you can list a website, which frankly can belong to an auto body shop and no one would know or care. That’s all. I don’t worry about creepy strangers following me. All they really know about me is what I choose to tweet. If I tweet my address and where I keep my stash, then I deserve a home invasion.
The 140 character limit isn’t a pain in the ass like people think. If I have something cool to share, I tweet a brief explanation plus a link to the full thing. A lot of people do that. For example, right now someone just tweeted “Like Gargoyles?” plus a link. Ooh, and “I wept blood after talking to my agent” plus a link. Next I’m looking at “A sadist uses trained monkeys to torture his victims” plus a link. You think I’m kidding, right?
If I’m following a thousand people, I don’t have to scan the tweets from all of them all the time. I can make a list of just the independent publishers, or only the agents, and I can follow that list when I want. It takes a tad of effort, but it makes the Facebook list creation process seem like rebuilding a Corvette t-boned by a dump truck.
Hashtags make things easy. A hashtag looks like this: #hashtag. If I tweet about humor, I might stick a #humor hashtag in my tweet. That way, anybody searching for that hashtag would find my tweet. I also like to use #mentalillness, #dumbass, and #vampirecows. If I want to see what people are saying about science fiction, I can search #scifi. It’s a good way to find cool links and to find new people you want to follow, or who might be fooled into following you.
I can manage my electronic space pretty easily in Twitter. I drop in when I have a few minutes, and I check out tweets on topics about which I’m interested. I spend far less time on Twitter than on Facebook, but I get a lot out of Twitter. I can just look at the things I’m interested in rather than wading through my friends’ religious manifestos, pictures of lions hugging bunnies, and notifications that this was the worst morning of their lives. I love them all, but it’s a lot to read through when I only have five minutes.
Twitter doesn’t try to sell me shit. Sometimes people send tweets that try to sell me shit, but I can just stop following them.
To sum up, if I just wanted to hang with my friends, I’d never use Twitter. For finding people and information that interest me, it’s been the WD-40 of social media. Well, maybe not that good—let’s say it’s been the crescent wrench of social media.
Oh, and one more thing. It’s a lot harder to flame someone or write an insane rant if you’re limited to 140 characters, because you have to write with discipline. That alone is worth its weight in kittens.
I gouged out part of my soul and hurled it into a wood chipper the other day. It was no fun, although I did get to eat pie while I did it. It happened because I’m trying to write something longer than the instructions for assembling an armoire made in Korea, and hopefully with better grammar. I’ve been racking up the word count, developing characters and making them suffer, and following my plot storyboard. Then a few days ago I wrote a scene that I adored, and I read it to my wife. That’s when it happened. After I was done, she paused and said, “It doesn’t really add anything, does it?”
Writers, like all artists, are by definition insane. They don’t perceive the world the way other people perceive it. People may or may not agree that I’m a writer, but I do have a piece of paper that says I’m crazy, so there. My wife had spoken the evident truth, which forced me to do the crazy thing and destroy those words, each one a child of my creative spirit. I wanted to make a surgical excision, but in the end I slaughtered them with all the finesse of a mustard gas attack.
I found myself a bit unmotivated after that. But motivation and inspiration should make no difference to writers. You write unless your hands have been crushed and you’ve been kicked in the jaw by a horse. So I sat at my keyboard, Diet Coke at my left hand, and discovered the Five Good Reasons Not to Write.
My tools are defective. My monitor is dusty, and it’s giving me a headache, so I’d better get the Windex. I should wipe down the kitchen counters while I’m passing through the kitchen with Windex in my hand. Oh, and Windows is telling me to install a security update, so I should do that to avoid losing all my work through insecurity. I’ll defragment my hard drive too, just to be safe.
My work environment is oppressive. The jumble of picture frames on my desk is breaking my concentration, so I should organize them. But I need to find places to put half of them, so I have to rearrange the bookshelves and move the printer. I’ll have worked up a sweat by then, so I should install the ceiling fan that’s been sitting in a box since I bought the house nine years ago.
My thinking apparatus is under-fueled. I have a headache from staring at the screen in impotence until my blood sugar drops to single digits. I need a sandwich. However, I only have ham in the fridge and am trying to watch my cholesterol, so I have to go to the store. I should also get everything else on my weekly grocery list since I’m already there.
I need to document my life. My cat’s sleeping amongst the orderly picture frames and looking cuter than any creature on Earth, including bunnies. I have to take a picture because this will never happen again. When I reach for the camera, my cat moves, so I have to wait until she reassumes a cute pose. It may take a while.
There’s this thing called the internet. For my story I need to research how expensive bribes should be in Bangkok in 1948. Wikipedia has an invaluable entry on Southeast Asia, and on Google I find a photo of elephants dressed like panda bears. That has to go on Facebook right away, and while I’m there I like a bunch of posts, wish I could dislike a bunch of posts, and post about my sandwich. Now I’m hungry for Thai food.
This morning I received a message from the illustrious Strannyi, whom I’m sure you must know as a writer, grammarian, and expert on zombie tribbles. She has graciously nominated me for the Liebster Award! Before anyone starts sending me frankincense and myrrh, let me elaborate on what this is. The Liebster Award is something for which bloggers nominate other bloggers who have less than 200 followers. There’s no actual award in the end, but being nominated is really nice recognition from other bloggers who like your work.
The origin of the Liebster Award is uncertain, but the earliest mention that anyone can find is a German blog in December 2010. We don’t know exactly how it started. But heck, nobody really knows why we blow out birthday candles, and we let the kids do it anyway.
Here are the rules. First I answer 11 questions that my nominator gave me. Then I nominate 5 – 11 blogs that I follow and think are really cool. Then I list 11 questions that these nominated bloggers will answer should they choose to participate. (No blood, no foul if they choose not to.) Then I convince my wife to take me to an expensive steak house to celebrate. So, with thanks again to Strannyi, here are my answers to her questions.
1. What was your first thought upon seeing that you had to answer eleven questions?
Okay, here are the blogs I’m nominating. I can’t be sure that they all have less than 200 followers. Some may have more. Some may have a lot more. I’m nominating them anyway, so there.
And finally, here are the questions for my nominees:
1. How many computers, smart phones, and tablets are within 10 feet of you right now?
2. What’s the best advice you ever got?
3. What kind of cake do you like for your birthday?
4. What’s your dream car, and why?
5. What fictional character would you like to be?
6. What’s a good excuse if you come home really late and your spouse is waiting up?
7. What’s your favorite film, and why?
8. Does the Loch Ness Monster really exist?
9. What’s the secret of a successful relationship?
10. Who taught you to ride a bicycle?
11. Are we there yet?
That’s it. Thanks again to Strannyi for the nomination, and I’m extremely honored.
And just for fun, here’s one of my sister’s painting that’s currently for sale. If you’re interested, please comment and I’ll let her know. Buy it now. Before you eat or go to bathroom.
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.
I’m writing this with a tequila bottle in one hand and a five dollar cigar in the other. That’s not totally true, I guess, or even true at all in the technical sense. But I could be writing with booze and smokes in my hands if I wanted, and every writer in literary history would envy me. Today for the first time I’m attempting to use speech to text software to write a real thing that real people might read.
I’m trying this in anticipation of a neurological rebellion that might hold my hands hostage, like socialist guerillas occupying a power plant, but I’m finding it a problematic exercise. For example, in the prior paragraph the speech to text software thought that the word “for” should be “from.” When I tried to edit the word, the software obtusely led me on a Maypole dance through four or five incorrect commands. The most entertaining was when I said “select four words right,” and the software interpreted it as “Open World of Warcraft.” I am not making that up. I haven’t logged on in years, so it was a surprise. Also, it’s really hard to get this program to type the phrase “Open World of Warcraft” when it thinks you want to open the program World of Warcraft whenever you say those words.
The preceding paragraphs took me five minutes to write. They took seven months to edit, otherwise known as 30 minutes, but anyone who challenges the seven months interpretation can put on this god damn headset and try it themselves. It also aggravates me that the stupid software doesn’t understand the word “obtusely.”
A quick experiment has just shown me that this program understands almost no profanity. That is a F you see Kay I in G shame, and I expect that’s going to slow down my words per hour considerably.
Holy frijoles! (I just found out it doesn’t understand Spanish, and I had to type “frijoles.”) I don’t know why, but all on its own this software just tried to take something I said and post it to Twitter. I hope it wasn’t “F you see Kay I in G.” That’s a little bit scary if you ask me.
The biggest problem I’m having is that I’m not verbally oriented. I have a hard time learning things by listening to people, especially if they’re really boring people like most of my college professors. I learn things by doing them. That’s handy when you write by typing on a keyboard with your actual fingers. But in order to speak the words I want to write, I have to stop and think about every phrase before I say it, so that it doesn’t come out sounding like a Neanderthal on Quaaludes. (Holy crap! This program understands what Quaaludes are. I bet that’s because the people who use this program have to take them a lot.) So, for these few paragraphs that would normally take me about half an hour to write and edit, this program has demanded an hour and a half, a liter of Diet Coke, and a surreptitious pull off the Cuervo bottle. (I see it understands Cuervo too.)
Despite all that, I admit that this would be better than not being able to write at all. So I’m going to call this test successful, maybe have a party, and definitely have a celebratory bag of peanut butter M&M’s. Technology is a damn fine thing, but I will say that I never want to have software integrated into my body, no matter what technologists say. It would take me 45 minutes to pee.
This was my facial expression the seventh time I said, “jump six lines down,” and it typed something horrible about cocaine and clowns.
I love the fact that stories make my real life look like the dim cousin with snot on his cheek. Things that happen in stories don’t happen in the real lives of real people, and that’s kind of the point. Stories are so unreal we can sink into them without squirming. Come on, nobody wants to be told about real life when they have a real life of their own to deal with.
We don’t live in stories. We’re not going to bring down a corrupt government with nothing but our pistol and a three-day beard. We’re not going to get seduced by some leather and lace vampire prince crime lord saxophone player assassin. We don’t wield magic swords that sweaty fan boys buy replicas of to wear with their fake chainmail and cheap boots. These things are not going to happen to us. We’re going to update spreadsheets, build houses, mow the yard, eat junk food, chase our kids, watch bad TV, go to the bathroom, and sleep. Maybe we’ll drink a margarita. And die. Not from the margarita I hope.
Stories resemble our real lives in almost no way at all, but still we want to understand our lives through stories. Life is big and scary, but fun little stories unfold in familiar ways. Stories strip the detail off our flabby lives and leave us with the polished bones.
Let me demonstrate. I’ll summarize the well-known tale of Luke Skywalker in the very first Star Wars film.
Normal Life. Luke’s a whiny, reckless farm boy on a boring planet hot enough to melt all George Lucas’ Oscars. He wants adventure and glory more than anything else, so he bitches about his chores and drives his uncle insane.
The Adventure Begins. Luke meets wise but scruffy Obi-Wan, and then the evil Empire turns Luke’s family into medium-rare lawn art. Luke makes his first decision. He joins Obi-Wan and right away gets into trouble in a bar. It’s all he can do to avoid tripping over dismembered arms.
Loyal Friends Appear. Luke flees the planet just ahead of the Empire, courtesy of cynical Han Solo and his wookie friend, Chewbacca, who’s like a huge, psychotic shih tzu. We find out that wookies tear off people’s arms, and that Obi-Wan can be given a migraine from a hundred light years away, even when he’s in hyperspace. Luke gets to show he can use his mystical powers to outsmart levitating D&D dice.
Bad Decisions and Worse Results. Luke has recklessly followed Obi-Wan and is rewarded by getting sucked into the arms of the evil Empire, particularly the villain Darth Vader. Then, like a moron, Luke recklessly decides to save the princess. That results in:
being trapped in a room with a dozen maniacs shooting blasters
almost getting crushed after some garbage monster humps his leg
getting stuck on a ledge with storm troopers shooting at him, or at least at the walls near him, and being saved only by heroic wire work and an incestuous smooch.
seeing Darth Vader murder the beloved Obi-Wan, producing a disappointing lack of gore.
Setting Up the Big Fight. Luke escapes from the Death Star after a two minute space battle that could have been replaced by footage from any film about WWII air combat. However, he’s leading his enemies right back to the rebel base. Luke’s crappy decisions have now endangered the base and the entire rebellion made up of every white male extra in Hollywood. What does Luke do? He rolls up his sleeves and does some determined moping. Luke and his friends reach the rebel base, and the rebels plan the ultimate assault on the Death Star, which all the pilots agree is pretty much doomed.
The Dark Moment. The assault goes poorly, if getting 95% of your force wiped out can be considered a poor showing. When the rebel base is seconds from annihilation, when the deadliest villain in the galaxy is about to give his son Luke the ultimate time out, when things could not possibly get any worse, and it’s all Luke’s fault—Luke grows up. Rather than recklessly relying on his targeting computer, he trusts his instincts and obeys the disembodied voice of a dead man. Luke fires an awesome sci-fi torpedo into a port the size of a wamp rat. I still don’t know how big that is, but it blows the Death Star into a jillion cheesy 1977 special effects bits.
Wrap Up. Luke gets a shiny medal from a cute princess with whom he has an ambiguous relationship, and about 5,000 rebel soldiers watch while wondering what the mess hall is serving for lunch. And hoping it’s not wamp rat. Luke gets adventure and glory because he changed from a whiny, reckless youth into a confident man with mystical powers and a badass black wardrobe in the sequel.
The story is clear and structured and non-threatening. It’s a nice way to understand things. But here’s my take on real life for Luke Skywalker.
Real Life. Luke’s a whiny, reckless farm boy who wants adventure and glory. He works on his uncle’s sand farm, until the sand market crashes and they go broke. They move to the city where Luke sells deep fried wamp rat on a stick. He does well, opens his own wamp rat stand, and then opens a few more.
Luke meets a girl who can stomach the aroma of wamp rat, she marries him, and they crank out some kids. He recklessly opens a blue milk smoothie franchise, and he loses everything except one broken down wamp rat stand. He recovers by adding grilled wamp rat and wamp rat fingers to the menu.
Luke grows up, stops making reckless decisions, and saves his money, even though there’s nothing worth a damn to buy on this stupid planet. As the kids grow, they take family vacations to the planet’s other squalid cities. Things seem really good.
The kids leave home, and Luke turns the wamp rat business over to his son. His wife gets tired of hearing his stories about the droids he owned when he was a kid, and he spends more time in the garage rebuilding classic land-speeders. He breaks his leg in a horrible bantha accident, and he never dances again. The city raises the taxes on his mud brick hovel, and his idiot son runs the business into the ground. Luke and his wife move to a small sand farm and rarely see their kids. Not only does Luke never leave the planet for adventure, he ends up back where he started, on a sand farm. I could go on, but you see where I’m headed with this.
Luke’s story and Luke’s real life both contain lots of references to wamp rats, so they’re alike in that way. Also, Real Luke and Story Luke both learn to stop flailing off to rescue every princess that comes along, getting their mentors killed and/or sending their blue milk smoothie franchises into bankruptcy. The difference is that Story Luke takes 121 minutes to learn that, while Real Luke takes half a lifetime. That’s a lot fewer trips to the bathroom, even with 64 ounces of Dr. Pepper inside you. Of course, Real Luke doesn’t get any medals, or mystical powers, or a light saber, but restoring land-speeders is probably fun.
If Real Luke saw Story Luke’s tale, would he understand more about his real life? Would it help him grow up and stay away from schemes involving blue milk? Would it convince him to stop wasting his time on land-speeders and go have some adventures? I think it might, but I could be wrong. I guarantee one thing though. It would convince him that you should never let anything bigger than a beagle hump your leg.
After seeing these cute babies, how could you eat wamp rat? Well, maybe with some Ranch dressing…
Inspiration sucks. It’s like that five dollar macchiato you drink every morning to get yourself going. Then one day the cat barfs on your shirt and makes you late, and you don’t have time for Mr. Macchiato. You can’t get yourself going without it, and at work you just stare at an imaginary point hoping no human comes near you before noon. The professional writers say that inspiration is for suckers. Just start working and let the work take care of itself.
So I felt really bad today when I sat down at the keyboard uninspired, depressed and communing with that imaginary point rather than attacking the keyboard like I was John Henry. I squirmed in my chair and felt shame that I was attempting to use the same alphabet used by Mark Twain. I’m a man of my time, so when I have a problem I do what the people of my time do. I go to Google. I searched Google for inspiration. By the way, the word “inspiration” produced 107,000,000 hits, and I don’t think any of them are at all inspiring.
After a while, like a lazy, willful mule, I started looking for anything I could use as an excuse for not writing at all. I landed on bipolar disorder. That was promising. I figured I could whine about it for at least a couple of paragraphs and be done. But then I found a page listing the best things about bipolar disorder, which isn’t your normal kind of post about a mental illness.
I think the “best things bipolar” list contained some fine and illuminating stuff, but it didn’t quite capture my experience with my friend bipolar. That’s what led me to create this alternate list of The Ten Best Things About Being Bipolar.
Since you’re manic sometimes and depressed at other times, bipolar can be claimed as the reason for almost anything you’ve screwed up or don’t want to do.
After being manic for a while, you can tell people what it’s like to write the sequel to Lord of the Rings, invent the perpetual motion machine, and fly without an airplane.
You have a wide selection of pills in decorator colors, so there’s no need to remodel the bathroom.
You can finish a day’s work when other people are still asleep, and you can think faster than reality occurs.
When depressed, you get plenty of health-enhancing rest for long periods of time, in rooms darkened by curtains that block out harmful UV rays.
You can openly pay someone to put up with your shit and react in a patient, thoughtful way, because it’s more acceptable to do this with a psychiatrist than with a prostitute.
There’s no substitute for being the smartest, most charming, most articulate, sexiest and most creative person on Earth for a while. It’s worth the embarrassment of later looking back at what you did and wondering what the hell you were thinking.
If you make bizarre money decisions, buy ten thousand pairs of bowling shoes, lose your home and possessions, and cause all your family members to abandon you, that’s just an unambiguous sign that God wants you to become a monk.
You give your spouse lots of opportunities to develop patience, tolerance, and the discipline to not hit you in the face with a frying pan.
You get to identify with scads of famous people who might have been bipolar too, like Abraham Lincoln, Marilyn Monroe, and Tigger. That’s got to be good for your self-esteem.
So there’s a poke in the eye for you, inspiration.
It sometimes surprises me how many people like their bipolar experience just the way it is. Yet plenty of people don’t like bipolar, and they can get pretty angry that anyone might say positive things about it. So, I’m happy to see your comments, but please try to keep them civil, or at least more civil than a religious war.
The suspected-of-being-bipolar President Theodore Roosevelt. Is he manic here? Depressed? You decide.
My hands shake all the time now. Well, that’s a lie. They don’t shake all the time. They just shake when I try to do something with them. It’s partly because of the otherwise harmless lesions hanging out in my cerebellum. It’s hard to describe. Think about it as if my cerebellum is the bottom floor of the fraternity house in the movie Animal House. The lesions are John Belushi and Tim Matheson and those other wacky guys throwing a party down there. My hands are that kid Pinto upstairs struggling to unhook a bra, which is hard when Otis Day and the Knights are making the house vibrate like a Dodge Charger with a 426 engine and straight pipes. The good thing in this scenario is that the lesions never make so much trouble that Dean Wormer shuts us all down, unlike in the movie. So, it could be a whole hell of a lot worse.
The other perpetrator of this shaking nonsense is the undercurrent of stress swirling beneath my daily activities. I’m waiting to find out whether I worked for a year to produce a repugnant pile of shit. You see, I wrote a novel last year, and this spring I had the amazing luck to pitch it to a cool literary agent. At least I feel she’s cool because she asked to see some chapters. I wanted to send them five minutes after she asked, but I made myself wait a couple of days so as not to look desperate.
A month later the agent emailed me a fantastically helpful note. She liked the first chapter, but nothing after that would make anyone want to read the awful, nasty tome. That’s not entirely true, I guess. She didn’t say awful and nasty. But she did give me some specific advice and say that she’d not be averse to looking at it again after a “thorough rewrite.”
I’m not quite positive what percentage of a book needs to be changed in order to qualify as a thorough rewrite. I can say that over the past two months I’ve changed a bunch of it. After rounds of editing that would qualify as OCD behavior, I sent the first three thoroughly rewritten chapters to her a few days ago. And now I simmer like gumbo.
I like the book, which I suppose is a good thing. It’s a comic fantasy novel, although not in the traditional fantasy mold. It contains just one magical being, and magical things happen about once per 50 pages. There are no magic rings, enchanted swords, effeminate elves, depraved wizards, or poems in dead languages that are so pretentious you want to beat yourself to death with the book.
What the heck does my book have then?
A hero who can’t keep his mouth shut, tries to bite off his enemy’s ear, and earns everything he ever wanted while suffering dreadfully along the way.
Three appalling villains, one with mythically destructive feet.
A vivid depiction of how it feels to be so in love that you’re the craziest person on Earth.
A number of shocking and nightmarish deaths.
The most bureaucracy-afflicted fairy in the history of literature.
Horses.
It also includes what I believe are a lot of laughs. Everybody’s sense of humor is different, so that’s no guarantee you’ll be laughing until you choke on your own spit.
For example, I like the line, “People are as crazy as three chickens in a sack.” I read it to my wife last night. She said it was understandable. Although she didn’t laugh, she did say it sounded better than “three chickens in a bag,” which is undeniably true.
Maybe the final test is one of my favorite sentences:
“Had the thing stood up and produced blocks of sweet Gouda cheese from its ass I could not have been more astonished.”
Yes, that sort of sums up the product of a year of my labor. Maybe you can understand my stress after asking an agent to pass judgment on a book that includes ass cheese.
This gorgeous photograph depicts none of the scenes appearing in my book. But isn’t it cool?
