How's the cover coming along?
Keep working on it. No matter what genre you're targeting, there must be an element of whimsical sluttiness involved.
In the calculus of the book biz:
Slut + Whimsy = Face-Out at B&N
Trust me.
Here's what I'm talking about:
Really?
Really?
You call that hiding?
Man! Did my website ever get a lot of hits yesterday! I accidentally tagged the URL for my website instead of the (corrected now) List of Literary Agents Who Will Represent You Even If You Have Never Written a Fucking Haiku in Your Life.
And there's no need to start writing anything just yet. You aren't ready for that. Look, hopefully I won't have to continue posting these checklists, but up to this point, you should have:
☑ A trained Suicide Prevention Pit Bull
☑ A Drowning Victim outfit for our dress-up day
☑ A crackerjack literary agent
☑ A slutty cover for your novel
☑ And, oh yeah, this:
Pay up.
Now.
I mean, come on! Where are you ever going to learn stuff like this? All the other so-called teachers of How to Write a Novel are going to tell you the same old list of lies: You need to read massive amounts of stuff (eww... boring); you need to have grammatical and technical perfection (bullshit, editors are our grammar and spelling bitches); you need to have a wealth of real-life person-to-person experiences (horse crap! Besides, I get anaphylaxis if I go outside without earbuds or spend more than six minutes away from my X-Box).
People are dumb and boring.
RULE NUMBER THREE: You should set up a Skype visit with a school.
Just tell them you're a writer. Schools never check shit like that.
Trust me.
And, by the way, it's a good idea to carefully scrutinize the background of your "Skype Set" before you visit the little tykes.
I recall, with a bit of whimsy (which, if you hadn't guessed is my word of the day--yesterday's was poo), the first time I Skyped in to a middle school as a "guest author" (which was about four years before my first novel was published, although I had attempted several unfinished Haikus), there was all this booze and porn on the bookcase behind me.
My bad.
I'm only here so YOU will learn from my mistakes, people.
