Sunday, January 13, 2013

how to write novels (part 3)


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.