lying for a living

The Beatles get hold of a thesaurus.

(Via Wordsmith.)

How to convince your teenager that you’ve finally lost your mind:

When he walks into the room, be kneeling next to the end table where you’ve set your laptop, frowning industriously at the screen.

Make sure that your search engine is displaying “Results 1-10 of about 3,350,000 for beavis and butt-head.”

Fail to notice your child approaching as you type variations in your search terms: Butthead. Butt-head. Butt-Head.

When he says, “Mom,” shriek, jump, and shout an epithet that sends the dog running from the room.

Explain that you’re fact-checking the correct spelling, capitalization, and hyphenation of a cartoon character’s name. Because you’re correcting the page proofs for the new edition of Crosscut. In which your own fictional characters debate the merits of an animated show. It all makes sense!

When the official MTV site brings up “Beavis and Butt-Head,” say, “Hyphen and capital H. See! See?”

Later, spend an hour with him watching Family Guy and South Park, laughing really hard.

The Virginia Quarterly Review posts some editorial comments from its pile of rejected submissions: “I can’t enumerate all the ways in which this is horrible.”

• The emotional problems of clipping fingernails. Actually the best of his submissions.
• A bawdy limerick? Really?

And yes, these blunt, in-house editorial comments do get transmitted to rejected authors, but “presented in a considerably kinder light.”

“Planet of the Apes fan-fiction! Have we no standards?” might become “we encourage you to read a few issues of VQR to get a better sense for the sort of work that we publish.”

(Via Bookninja.)

One tip I give people who are writing chapter one of their first novel: If you find yourself imagining how your jacket photo will look — or, God forbid, if you dress up and pose in front of the mirror practicing your coolest authorial look — it’s a rock-solid sign that you’re getting ahead of yourself.

Now Jessica Schneider takes it a step further, posing for deadly awful author pics so that we don’t have to: Bad Published Writer Photos.

There’s a punchline at the end, too.

A “grammar vigilante” heads to Seattle in his fight to make the USA “a safer place for spelling.”

The Typo Eradication Advancement League.

(Via Wordsmith.)

Don’t want to start a gender fracas here, but Rebecca Solnit rings a bell that chimes with my own experience. “Every woman knows what it’s like to be patronized by a guy who won’t let facts get in the way.”

“So? I hear you’ve written a couple of books.”

I replied, “Several, actually.”

He said, in the way you encourage your friend’s 7-year-old to describe flute practice, “And what are they about?”

Or, in my case, “Have any of them been published?”

He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. “And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?”

… Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, “That’s her book.” Or tried to interrupt him anyway.

But he just continued on his way. She had to say, “That’s her book” three or four times before he finally took it in.

In my totally subjective experience, men are also the ones who say, “Anybody can write a novel.” And: “Your book — what was it called again? — you want to know how I would have improved it?” Which is the sure lead-in to, “My novel would be about Kilimanjaro and war and existentialism — sort of Hemingway meets Immanuel Kant… but deeper.”

But women don’t get off the hook. They’re the ones who say, “You write violent crime fiction where women die. Is something wrong with you?” And, “Why do you like the idea of murdering other women?” And, “No, seriously, are you emotionally disturbed?”

Go on. Have at me.

(Via Bookslut, who links to the story with this awesome comment: “Last year a man corrected my grammar five minutes after the sex was over. I did not sleep with him ever again.” Damn, that’s standing up for grammar and for yourself. Represent, girl.)

How fast can you type — against competition?

Typeracer.

The fun comes not just from the chance to engage in addictive, pointless competition online, but because you test your skills by typing quotes from books and movies. See if you can recognize the source of each quote as you type, and as you watch your little VW Beetle avatar nudge across the screen toward the finish line. Watch out: typos are the equivalent of spinning off the track and running into a ditch.

UPDATE: Losing by 15 44 words per minute to a competitor named NotSober has dented my pride.

Commas, Turning Up, Everywhere.

A fully revised edition of Dan Brown’s mega-bestseller is about to hit bookstores, “Now with no factual errors.“

“It’s true that I let a few little mistakes go in the first edition,” said Brown. “Factual errors about Biblical history, early Christianity and Judaism, Catholic theology, Egyptian mythology, Mithraism, the origins and language of the New Testament and Gnostic Gospels, the Nicene Council, Emperor Constantine, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi texts, the history and modern organizational structure of Opus Dei, the history of the Vatican, interpretations of Leonardo’s Last Supper and Mona Lisa…”

It goes on. For a long and very funny while.

The new edition will have “absolutely bullet-proof historical detail,” plus “some new characters, more chase sequences, and a completely revised conspiracy.” The publication date is April 31.

(Via Maxine Clark, who I blame for causing me to waste the last hour laughing at 101 Reasons to Stop Writing. “5. I’ll just pad this out. ‘Padding: When you run out of ideas, but keep on writing. It’s also something insecure rockstars do to their crotches. The fluff covering the flaccid.’”)

New York magazine fake-profiles fake memoirist Margaret Seltzer.

“You write a memoir these days, and someone’s always trying to outdo you. It’s an arms race. Just when you outrun the tsunami, cradling a baby under each arm, you look back and some joker is surfing on that mother, with a whole bandolier of babies across her chest, and she’s juggling flaming torches and a chainsaw to boot. It’s mad crazy on these streets.”

Author Colson Whitehead also gets a brief audience with raised-by-wolves memoirist Misha DiFonseca, currently writing a prequel “about her time on the run from the Armenian genocide, when she was taken in by ferrets.”

And as hard as I laughed while reading the story, I laughed harder reading the comments.

(Via GalleyCat.)