After spewing all my annoyances in the previous post, I’ll now return to being a laid back Little Mary Sunshine. Don’t worry, nobody who comments here is the target of my ire. And I know full well that doctors, computer programmers, musicians, plumbers, lawyers, and carpenters likewise have to deal with dorks who expect them to provide their services free of charge. Thanks for putting up with Meggie’s little rant.

As you were.

Dear aspiring authors and random people I run into at Starbucks:

Please don’t:

Decide over the weekend that it’s finally time to look for a job — and that publishing sounds like a glamorous industry, so will I please call my publisher and get you a position as an editor? Because you know they’ll jump at the chance to hire you — you majored in English Lit.

Email me, attaching a 2.5 meg document, with the message: “This is my novel. I want to send it to Hollywood. How do you like it?”

Stick a 750-page manuscript in my mailbox, with a Post-it note that reads: “My cousin wrote this thriller but can’t get it published. I thought you’d be the best person to tell him how to fix it.”

Ask me to comment on the query letter you’ve written for your novel. Then, when I suggest strategies to strengthen it, grab it back and berate me for hurting your feelings, because every word and sentiment in the query is personal and precious to you.

Ask me to phone up Stephen King to see if he’ll donate money to your pet cause.

Ask me to forward bestial horror-porn jpegs to Stephen King.

Ask me to blurb your unpublished misery memoir. (“Could you please give me a few quotes on the scenes below? I plan to send the memoir to agents eventually.”) That’s right — ask me to provide review quotes for your half-finished project. Note: A single paragraph of description about your childhood home does not constitute a scene. Neither do two sentences that describe the trauma you suffered when American Airlines wouldn’t upgrade you to first class, even though you were having a really tough morning emotionally. (And I hate to tell you, I truly do, but “My divorce was epic” is an insufficiently compelling reason to believe publishers will rush 1 million copies into print.)

Send out a mass email saying, “Dear Betty Sue, Dahlia, Mimsy, and other special friends: I’m revising my C.V. Prefer job in publishing. Could you please write up a few sentences recommending me? I’ll add them as quotes on the resume. By Friday, please.” Note: You sent the email to forty-six “friends,” and forty-three don’t actually feel so special.

On your C.V., under “Publications,” list your novel-in-progress. Listing the “Jots on Tots” column you write for the pre-school newsletter, which alerts fellow parents when the snack schedule changes, is iffy enough. An unfinished project, which exists only as musings in a spiral-bound notebook, has not been published.

Please, just don’t.

And if you need to know why, that’s another post. But for now: rant finished.

Hear me speak! Yes, I can string two sentences together extemporaneously! You can listen to Jeff Rutherford’s interview with me, recorded at ThrillerFest in New York — talking about Stephen King, The Memory Collector, women who write thrillers, and other scintillating topics.

Reading and Writing podcast interview.

Miss England gives up crown over brawl.

LONDON (Reuters) – Beauty pageant winner Miss England gave up her title on Friday after reports she had been involved in a nightclub brawl with another beauty queen.

Rachel Christie, niece of former British Olympic gold medal sprinter Linford Christie, was arrested earlier this week after allegedly getting into a fight with Miss Manchester, Sara Jones, at a club in the northern English city.

No word whether they tried to strangle each other with their sashes, or slash anybody with their crowns.

For parents who have read Goodnight Moon to their children so many, many hundreds of times that bedtime reading eventually comes to seem like a horror story:

Bookgasm reviews Goodnight Moon.

Set in a dystopian future in which genetically engineered animals have devoured humanity, GOODNIGHT MOON is told from the perspective of a unseen, dying victim of the ravenous hordes. As he reflects on the scene with his last breaths, MOON provides a terrifying eulogy for the human race.

The comments are even funnier.

(Via Laurie R. King.)

Storytelling is being killed by the Internet, or so claims Ben Macintyre in today’s Times of London.

Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.

The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé.

I don’t buy it, because — as Macintyre says himself — humanity has a deep and ineradicable need for narrative. And I don’t think I agree with him that cellphone novels are the solution. Outside of Japan, I don’t think cellphone novels (which are different creatures than novels read via an iPhone app) are going to catch on. But the article’s fun.

Among the many phone calls I don’t want to receive at 3:30 a.m., one is, “Mom, I’m at the hospital with appendicitis.”

So when I call writing a distraction, I mean it in a good way. Work is helpful. This morning, editing a scene of thrillerish mayhem kept me from dwelling on the thought that a surgeon had taken a scalpel to my youngest son, and that I was 3,000 miles and five time zones away, and that I would have to wait hours to hear how the surgery went.

My son has now phoned again. He’s back from surgery, and though he sounded like a croaky toad, he says he’s doing all right.

However, I’ve just reread both this post and the chapter I edited this morning. And it’s clear that I was completely distracted after all, and will probably have to rewrite everything I was working on, because all my words virtually shout, My baby needs chicken soup!

UPDATE: Thanks for all the good wishes. Nate’s on the mend. He still feels wiped out, but his brother and grandparents are there with him, so we’re feeling reassured. And he’s able to take ribbing from his brother with good humor, so he’s definitely improving. When he gives the jibes back sarcastically, he’ll be ready to go home.

Last week I was driving down El Camino Real in Palo Alto with the Husband and the Daughter, when the Husband looked at the car beside us and said, “That guy’s got a bullet hole in his door.”

And you bet, the gigantic dude behind the wheel of the gigantic green SUV in the next lane did have a perfect, circular, bullet hole deforming the center of the driver’s door.

This raised questions in my mind. Specifically: Why would you not repair bullet damage to your shiny high-priced SUV? Because

1. Leaving it reveals to your enemies that you’re vulnerable to attack.
2. That hole’s eventually going to rust.
3. The sight of a single hole could encourage other drivers to take pot shots at you, with the intent of turning your door from Cyclops into a happy face. And the Daughter and the Husband and I don’t want to be around for target practice.

Those questions floated through my mind before the Daughter put her foot down and the Corolla slowly (slowly, slowly) pulled away from the shoot-’em-up-mobile. But don’t be surprised if some future novel of mine features a car pocked by large caliber ammunition.

Bathroom camera peeps on customers at Christian bookstore.

Shocking that somebody who’s supposed to hold himself to a high moral standard — I mean somebody who works at a bookstore, for God’s sake — would do this.

People sometimes ask me how I can tell if a piece of writing is good or bad. Often, their interest isn’t merely academic or aesthetic. It’s couched in terms of, “My mother loves my novel-in-progress, and my neighbor says it’s really, really full of awesome adjectives.” And if I offer that, in my opinion, motherly love and adjectival awesomeness don’t always equate to good writing, the writer stomps off in a huff. Consequently I am gunshy about giving my opinion to relatives, childhood friends, and strangers who email me asking for critiques of their magnum opus. Instead, I direct them to other sources.

I’ve told plenty of people about How Not To Write a Novel, along with other classics — Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird, Stephen King’s On Writing, Sol Stein’s Stein On Writing — but some people can’t be bothered to head to the bookstore, or the library, or even to an Amazon shopping cart.

For these folks, and for all of us who appreciate satire, there’s now a cheap, easy alternative: How To Write Badly Well. Topics thus far include “Write thinly-veiled, self-aggrandising autobiographical fiction,” “Begin your novel with the protagonist getting out of bed and seeing that it is raining outside, which perfectly mirrors his life,” and the classic “Present your research in the form of dialogue.”

Joy, oh, joy.

On the other hand, if you want to practice your bad writing because you plan to enter the Bulwer-Lytton Contest, take all those tips to heart and get cracking.

And I can’t resist posting a couple of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton entries:

Winner:

Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.

David McKenzie
Federal Way, WA

Winner: Adventure

How best to pluck the exquisite Toothpick of Ramses from between a pair of acrimonious vipers before the demonic Guards of Nicobar returned should have held Indy’s full attention, but in the back of his mind he still wondered why all the others who had agreed to take part in his wife’s holiday scavenger hunt had been assigned to find stuff like a Phillips screwdriver or blue masking tape.

Joe Wyatt
Amarillo, Texas

Runner-Up

In a flurry of flame and fur, fangs and wicker, thus ended the world’s first and only hot air baboon ride.

Tony Alfieri
Los Angeles, CA

Yes, I am laughing out loud at that one, and yes, I could waste my whole afternoon reading the winning entries. Writing badly well is, in fact, wickedly hard.