THEM: "Oh hey there guy! Well, you know, pretty good, Carol's been redecoratising the living room and my little girl got a triple double goldstar trophy sceptre for her report on Miley Cyrus."
YOU: "Um...I'm pretty sure that there's no such thing as a triple double trophy sceptre..."
THEM: "what about you?"
YOU: "I'm going to FUTURE SPECS with all my heart and most of my liver!"
THEM: "Future Specs? I don't know Jimbo Jones, that sounds like lefto hippie commie pinko bullshit propoganda juice. Will there be....arty things?"
YOU: "All the types! Sound types! Look at it with your eyes types! Touchy touch with your fingies types! Watch the people do the things types! Plus there will be super cheap booze."
THEM: "Well Jackie James, that does sounds like all the fun things in the world. I guess I'll go. How when why wherefore?"
Daniel Santangeli, Giema Contini, Kieran Law, Gen Ganner, Thomas Quirk & Manda Boyd, Leena Reithmuller, Emma Schofield, Robert Millet's Amazing Time Machine
It's
been a busy week. I've been flat out organising the interstate tour and
doing radio interviews (you know it's going to be quality airtime when
the guy out of the front of the station greets you with a joint in his
hand). My novel was finally released in Australia this week, and man,
Oprah will just NOT GET OFF MY CASE. Seriously. Yesterday she rang me
up and she was all like:
“Oh my god I loved your boooook!"
You
know, with that rising voice thing she does. Let me tell you, it might
be endearing to watch on your telebox but it is PAINFUL to listen to in
your ear. So I was like,
"Listen Oprah, I'm actually on the last level of
Street fighter IV. Can you txt me later?"
“When can I get you on my show? I was going to have the Olsen twins on in January but their agent just called and said they'll be in rehab or prison or terrorist training camp or some crap. You free then?”
"Yeah Listen O-town I'm actually going to be in Cambodia writing the next book in January."
“Well can I at least get a review to tweet to my peeps?"
"Seriously, O-face, have you ever tried to beat Zangief on level 7? It's f**king hard. And trying to do so with an overexcited billionaire yammering on is making it a lot harder. Look, I'll write you a goddam review myself. Here tis:"
A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO DYING IN INDIA
BY JM DONELLAN
(REVIEWED BY JM DONELLAN)
Look, I don’t know what the hell I was
thinkingwhen I wrote this. Didn’t I realise that no one reads books unless
they are about vampires or wizards? Perhaps I should have written a book about
a young vampire wizard on a quest to unlock an ancient mystery hidden within a
famous painting whilst pursuing romance with a sexy rockstar who leads a
double life as a crime scene investigator. That’d really get the money men
drooling.
+ +
= best selling piece o' crap ever.
Everyone from the tweenies to gay twenty-somethings to soccer mums
would be trampling over each other to get to their nearest Borders to pick that
shit up. It’d probably even be adapted into a movie directed by an ex-porn star
struggling to gain some credibility.
I mean, look at the vocabulary in
this book. Kaleidoscopic? Prometheal? It’s like I expect people to use a
dictionary, or their BRAINS or something? This book doesn’t mention twitter
even once! Was it written in the middle ages? A Beginner’s Guide to Dying in
India has been called ‘witty and poignant.’ Poignant? When was the last time
you saw an ultra-hip Gen Y scenester type the word poignant into their iphone?
Never. That’s when.
"Does 'poignant' have two umlauts or three?"
My main regret is that this book
took me three years to put together from having the first spark on the rooftop
on a hotel in the Himalayas to telling my publishers to ‘shove it’ when they
wanted me to tweak the final chapter so that it featured a sex scene occurring
in a helicopter as the heroes escaped the exploding casino. It makes me cry to
think of all the things I could have done in that time. I could have learned
jujitsu, how to juggle flaming chainsaws, or how to make a clarinet out of a carrot.
You
know, stuff that would impress girls, instead of sitting in front of a laptop
for weeks on end bathing in my own sweat and trying to think a better metaphor
than ‘more out of place than the pope at a sex convention.’ (Suggestions?) I give this book sixteen
thumbs down. Which is slightly better than the rating I gave the Twilight
series, and slightly worse than the rating I gave for this guy’s moustache:
"It's Movember all year round in my world bitches! PS: you can get the bookhere if you to write your own scathing review, or if you need something to hide your face from that creepy guy that always sits opposite from you on the bus. Yeah, you know the one I'm talking about."
I had an abortion this week. I was halfway through my follow up novel (for adults at least, my kids book is done and dusted) when I made the difficult decision to prematurely end its life. It was entitled Junk Quay: A Modern Ghost Story. Basically it was a story about blues music and quantum mechanics. This guy featured pretty heavily:
So far I haven't had any christian fundamentalists at my door, but I'm
keeping plenty of death metal albums, gay porn and hardmount prints of Piss Christ on hand to ward them off if neccessary. The good news is that this has given me the chance to dive straight into my next book which I was much more excited about anyway. Expect God in a Coma to hit shelves sometime before the end of the world.
Lately I've been accused by many people, my girlfriend among them, of being a self-promotion whore. I justify this by the fact that this is my first art baby. I'm a bit like that annoying friend you have who's just had their first kid and starts working it into every single conversation you have with them by the most implusible segue imaginable:
You: Hey, have you read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart? I think, for me, it epitomises the pinnacle of African literature and perfectly encapsulates the feeling of fear and confusion that faces a ancient culture dealing with the plague of European colonisation.
Them: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS PHOTO OF MY BABY???
You: Uh...yeah I think you should me one last week...
Them: Oh! That was when he was three months and THREE days. This is him at three months and SIX days! Doesn't he look so grown up! Look at the way he's looking at that Caravaggio print on the wall, I think he really has a basic grasp on critiquing and appreciation Baroque era Chiaroscuro painting!
"waaaah! Caravaggio's excessive use of shadows exemplifying chiarsocuro painting displeases me! I'm having a pre-naptime existential crisis!"
In any case, it's only two weeks until the Australian release of A Beginner's Guide to Dying in India and in preparation I've been drinking too much and spending an unhealthy amount of time playing xbox, much like my literary heores George Orwell and Anthony Burgess did before the release of their respective masterpieces.
"I pwned yr droids with my l33t skillz!"
I've been asked if I'll sign copies when it is released. People, seriously, I will lick, bless, baptise and sign in my own blood any copy you want to obtain in exchange for your not very hard earned cash.
Both stores ship anywhere in the world except Sarah Palin's house. Plus
they have heaps of other amazing books like the Bell Jarand Of Mice
and Men that TV characters sometimes mention in a very obvious and
unnatural way when the lazy script writer is trying to make them appear
educated in the space of the few minutes of content between coke
commercials.
If you write a review for me I will be forever in
your debt. Seriously I'll give you a kidney or something. It may not be
MY kidney, but nevertheless...
A brief but essential guide for those making the difficult transition from solitary living to cohabitation.
1 Air guitarring way too enthusiastically.
Obviously a small amount of air guitarring is permissible, nay, REQUIRED in good company. However, full on, down on your knees ‘guitar face’ soloing is highly ill advised. This goes double for head banging, particularly after that time that I slammed my head into the coffee table during the solo to ‘good times, bad times.’
2 swearing at the toaster
This probably shouldn’t be done in any case. I mean, it’s not the toaster’s fault that you slept in because you were so busy dreaming that you could speak French and had to save Scarlett Johansson from attempting to sing Tom Waits songs only to awake and find that only the first part of that particular nightmare was the invention of your imagination. It’s not the toaster’s fault that the fucking toast takes so fucking long to fucking cook fuck fuck shit FUCK! And no throwing the toaster at the wall doesn’t help, it’s not the wall’s fault either.
Was it all just a horrible dream?
3 Wearing embarrassingly effeminate underwear that your ex girlfriend bought you and you really, really wouldn’t wear anymore if it wasn’t so goddam comfortable.
Okay, so the relationship was an absolute train wreck (and I don’t mean page 12 footnote mention train wreck, I mean prime time, front page, widespread devastation and carnage level train wreck) but I did get this one really comfortable set of boxers out of it. Sure they have what I would LIKE to refer to as stallions but am aware most people would prefer to identify as ‘ponies’ printed on them, but damn, so comfortable! Might have to stick to wearing them underneath other clothing items of the slightly less humiliating variety. Such as my brown flares with the 'Bowie’ patch sown into the bum.
when I say: y'all say:
4 drinking alone
Thankfully, drinking alone becomes substantially more difficult when surrounded by other people. However, this will mean an end to passing out on the couch whilst watching Black Books with a bottle of cheap red wine and a bowl of half eaten microwaved pasta four nights a the week. The other after affects of drinking alone, such as karaoking the fuck out of heartbreak classics, particularly those that explicitly refer to oneself as a woman, are also now banned.
5 incessantly asking editing advice
Does this scene work? Is this characters voice appropriate for their cultural background and level of education? I’m not sure about the ending…Do the supporting characters need tweaking? Should it have ninjas? Should it have zombies? Should it have pirates? Should it have zombie ninjas pirates who take over a condo in California that neighbours a cemetery on one side and a celebrity rehab facility on the other?
Gets annoying doesn’t it? Well, if you live with me you sure as hell better get used to it. I have to bring these characters to life and I need your help. If you don’t help me its like you aren’t helping to raise a child. WHICH IS ALMOST LIKE MURDER!
Besides, for every one question I verbalise I have another 10 748 buzzing around in my head, just imagine how annoying that gets.
Okay that’s all for this week. You may resume your meagre existence til then.
THE END
Was that okay? Did it read 'glib' or 'self-depreciating'? Do you think they’ll like it?
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