Bill Clinton and James Patterson Team Up for a Sequel

This is getting a sequel.

I just saw a headline that James Patterson and Bill Clinton are teaming up again to write a sequel to their novel The President is Missing.  I didn’t read much beyond that.  I didn’t click the article.  I just said, “Of course,” and moved on.

Of course Bill Clinton and James Patterson are writing a sequel.  Why wouldn’t they?  The President Is Missing made a ton of money, and it didn’t require much effort.  When you make a ton of money from not trying very hard, you’ll do it again.

I read the first few chapters of The President Is Missing a few weeks after it came out.  It wasn’t as sloppy as most of James Patterson’s book, but it was still pretty bad, and the first scene didn’t make any sense once you realized what had really happened.

I understand why James Patterson and Bill Clinton would feel comfortable working together.  Both have been rewarded for their bad behavior.  At the very least, their bad behavior has been ignored.

James Patterson is a competent writer who intentionally puts out books that aren’t really publishable.  If any non-famous writer tried to get a James Patterson book published, the book companies would think the writer was incompetent.  I’ve listed the flaws in Patterson’s writing in the past.  Nobody argues about the flaws.  It’s just that nobody cares.

James Patterson has talent and the resources to write higher quality books and still make a ton of money.  Instead, he intentionally publishes garbage to make even more money, and he rarely gets called on it.  I think there’s a chance he purposefully writes crappy books just to see how much readers will put up with.

Nobody has ever really disagreed with me about James Patterson.  Like I said, people just don’t care.  I don’t even care THAT much.  I don’t lose sleep over it.  It’s just something interesting about book publishing that the big book sites won’t talk about, so somebody has to (even if I have no influence).

Bill Clinton’s bad behavior is a little different (and I hesitate to write about it because people turn demonic when it comes to politics, so I’ll tread lightly to make my point).  Some policy wonks believe that Bill Clinton has been rewarded for legislation in the 1990s that is now looked on with disfavor.  That’s not exclusive to Bill Clinton.  Most politicians enact legislation that looks good short-term but you find out 10/20/30 years later that a bunch of people got screwed over.

Some also believe that Clinton got away with really bad personal behavior too.  I’m not getting into that argument, but I understand. If you believe that Bill Clinton did what he was accused of doing, then you would think he got away with (and maybe was even rewarded for) bad behavior.  I mean, he’s been a politician for most of his adult life; of course he’s gotten away with something.

At any rate, both James Patterson and Bill Clinton are being rewarded because they wrote(?) a mediocre book that sold a lot of copies.  In my mind, the publishing companies used hype and celebrity to trick readers into buying a mediocre book, and they’re going to do it again.

The book publishers don’t think there’s anything wrong with what they’re doing.  From a trickster’s point-of-view, it’s up to the other person not to get tricked.

Now that I think about it, though, I’m not sure where the headline about the sequel to The President Is Missing came from.  I didn’t read the article, and I didn’t cross-reference the information.  I hope the article wasn’t from a hoax site.  I really hope I didn’t just write a blog post based on a headline from a hoax parody site.  Aaarrgh!

I hate getting tricked.