I might lend my copy to somebody else, or I might give it away, but I’ll never share it.
People can have different tastes in a lot of things, including books, music, movies, and even taste (as in food). I guess we can even have different tastes in words. A couple days ago I admitted that I couldn’t read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone because of the name “Dumbledore.” “Dumbledore” annoyed me so much (and I was even reading silently) that I had to put the book down and never continue. I also admitted that I didn’t like the word share.
Dumbledore might have been a decent character. Dumbledore might have had redeeming qualities. I have no problem with Dumbledore, except for the sound of it.
But the word share? Share has no redeeming qualities. Everything about share sucks.
Over the years, I’ve come to hate the word share. In school it meant giving up something I owned for somebody else who probably didn’t deserve it. In my professional life, it means giving my coworkers the chance to get credit for my ideas.
I once had a boss who used to say share by extending the sound over two syllables (shay-air) in a nasally tone at brainstorming sessions. I cringed whenever she said “Shay-air,” and it didn’t help that I was usually the first person she called upon. I think she enjoyed watching me say “Uh…. Errr….,” with my face turning red whenever she asked me to “shay-air” what I was thinking.
I felt bad when this boss got demoted (or laterally moved), but I didn’t “shay-air” my sentiment with anybody else because she was unpopular and had added a bunch of unnecessary and counterproductive procedures to our jobs.
Now whenever I hear the word share, I hear shay-air, no matter how the word is uttered. It’s like the fingernails on the chalkboard (which might be a bad example because that has never bugged me).
Now that I think about it, I don’t even like the concept of sharing. I’d rather just tell somebody my idea than share it. I’d rather just let somebody borrow my stuff than share it. In some cases, I’d even give my stuff away before I share it. At the very least, I’d buy somebody the same thing that I have instead of sharing mine.
One of the very worst expressions ever is “Sharing is caring.” In my mind, all I hear is “Shay-air-ing is cay-air-ing.” Not only is this annoying, but the message is misleading, at least it is from my point of view. When I’ve shared stuff in the past, it wasn’t because I cared; it was because I wanted other people to quit bothering me. Now when I give my stuff away or I lend it out to others, that’s when I care.
Very few words have both an annoying concept AND an annoying sound. Because of this, the word share is in an annoying league of its own. Maybe it’s just me.
The only time share doesn’t bug me is if it’s somebody’s name. I have no problem with Cher. For some reason, I don’t hear it the same way when it’s used as a name. Even growing up in the 1970s listening to (or watching) Sonny and Cher, the name doesn’t bother me. Sonny doesn’t bother me either, and Sonny bothered a lot of people.
*****
If some of the previous few paragraphs look familiar, it’s because I plagiarized them… from myself. I just wanted to admit where I got my ideas so that I don’t get accused of plagiarism and get fired from my own blog and have all my posts yanked from Dysfunctional Literacy. I almost got myself fired from my own blog once (that stupid idea called “Dysfunctional Grammar”) and I don’t want it to happen again. It’s kind of embarrassing to almost get fired from your own blog, even when nobody else knows about it. So if you’re going to plagiarize on your blog, plagiarize from yourself and just admit it.
(image via Wikimedia)
When author J.K. Rowling says she made a mistake, it makes news. Supposedly, the author of the Harry Potter books claims she has second thoughts about how she ended the series, stating that maybe Hermoine and Ron shouldn’t have ended up together. This has started a firestorm of fans arguing, with some proclaiming that they knew all along that the couple was a mismatch and others saying… Actually, everybody I know who has read the series believes that the couple was a mismatch. This debate has been pretty much one-sided.
Personally, I don’t care. I’m one of the few people who hasn’t read any of the Harry Potter books or seen any of the movies. I started the first book but stopped after running across the name Dumbledore a few times. That name really annoys me. I don’t know why. It’s not rational (and I’m usually a rational person), but I knew I couldn’t finish a book with a name like Dumbledore being used constantly. I also don’t like the word “share.” I cringe whenever I hear the word “share.” If there’s a sentence in the Harry Potter series with both “share” and Dumbledore,” I don’t know what I would have done.
I couldn’t watch the movies either because if I can’t read the word “Dumbledore” silently, there was no way I could hear it constantly during a bunch of movies. So I don’t have a dog in this hunt. I don’t care if Hermoine ended up with Ron, or if she dumped him as soon as the credits rolled or when the reader put the book on the shelf. All I know is that a girl who looks like Hermoine doesn’t end up with a guy who looks like Ron unless the girl grew up poor and the guy has a lot of money (or is in a position of power).
J.K. Rowling says that the ending is a kind of “wish fulfilment.” She wrote the books. She can make up any ending she wants. But my theory (without any proof to back this up) is that she wrote the Harry Potter series too quickly. That was a lot of books with a lot of pages in a relatively short period of time. I understand, there was a lot of money to be made. But I bet if she had taken more time for each book, Rowling wouldn’t have these regrets. And if she really regrets it, she could just write another book and end it with Hermoine breaking Ron’s heart. That book would make a lot of money.
Even if J.K. Rowling botched the ending of the Harry Potter series, it was at worst a minor mistake. There have to be other authors who regret how they ended their books or series. For example, I wonder if Suzanne Collins has second thoughts about how she wrote Mockinjay. Those Hunger Games books came out even more quickly than the Harry Potter novels. And I thought Mockinjay was a borderline travesty that didn’t resemble the first two books (and I don’t just mean the plot. I also mean pacing, character development, and logic). I wouldn’t mind if she simply asked for a do-over and wrote a different Mockinjay. Maybe the movie version will make more sense.
I have regrets about my entire first six months of Dysfunctional Literacy. I’ve even gone back and deleted a bunch of posts under the category “Dysfunctional Grammar.” This idea was so embarrassingly bad that I don’t even want to explain what it was. The “Dysfunctional Grammar” posts were so stupid that I almost fired myself from my own blog. Luckily, I’ve seemed to find my voice/niche recently, but I’ve still left one example of “Dysfunctional Grammar” buried somewhere at the bottom of this blog just to remind myself. I can do that. But famous authors can’t go back and delete their regrettable words once they’ve been published and then hope that nobody notices. I guess that’s the advantage of being an unknown writer.
I had a writing teacher who said that once a rough draft is done, the writer should put it away for six months and then come back to it. The guy was kind of a hypocrite because he’d assign a composition and expect the final draft within a few days. To be fair, he explained the difference between reality and ideal situations, but still, six months would have helped. Then again, there were a couple assignments where six months wouldn’t have mattered. Six months wouldn’t have mattered with “Dysfunctional Grammar.” And when an author writes a prolifically successful series like Harry Potter, there might never be enough time to truly get every detail perfectly right.
But enough about me! What do you think, especially those of you who have actually read the Harry Potter books? Did J.K. Rowling make a mistake with her ending? What other authors should have second thoughts about the way they ended their books? Have you ever written something that you regretted or had second thoughts about?
Even though I was certain Daniella was capable of reading classic literature, I wasn’t sure where she should start. When she had her thick glasses on and held a Jane Austen book where everybody could see it, people who didn’t know her assumed she was educated. But all she really read was trashy romances. At some point, somebody would figure out that she was a literary fraud, and if she was going to snag a rich husband, she would have to delay that moment as long as possible.
Authors like Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte might be worth reading, but they weren’t the authors to start with. Daniella needed something short, something that wouldn’t brand her as illiterate, but something that would hold her interest. Then it hit me. Poetry. Daniella could read poetry. But since money was now an issue and poetry was risky as far as taste was concerned, we decided to borrow some poetry from the local library.
I thought maybe Daniella would like reading some Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton because both dealt with crazy shit in some way, and Daniella liked to complain (or brag) that there was always “crazy shit” going on in her life. I figured maybe Daniella could relate. And I wasn’t worried that she’d get depressed reading Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton. Daniella wasn’t the type to stick her head in an oven; she was the type to smash a bottle over an ex-boyfriend’s head. As long as I wasn’t on the receiving end, I respected that.
The last time Daniella and I had been at this library, she had caused several mini-scenes, coughing loudly, eating corn chips, and strutting around in a really tight, thin t-shirt. On this Saturday afternoon, Daniella was much more mellow. She had on her thick black glasses, and her hair was pulled back, and her sweater-jeans outfit was nondescript. And the library was quiet too. It was crowded, but people wandered around the shelves without talking, and others sat at table and couches reading newspapers and magazines. The librarians didn’t even give us dirty looks when we walked in. I thought, maybe this would be uneventful after all.
But as soon as we found the poetry shelf, I regretted not driving to the main branch library downtown. Our local library’s poetry selection sucked. No Anne Sexton. And only one Sylvia Plath, a beat up copy of The Collected Poems. Daniella immediately reached for a thin booklet of Robert Frost poetry. Of course, she had gone for the tiniest paperback available.
“Should I wear a beret when I read these?” Daniella asked.
“You’re not ready to be pretentious yet,” I said.
I was about to suggest an anthology of poetry when some little kid went screaming across the library between the fiction and nonfiction sections making a “RRRaaaaaaarrrrrTTTTT!!” sound. We couldn’t even tell what that sound was meant to be. From my brief glimpse of him, I could see he was a boy, probably six or seven, with a bowl haircut. Still, he was too old to run in a library, and (this might not be fair, but) boys with bowl haircuts almost always misbehave.
Daniella rolled her eyes at the noise. Yes, she was annoyed at somebody else acting up in a public library.
I pulled out the copy of Sylvia Plath’s The Collected Poems and handed it to Daniella. Daniella flipped through the pages.
“This is almost 400 pages,” she said.
“It’s poetry,” I said. ‘You don’t have to read all of them. Just skip and choose.”
“This one doesn’t rhyme,” she said, stopping at a page.
“Poetry doesn’t have to rhyme,” I said. “There are other literary devices like metaphors and…”
Daniella slammed the book shut near my face.
“I was kidding,” she said flatly, and I couldn’t tell if she was serious, but she kept the book.
As she stepped out of the poetry row with her three books, the screaming boy plowed front first into Daniella, his head plummeting smack into her breasts. He was either very lucky, or he was a little pervert in the making.
“Motherfu…” Daniella said, and then she caught herself. “Mother. Where is your mother?” she asked sweetly. It probably sounded sincere to anyone who didn’t know her.
The boy pointed to the opposite side of the library, but I couldn’t see anybody. That wasn’t surprising.
“Young man, you shouldn’t run in the library,” Daniella said. Then she ruffled his hair and redirected him to the other side of the library.
“Nice recovery,” I said.
Daniella waited for me while I perused the row of new arrivals. John Grisham had a new book, but there was a booger on page 54, so I put it back. The new Stephen King book seemed clean, and I reached for a new Lawrence Block mystery when the boy screamed around the area again.
“And I even used my nice voice,” Daniella complained.
As the kid raced past us, Daniella stuck her foot out, and the boy stumbled and then splattered face first on the floor. He jumped up, looking around to see if anybody saw him, when Daniella grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him to her. Leaning down so that they were face-to-face, she said something low but stern, and the boy’s eyes went wide and his jaw hung open. When Daniella released him, he walked stiff like a robot to the opposite side of the library. Daniella pushed her glasses back up and smiled.
“What did you say to him?” I asked.
“I told him not to run in the library.”
“Uh huh,” I said.
After a pause, she leaned close and whispered, “I told him if I caught him running again, I’d rip his tiny, little nuts off.”
I nodded. That was more like it. I figured it was time to leave before the boy’s mom found out what Daniella had said. Daniella had a history of being mean to moms of little kids.
When we reached the checkout with our books, Daniella whipped out her own library card. “This one’s on me.”
After a moment (what happens next makes more sense if you’ve read this first), the librarian cleared her throat and said, “I’m sorry, but according to our records, you owe $10.40 for Interview with the Vampire.”
“I turned that in,” Daniella said, moving into her debating stance, hands on hips, chest out. “A long time ago.”
“I’m sorry, we never got it,” the librarian said.
“But I know I…” her voice had an edge. Daniella was about to get righteous.
“Daniella, let me talk to you a minute,” I said, and started walking to the biography section. “Over here.”
Once we reached the biographies, I looked down at the floor and stage whispered. “You never turned that book back in.”
“Yes, I did!” she semi-hissed back.
“No, you reshelved it right here.” I pointed to an upper Gs shelf, and the book wasn’t there. “I saw you do it that day you… I asked you out.”
“I did? Why would…” Daniella swirled her tongue in her mouth as she thought. “Shit! You’re right. Why didn’t you say anything when I did it?”
“I… wasn’t thinking.” I remembered the tight t-shirt she had worn that day, and how when she’d reached for the top shelf that the bottom of the shirt had lifted and… I shook my head clear. “That book could be anywhere,” I said. “Seriously, I didn’t know you checked it out. I thought you just pulled it off a shelf before you saw me.”
“Can you believe I actually tried reading it?” Daniella said. “Shit, you want me to pay for it?”
“It’s only ten bucks,” I said casually. Inside, my stomach broiled. The whole point of coming to the library was to avoid spending money, and now we were going to have to pay for a lost book.
“I’ve seen you get pissed over ten bucks before,” Daniella said. “I’ll get it. Besides, we weren’t together yet.”
When we returned to the counter, the librarian said that they had three other copies of Interview with the Vampire that never got checked out anymore so the current fine would cover the book, and Daniella searched her purse/bag for change. It took a while. The time she spent fishing through her bag for $10.65 was probably longer than a $20.00 lap dance at Nero’s, but I kept that thought to myself. Finally, with much patience and no profanity, she found exact change.
“You paid your own library fine,” I said as we left. “Don’t you feel like a better person for it?”
“I can’t carry this book around when we go out,” Daniella said, lifting the 400 page volume up and down over her head like a barbell. “She has shorter books, right?”
“You don’t want to walk around with a Sylvia Plath book if you want to attract a stable rich guy,” I said. “It’s just good poetry to begin with.”
Daniella was actually going to start reading books, the kind she would be able to discuss if anybody asked her. Hopefully, she wouldn’t need to fake read anymore, at least not so much. The next step was to get Daniella to a place where she could meet the right kind of men with money. She’d never find the type of person she was looking for at Nero’s. If Daniella was going to find a naïve rich guy and manipulate him out of everything he had, there was one place where I could take her. She wasn’t going to like it. It was going to take some explaining. But I was confident that Daniella would understand that this was her best next step to achieving her diabolical goal.
Daniella would start going to church.
*****
To be continued in… The Literary Girlfriend: Finding Religion .
If you want to read “The Literary Girlfriend” from the beginning (it’s getting kind of long), start here.
Don’t read while you walk, or this could happen to you. (image via Wikimedia)
Even though I sometimes read in public, I rarely walk while I read. To me, it’s common sense. The world is a dangerous place, and I could easily walk in front of a moving bus while I’m reading, or I could get conked on the head by a mugger. I always knew reading and walking at the same time was a bad idea, but now I’ve discovered that it’s even worse than I originally thought.
According to a study reported in USA Today, people who read or text while walking don’t walk normally. They develop a weird stride, almost like they’re drunk. That explains why people who stare at their phones while walking (I call them phone tools when I’m feeling judgmental) run into stuff and fall down. Even when they’re not falling down, they’re in danger of falling down.
I don’t need to text or read in order to fall down while walking. I am capable of tripping over cracks in the sidewalk, twigs on the ground, loose shoe laces, or air. I’ve never tripped while running. Then again, I hate running, so I don’t do it much, but I’ve never tripped when I’ve been running. Maybe I should read or text while I run and see what happens.
Now on Amazon!
I was told at a very early age that I walked funny. Even before I hit puberty, I was told I walked funny. If people had started telling me during puberty that I walked funny, I would have had a logical explanation for them, but I don’t want to get into that now (I’m not that kind of blogger). I don’t have any memories of me reading while I learned to walk. I guess I was simply blessed with a unique stride.
I won’t read and walk because I don’t want to fall down. Most of my fears are kind of vague or abstract (something horrible happening to my family, that kind of thing), but I’m afraid of falling down. I’m the type of person who doesn’t laugh at the old lady who yells “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!!” in the commercials. I have no problem mocking poorly-acted misfortune, but I can see myself being that person who has fallen down (just not the “lady” part). I’m the type who can fall down, and I’d yell “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up,” and everybody around me would laugh. I’ve known people just a little older than me who have fallen down, and it messed them up for a long time. Falling down is no joke, even if it’s posted online. If reading and walking increases the chance of that happening to me, forget it.
I also don’t want to be one of those guys who falls down on YouTube. I don’t like providing free entertainment for people I don’t know. The only reason I write for free on Dysfunctional Literacy is because I like writing. I hate falling down, and I don’t want people getting free entertainment from me doing something that I hate doing. I don’t even want to get paid for falling down. It’s bad enough that I walk funny when I don’t even read, but I’m not going to walk funny and read and then fall down, and then give somebody else who recorded it a few million hits. That would tick me off.
If we walk like we’re drunk when we read and walk, does that mean we text like we’re drunk when we text and walk? That would really hurt my feelings. It would be embarrassing enough to fall into a hole while I was texting, but I’d really be ashamed if I left out an apostrophe in my text. I also hope I don’t read like I’m drunk. If I’m taking my life into my own hands while reading and walking at the same time, I at least want to remember what I read. Then again, I don’t remember much of what I read anyway, so walking probably wouldn’t affect my comprehension that much.
I can understand why people want to read/text while they walk. Walking can be boring sometimes. The mind can wander, and reading/texting is a productive way to pass time. But I don’t understand the text/read while driving mentality. Driving is way more dangerous than walking. I’d never read a book while driving (not even while sitting at a light), and I’d never write anything, so I don’t understand the drivers who would never read a book or write a letter while driving but would text while driving. Yeah, I know to them, texting is like talking and people talk on the phone (that’s kind of dangerous too), but texting isn’t talking at all, even if you use a phone for it. Texting is writing, and I’d never write while I’m driving. I wouldn’t even write while I’m walking.
Nobody tells me that I walk funny anymore. I probably still do, but I’m older, and maybe people my age are expected to walk funny now. Either that, or there are so many young people walking funny because they’re reading or texting that I don’t get noticed anymore. That’s very liberating, to know that I can walk as funny as I want now, and nobody will care. Thank you technology, and a special thank you to the youngsters who misuse it!
*****
If you’re going to read while you walk, you might as well read something light and easy.
Now only 99 cents on Amazon!
This might be one of the worst book covers ever, but the title follows one of the most common word patterns used in book titles.
Even though I’m a visual person (meaning I like pretty pictures and read comic books), I’ve never looked closely at book covers. Unless the cover illustration is of a hot chick with cleavage, my eyes seem to naturally search for the title and author. To me, a book cover is not a factor when I choose a book. The cover is almost always designed by an illustrator who is not the author. In fact, I’d bet there is no relationship between the quality of a book cover and the quality of the writing inside the book.
But the title is different. The author almost always comes up with his (or her) own title. If the title is stupid or pretentious, chances are that the book will be stupid or pretentious. If the book title is clever or intriguing, maybe the book itself will be clever or intriguing. It doesn’t always work out that way. But I’d rather judge a book by its title than by its cover.
This year I’m making an effort to read more books as they come out so that I can form my own opinions before reviewers can spoil the books for me. I find that since I can’t see the book covers very well on my phone (my new phone is great, but covers are small), the biggest determining outside factor for me is the title.
All of the books below have come out in the last few weeks, and almost every title follows one of six commonly used title patterns:
1. NOUN-PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE
The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
The Secret of Magic by Deborah Johnson
The Gospel of Winter by Brendan Kiely
Radiance of Tomorrow by Ishmael Beah
Saints of the Shadow Bible by Ian Rankin
The Purity of Vengeance by Jussi Adler-Olsen
The Secret History of Las Vegas by Chris Abani
2. PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE ONLY (maybe with lots of adjectives)
On Such a Full Sea by Chang Rae Lee
Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan
In the Blood by Lisa Unger
3. THE or A plus NOUN (with maybe an adjective in the middle)
The Visionist by Rachel Urquhart
The Kept by James Scott
The Bird Skinner by Alice Greenway
A Well-Tempered Heart by Jan Philipp Sendker
The Ascendant by Drew Chapman
The Execution by Dick Wolf
Bad Wolf by Nele Neuhaus- The “the/a” is implied.
4. PROPER NOUN
Bella Cora by Phillip Margulies
Worthy Brown’s Daughter by Phillip Margolin
Mercy Snow by Tiffany Baker- Yes, Mercy Snow is a character’s name. I checked.
Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty
Foreign Gods, Inc. by Okey Ndibe
Hollow City by Ransom Riggs
5. ONE WORD
Perfect by Rachel Joyce
Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates- This title also fits the PROPER NOUN category
Red-1, 2, 3 by John Katzenbach- Do numbers count as words?
6. NOUN-VERB (with something before or after)
The Wind Is Not a River by Brian Payton- I don’t trust a book with a title that’s a complete sentence.
Before I Burn by Gaute Heivoll
Before We Met by Lucie Whitehouse
You Disappear by Christian Jungerson
++
The only 2014 book I’ve found that doesn’t seem to fit any of the six categories is Andrew’s Brain by E.L. Doctorow. I almost said that the “the” or “a” is implied and put it in either Category #3 or #4. but I need to think about that. Maybe it’s the rare title exception.
++
Three books from 2014 that I’ve started reading are The Kept, The Ascendant, and Foreign Gods, Inc. I guess I like short titles. The category that I’m least likely to read is the NOUN-PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE. To me, it seems overdone and overdramatic (but maybe the books are also overdramatic). I guess I don’t like titles with long prepositional phrases either. There’s no way I’ll read Under the Wide and Starry Sky or On Such a Full Sea, but I’ve started reading In the Blood. The short prepositional phrase is just fine with me.
I know I’m not supposed to judge a book by its title, but what else are we readers supposed to do? Reviews are rigged. Covers aren’t illustrated by the author and aren’t an indication of the quality of a book. Popular authors get stale after a few books. There are too many books out there to give each one a fair chance, so if I have to choose one way to decide which books to sample/read and which ones to ignore, I’ll choose to judge a book by its title.
When Daniella told me that she wanted to get married, I almost crashed the car into a parked bus.
I was driving slowly through the mall parking lot when she said it. My mouth probably hung open. After all, it had been the last thing I expected. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had wanted to break up or if she had just wanted to curse at me some more. But get married? I stared at Daniella for a moment while the car was moving, and a mom pushing a baby carriage stepped in front of our car, and I swerved and almost sideswiped a charter bus of elderly shoppers.
The mom glared at me. My window was already down so I shouted a quick apology and kept my eyes on the lot in front of me as I cautiously moved on.
“You want me to drive?” Daniella said with her cheese-eating grin.
“You… want… but…” I stammered as I drove out of the parking lot onto a main thoroughfare. The Sunday afternoon traffic was starting to pick up, so I really needed to be careful.
“I didn’t mean get married… to you,” Daniella said. “I meant that I want to get married… sometime…. to somebody.”
“You did that on purpose,” I said.
“Maybe.” Daniella shrugged. “We couldn’t be married to each other. I want a rich guy, and you deserve a woman who luuuuvvvvs you.”
“And you don’t luuuuvvvv me.” I already knew that, but it was still tough for me to admit it aloud.
“No,” she stated. “I like you a lot because you luuuuvvvvv me. It’s a nice feeling. Everybody should have somebody who luuuuuuvvvvs them. You deserve that too.”
Even though I appreciated her sentiment, I still was annoyed about how she had set me up on the marriage idea.
“Wait! Why are we going home?” Daniella snapped. “I wasn’t done shopping!”
“You were the one who wanted to leave,” I said.
“I was pissed,” she said. “I’m not pissed anymore.”
Exasperated, I veered the car to the left lane. The street was two lanes on both sides with a thin island in between, but I’d made u-turns like this all the time. I could usually make it in my sleep. But as I started the U, another car pulled out of a parking lot ahead of us on the opposite side, making me nervous, so I accelerated on the turn, which I knew not to do, and I misjudged the space I had, and the car’s rear passenger tire hit the curb. Daniella’s head rocked a little bit.
“Now I’m pissed again,” she said, shaking her head and blinking her eyes at me.
The car that had made me nervous blasted past us. I almost flipped him off, but it was my fault for getting intimidated. I was the one in a fancy sports car with a hot girlfriend who wanted to get married (even though it was to an anonymous somebody else).
“Sorry about that,” I said.
A moment later I saw flashing lights behind me. A cop was pulling us over.
“I don’t think it’s illegal to hit a curb,” I muttered.
“And I’m not paying for your traffic ticket,” Daniella said, mimicking me from a couple months ago.
Normally, I would have laughed, but I wasn’t in the mood. I pulled into a fast food parking lot, turned off the engine, and put my hands on the steering wheel.
“You do this often?” Daniella said.
“I don’t want to get shot over this.” Back then, our police department (though most police officers did a great job and I respected them a lot) had a trigger-happy reputation.
“Cops don’t shoot guys like you,” Daniella said, but my hands remained on the steering wheel anyway.
The police officer seemed to be taking his time in his squad car.
“So… you want to elaborate about getting married?” I asked, hands still on the steering wheel.
Daniella made a fart sound with her lips. “Your friends buy it when I wear my glasses and talk about books. Can you believe that?”
I nodded. Daniella was a great conversationalist, even when she didn’t know what she was talking about.
“I’ve been thinking … you showed me that I CAN set my standards higher. I don’t have to settle for guys that I meet at Nero’s. With the right look and the right talk, I can get a man with real money.”
I knew where she was going with this.
“I’m going to find a really rich guy! I’m going to rock his world! And then… I’m going to take everything he has!” She nodded with pride at her aspirations.
I should have been mortified at her idea, but I was intrigued and relieved. The last few months started to make sense. Daniella wasn’t living in sin with me just for my money (that I no longer had); she was trying to move up in the world.
I wondered when she had come up with this idea. “So when you showed up on our first date with the glasses and hair pulled back,” I said, “you were… practicing.”
“Kind of.”
“So, I’m… your practice husband.”
“You don’t mind?” Daniella said.
From the side view mirror, I noticed that the police officer had begun his slow stroll to our car. He was tall, broad, and not the type to eat a bunch of doughnuts. This guy looked like a cop who could bust heads without a stick or a gun. He had cool sunglasses too. I made a mental note to compliment him on the glasses. Then I wondered if I’d look like an asskisser if I tried to compliment him. I wasn’t good at schmoozing. I’d be better off taking the polite, respectful approach. Maybe Daniella could schmooze him. She reached into her glove compartment and pulled out some papers.
“License and registration, please,” the officer said, seemingly without emotion.
“I’m… removing… my hands… from… the steering wheel… to get…. the… required documents…,” I said to the police officer. I really didn’t want to get shot. I had the feeling he rolled his eyes behind those sunglasses. Daniella handed me the papers, and I relayed them to the officer.
“Jimmy,” he said. Then he leaned into my window and peered in. “This is your new boyfriend, huh.”
What? It took me a moment to realize he was speaking to Daniella.
“Randy?” Daniella said. “Shit!” It wasn’t the good “Shit!” reaction.
The cop seemed to inspect me through his shades. “He doesn’t look like your type.”
“You weren’t my type,” Daniella said. She wasn’t even trying to mask her contempt. “Jimmy’s my type now.”
Officer Randy chuckled. “You make a lot of money, Jimmy?”
“I…”
“Don’t talk to him,” Daniella said to me. Then she leaned on my shoulder and stuck her finger at Officer Randy. “And don’t cross-examine my boyfriend!”
“That smart mouth of yours always causes problems,” Officer Randy said.
“Fuck you!”
“Daniella,” I said to her. “You don’t need to do that.”
“Why do you always…?” Then she stopped herself and rubbed her temple. “Okay. I’ll be po-lite to the po-leese.” She leaned against the passenger door and crossed her arms.
“Danielle-a,” Officer Randy said slowly.
“Yeah, that’s… her real name,” I said with resignation.
Officer Randy nodded. “Nice car,” he said. I could tell he was talking to Daniella, not me. “Why’d you switch?”
Daniella stared out the passenger side and breathed heavily, her lips in a pout.
“If you’re going to be like that…” He kept writing on his clip board.
I mentally pleaded with Daniella to say something nice to Officer Randy, but silence probably was the best I could hope for. The quiet was awkward. Whatever conflict that existed between Officer Randy and Daniella, I couldn’t use my diplomatic strategies to smooth things over. I couldn’t do anything about it except eat the ticket.
A few minutes later, Officer Randy gave me the clip board and pointed out where to sign the form. “She’s a handful.”
“You’re not making it any easier.”
“Maybe, but I’m the least of your problems.” Then he ripped out a ticket and handed it to me along with the other papers and cards. “Have a nice day.”
I sat and watched through the side-view mirror as Officer Randy returned to his squad car.
“He never figured out my real name,” Daniella said. “He’ll make a great detective.”
“Have you ever had a friendly break up?” I asked.
Daniella snatched the ticket from me and frowned. “Speeding?” she said. “Reckless driving? He’s just making shit up. Why didn’t you argue this?”
I thought about the money this ticket would cost me, and it hurt that it was my fault. I shouldn’t have smacked into the curb. I was a better driver than that.
“He wouldn’t have given you this if I wasn’t in the car,” Daniella said. “We’ll take this to court. I’ll put on my glasses and go to the judge with you and speak softly and hold up a Jane Austen book and say Randy has been stalking me, and I’ll cry. Randy hasn’t seen me as library girl. He doesn’t know what I can do now. I’ll get his ass fired.”
Despite everything, I laughed. In the last hour Daniella had assaulted a photographer, cursed me out in the mall, almost gotten me beat up in a parking lot, and her ex-boyfriend had just written me a traffic ticket. When we got home, I was going to hide that badass leather jacket of hers someplace where she’d never find it. But we had a common enemy. And maybe a common goal.
“It’s not funny,” Daniella said.
“I’m not laughing at you.”
“Stop it,” she said.
“Are you serious about wanting to marry a really rich guy?” I asked.
“Yes!” she proclaimed with no hesitation.
I drove on past the mall, a sense of calm taking hold over me. For the first time in months, I understood my role in everything. My life, my relationship with Daniella, all made sense, and my mind was clear. I knew what I wanted to do.
“You really want to marry a rich guy,” I said with an enthusiasm that surprised me. “Then I think I’m going to help.”
*****
To be continued in… The Literary Girlfriend: Revenge of the Public Library .
If you want to read “The Literary Girlfriend” from the beginning (it’s getting kind of long), start here.
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(image via Wikimedia)
Last year was a financial disaster if you look only at what I made from my writing. I think my ebooks pulled in about $10.00 last year. That’s okay because I hadn’t expected to make much, and evidently, I’m not alone. An article in/at The Guardian shows that most writers (depending on how you define “most”) earned less than $1,000 from their writing last year, and you can’t really do much with that over the course of a year. I don’t know what percentage earned $10.00 or less. Maybe I don’t want to know.
Last year, famous rich author Elizabeth Gilbert said writing was “f*cking great.” That was easy for her to say because she’s “f*cking rich” (I quoted myself there). I make next to nothing from writing, and I still think writing is “f*cking great.” I think I have more credibility on this issue than she does. But even though writing is great, I know that I probably won’t make much money (I hope I’m wrong) for four basic reasons.
And if you include “I suck,” there would be five reasons.
TOO MANY WRITERS
It’s supply and demand. With ebooks and blogs/websites, millions of regular people who otherwise wouldn’t write are writing. I’m one of them. I gave up my dreams of becoming an author in 1997 when I had been told several times that I was talented but my niche had limited appeal, so publishers would be reluctant to sign me a deal. I put writing out of my mind for almost 15 years.
Yeah, there are a lot of other writers out there, but since I don’t like blaming myself (and other writers) for my low pay, I present…
NOT ENOUGH READERS
Technology has created millions of new writers, but that leaves fewer readers. All those people writing used to be people reading, and they might still read, but they probably read less, and if people are reading less and writing more, than the writer-reader ratio (or reader-writer ratio) goes down (or up). That means there are fewer readers to buy the books that that new writers are writing. And my mom will only buy one copy of my ebooks.
WRITERS PUBLISH FREE STUFF
Not only are there a bunch of writers out there, most of their material is now free. Blogs and websites (and even videos) are free. Some ebooks are free, and the others are really cheap. If so much reading material is free (and some of it is actually good), then readers will be attracted by that and avoid paying for anything. As a reader, that’s great. I love free stuff. But as a writer? I know that creating a reliable income from writing (at least the way I’m going about it now) is a long shot.
Despite the lack of income, writers probably shouldn’t start charging for the stuff that’s free. If they do that, readers would stop reading, and most writers would rather get read for nothing than charge and not get read at all. Feedback is a payment in its own way, so I figure any authors who get feedback from their writing are doing a good job.
FAMOUS AUTHORS WRITE TOO MANY BOOKS
Authors on The New York Times Bestsellers List from ten years ago looks a lot like the authors on the lists today. And a bunch of those authors write more than one book a year. I’ve scanned through these books. A lot of them suck, but readers buy them anyway.
For example, rich famous writer James Patterson published 13 novels last year, most of which had a co-author. 13? I’m not even gasping about the number “13.” I get annoyed at authors who publish more than one book a year, but 13? No, there shouldn’t be a law limiting the number of books that an author writes, but we readers should shame authors who do this.
Unfortunately, authors and publishers know this is a great way to make lots of money quickly. I don’t blame them. If I were in James Patterson’s position, I’d probably do the same thing. If James Patterson contacted me and said he wanted to co-author and publish a hardcover version of The Literary Girlfriend (my blog serial) and give me a huge contract for it, I’d probably…. I’d… I’d…
I’d tell him to stick it (in a polite way). The Literary Girlfriend is mine, and I’m not sharing, no matter what.
I know that if famous authors stopped writing multiple books a year, it wouldn’t change the writer-reader ratio enough to increase my chances of being successful. I know that. But every controversial issue needs a scapegoat. And I have no problem scapegoating a rich, famous guy who is completely unaffected by my scapegoating. Therefore, if I’m going to blame any one person for the lack of money being paid to writers, it’s James Patterson!!!
++
Even though my prospects of making money from writing are dim, I’m not filled with gloom and doom. Ten years ago, I could have pounded the keyboards indefinitely and still nobody would have read my stories, except maybe for Mom. Now, between blogs and ebooks and unlimited opportunities for shameless self-promotion, anybody can build an audience. And that’s “f*cking… uh… that’s pretty great.”
*****
For even more advice and insight, read…
Now only 99 cents on Amazon!
Maybe… maybe… maybe… To Kill a Mockingbird is overrated, but I’m not ready to commit yet.
“The Fault in Our Stars (by John Green) was really overrated,” a co-worker of mine said a couple days ago. She reads and knows that I read, and we both have kids who read, so all of us have read some of the same books.
“It wasn’t meant for us,” I said to my co-worker. I’m in my late 40s, and she’s in her mid-30s, and the book was written for high school kids. Most YA literature is unreadable, so I consider The Fault in Our Stars a decent book just because I finished it, and it has a pretty good ending.
“But it got a bunch of 5 star reviews on Amazon!” she said. “Maybe it was 3 and 1/2 stars, maaaaybe 4, but 5? No!”
“Everything gets 5 star reviews on Amazon,” I said. “If a book hasn’t received a 5 star review, it means it hasn’t been reviewed.”
“Then everything on Amazon is overrated,” she said.
My co-worker is probably right. Most books on Amazon get a lot of 5 star reviews. I don’t think any book deserves 5 stars. I haven’t read a 5 star book in… uh… I don’t think there is a 5 star book. A 5 star book should be like a 10 in gymnastics; maybe it’s possible, but it should be rare. The good thing about gymnastics is that at least they can use decimals. If Amazon could use decimals, a bunch of 5 stars would be 4.7 stars, which might not change the average, but there wouldn’t be so many underserving 5s. Instead, they’d be undeserving 4.7s.
But there are other ways books can be overrated.
If a book is a best-seller, it’s probably overrated. A book that sells millions of copies usually isn’t that much better than a book that sells thousands. I’m just as likely to quit reading a best-seller as I am a book that’s obscure. I’ve finished a few best-sellers recently. I enjoyed Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. It’s a good book. But it’s not much better than other books I’ve finished that weren’t best-sellers. It’s good, but it’s probably overrated.
At least Gone Girl was kind of original. Most bestsellers are written by authors who have written a bunch of other bestsellers, and their latest bestsellers are a lot like their previous bestsellers. If you’ve read one John Sandford or Janet Evanovich (a bunch of other names could be included on the list) book, you’ve read a bunch of books by John Sandford or Janet Evanovich. The authors deserve credit for building a loyal audience, but those individual bestselling books are overrated.
Books that win awards are automatically overrated too. I haven’t finished many books that win awards, so maybe I’m not the best judge of whether award-winning books are overrated. I’m not the award-winning author’s target audience either. I finished the Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction from a few years ago, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. I enjoyed it, which means that it probably shouldn’t have won a Pulitzer. I appreciated it a lot more than other readers who routinely finish Pulitzer Prize books (winners and runners-ups and books that they claim should have been nominated but weren’t). A Visit from the Goon Squad is overrated. It’s good, but the Pulitzer Prize automatically makes it overrated.
Even classics are overrated. Some critics may disagree, claiming that any piece of literature that survives generation after generation of readers cannot be overrated. I have a tough time believing that Moby Dick was that much better than other literature of its time period that has been long forgotten. At least, I hope it’s not that much better. Otherwise, I feel really sorry for book readers back in 1850. Moby Dick is a classic because somewhere along the way, it was overrated and the powers that be who choose what others should read decided that it would be a classic. Without literature professors and super-aggressive high school English teachers, Moby Dick and a bunch of other classics would have been long forgotten because they’re all overrated.
It’s easy to pick on Moby Dick because Moby Dick is Moby Dick. It’s not controversial to say that classics like Moby Dick are overrated. I was going to say something a little more recent and a lot more beloved like To Kill a Mockingbird was overrated, but I might not be ready for that yet. I don’t know if I want to be that controversial. People look at you crazy if you say To Kill a Mockingbird is overrated, and I don’t like it when people look at me crazy.
There are a lot of books out there that people haven’t heard of. If nobody knows about something, then it can’t be overrated. But it has the potential to be overrated. The books that people have heard of aren’t that much better than the books that nobody has heard of. But as soon as an unknown book or author becomes well-known, then that book and author have become overrated.
Maybe one day I’ll be overrated too.
As a quiet guy, I’ve always tried to deal with conflict in a subtle, diplomatic way. Daniella was a little more volatile. She didn’t mind using loud profanity in public to make her point. I think she enjoyed doing that, especially when she was in badass mode with her hair down and leather jacket on. This difference in personality (and arguing style) could make moments of disagreement in public awkward. A few minutes earlier, I had said something stupid in front of Daniella, telling a photographer that all I did for her was pay her bills. Daniella had already been pissed enough, but that comment sent her over the edge. Now all I could do was watch as she stormed away from me down the mall, her middle finger jutting into the air.
Calling after her would be counterproductive, I thought. Using her car keys to leave without her would also be a monumentally bad idea. I decided to follow her silently from a distance and give her a chance to cool off. After a few minutes, I realized she was going towards her car in the parking lot. It looked like she intended to leave without me. Despite my state of anxiety, I appreciated Daniella as she walked. Even with her badass leather jacket, I could see the sway in her hips as she took long, purposeful strides through a side section of stores. Other mall walkers turned their heads as she strode past them. Men admired her. Women glanced enviously at her and then nagged at their boyfriends for checking her out.
When Daniella got to the car, she reached inside her giant purse/bag and paused. Her shoulders sagged. Her head turned up toward the overcast sky, and I saw her mutter an obscenity. It was her moment of realization; I had her car keys. Then she saw me standing a dozen parking spots behind her. I kept my face serious. I had a lot of apologizing and explaining to do, and a smirk over the car keys would set everything back.
“Give me the keys,” Daniella demanded.
“No,” I said. “You can’t just drive off without me.”
“It’s my car.”
I’ve been making all the payments, I thought, but I knew it wasn’t the right thing to say.
“It’s my apartment,” I said, since that was probably where she was going to drive.
“You can take a cab,” she said.
“That takes money.” Money that I didn’t have.
“GIVE ME MY KEYS!” she demanded in her hard voice, and she took a couple steps forward.
“You need some help?” I heard a deep male voice shout behind me.
I turned and saw three big guys marching up the parking lot toward us.
Great, I thought. Daniella could always attract aggressively muscular guys eager to assist her. Two of them were in short sleeves. The only reason guys would go short sleeved in this weather would be to show off their arms or to pretend they were so tough they didn’t care about the weather.
“I think she wants you to leave her alone,” one guy said, and they started to spread out. Bastards, they already were bigger than me, and now they were going to surround me and gang up. It was moments like this that I wished I’d had a carry permit. Still, I had time to run if I needed to. But running would make it look like I was doing something wrong. It was too bad there were three of them. I could usually reason with one guy, but with two or more, there wouldn’t be time to talk and they were already trying to surround me. I chose a big pick-up truck and leaned my back up against it. At least none of them would get behind me.
“You want us to kick his ass?” the one to my left said to Daniella as they closed in. I looked at Daniella. I was already committed. I’d seen guys like this, and they weren’t going to get talked out of clobbering me if Daniella didn’t say anything. She thought about it. Our eyes met, and I could tell there was a part of her that wanted to see what would happen. My stomach tightened. My legs tensed. I could feel my heart rate going crazy. I was prepared to start swinging and not stop until I was down. There were three of them, but one of them was going to have to take the first punch. I’d make them work for it, even if I hit like a girl.
“It’s okay,” she said to the three assailants. “He’s with me.”
The guys kept coming at me like they hadn’t heard.
“I said leave him alone.”
The first guy was with one car length of me, and all three were locked in on me. This would be more for their pleasure than any sense of chivalry.
“LEAVE HIM ALONE, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!”
That got their attention. Daniella’s hard voice could carry. The three guys stopped and looked at each other, wondering who the piece of shit was.
“You touch him, and I’ll…” and Daniella strung together a bunch of verbs and adverbs that were very profane and impossible in a literal sense, but her words got the job done. All three guys stopped. One guy thought it was funny. One guy looked pissed and balled his fists as if he wanted to fight her. The guy in the middle of the pack actually flinched. When she was done, the three guys turned around and slowly headed back up to the mall.
The guy who thought it was funny pointed at Daniella and said, “Now THAT’S a bombshell.”
After they were out of hearing distance, Daniella turned to me and said, “That was a compliment, right?”
“Pretty much.” My heart rate was decreasing now, and but my hands shook as I gave her the car keys.
I should have been humiliated that my girlfriend (or maybe ex-girlfriend) had protected me from three potential assailants. Instead, I was angry she had put me in that position in the first place. If she wanted me to take a cab, so be it.
“What’s wrong?” Daniella asked.
“Are you serious?” I said. “You almost… they almost… “
“They weren’t going to do anything.” She seemed so confident that I knew she was lying.
Before I could argue any more, Danielle moved up toe-to-toe me with me, her hands on her hips. “You shouldn’t have said that about me in front of the photographer,” she said. “Or anybody else.”
“When we were at the Halloween party, you told everybody that I masturbated all the time,” I said (this argument makes more sense if you’ve read this.). “That was worse than what I said.”
Daniella shut her mouth tight.
I continued. “Then you called me an asshole when I was drunk when it was your fault that I was drunk in the first place.”
Daniella looked down, and her arms dropped to her sides.
“And you stole that blonde’s furniture and put it in our apartment and never told me it was stolen.”
“You always bring up the furniture,” Daniella said.
“I’ve never brought up the furniture until now,” I said. “I’ve been saving it.” My hands had finally stopped shaking.
Daniella muttered something that was most likely unpleasant.
“I shouldn’t have said what I said,” I admitted. “But what you just did here was a bad over-reaction. And you almost got me beat up.”
Daniella gave me the keys back and pressed herself against me. “You hurt my feelings,” she said, then walked to the passenger side of her car.
“I didn’t mean to,” I said, as I got into the driver’s side. “I… just didn’t like the idea of breaking up.” Now, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
“You want to break up?” she said. She rolled down the window. Even in the cold, or Texas’s version of cold, she liked the window down.
“I thought that’s what you were leading up to,” I said. Between my lack of money, the scene in the mall, and the parking lot incident, I was surprised this was even up for debate.
“We don’t… have to break up,” she said. “I’m trying to do things different now.”
I had an idea of what Daniella meant. She always had a boyfriend (currently me) to pay her bills. Her previous boyfriends had been rough guys; they paid for her stuff, but they’d not quite been law-abiding citizens like me. I knew of two previous boyfriends who had hit her (and she later put one of those guys in the hospital by smashing a bottle over his head and… it got kind of messy after that). I figured I was her way of doing things differently now. She’d never had a quiet, professional guy as a boyfriend (and I’d never had a girlfriend like her before either).
“So… what do you mean by ‘different’?” I asked. “Are you going to pay some of your bills?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Daniella said looking out the window. “I think I want to get married.”
*****
To be continued in… The Literary Girlfriend: Marriage Material .
If you want to read “The Literary Girlfriend” from the beginning (it’s getting kind of long), start here.
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Hell might be a bad place, but why is “hell” a bad word? (image via Wikimedia)
When it comes to profanity, the word “hell” isn’t that bad. It’s not as profane as “s***” or “f***” or “c***.” In fact, it might be the least offensive of the bad words, but when I was a kid, I still got my mouth washed out with soap if I said it in front of my parents.
A lot of words led to my mouth getting washed out with soap. I got my mouth washed out with soap for saying “Hoover Dam.” I probably shouldn’t have whispered “Hoover” and then shouted “DAM!!!!” I got my mouth washed out with soap for saying “shitzhu.” I probably shouldn’t have shouted “Sh*t” and whispered the “zhu.” Now that I think about it, I probably deserved getting my mouth washed out with soap.
“Hell” is similar to a lot of vulgar words in that it has four letters. Four seems to be the magic number when it comes to vulgarity. Yeah, a lot of profanity has way more than four letters, but most root words in profanity have four letters. In “mother****er,” the root word is four letters long. In “pieceof****,” the root word is four letters. The root word in “****sucker” is four letters. Those are all pretty bad words. The exceptions seem to be “ass” and “b*****,” and neither are THAT bad (though I’d be careful who I’d say “b*****” around because it can cause more of a reaction than the other words, depending on whom you say it to).
But Hell is unique for a four-letter bad word. It’s the only word that references a place. Yeah, a few vulgar words refer to places on the body, but a body part is different than a place. “Hell” is a place (if you believe in it), and it’s considered to be bad (if you believe in it). But should it be profane? The Gulag is a bad place, but if I ever shouted “Holy Gulag!” I wouldn’t have gotten my mouth washed out with soap.
It comes down to context. When I asked my mom if “Hell” was a real place, she said I’d find out if I kept saying the word “hell.” Then she washed my mouth out with soap. When I told my older brother to “Go to Hell!!” after he gave me a wedgie, I got the soap washing with no explanation. I guess saying “hell” is worse than giving somebody a wedgie. When I used the word “hellacious” as an adjective, nobody batted an eye.
That’s how I knew “hell” shouldn’t be a bad word. If I had said “crapola” or “f***tastic,” my breath would have smelled like Irish Spring for a month. But “hellacious,” I could get away with.
Out of all vulgar words, I think hell is the most fun to say. Something about the extension of the “L” sound gives it a humorous effect. I always laughed when my dad angrily said “Hell’s bells!” in front of us (but I made sure he didn’t see me laugh). The idea of Hell having bells was ludicrous, and the contrast with my dad’s anger made it tough not to laugh. In school, we students would yell at each other in the hallway “Go to health!” when we were on our way to health class. The teachers couldn’t punish us because we were simply telling our friends to go where they were supposed to go.
I don’t think “hell” should be considered a bad word. It’s a place, and it’s too easy to say for it to be forbidden. But I don’t want my kids to get in trouble at school, so I’ll teach them not to say “hell” in public or in front of adults. You can have a lot of fun with the word “hell,” but you probably don’t want to end up there.
