“One thing all of those authors had in common with each other, but not with me, was that they had led lives that were worth writing about. … What the hell had I ever done? Nothing. Oh, wait, that’s right, I’d taken my GED test and graduated high school two years early. Wow!”
—Josh Becker, GOING HOLLYWOOD, pages 90-91
“I’d rather be Ed-fucking-Wood than not be a filmmaker.”
—Josh Becker, GOING HOLLYWOOD, page 161
I am always personally annoyed when I find that the reputation of a creative work is clearly based on what the audience was expecting, rather than on what they actually received. The clearest example of this I can think of is a cinematic one: In 1982, a very creepy, original horror movie about a satanic toymaker and his attempt to murder thousands of children on the 31st of October was released and immediately upset all of the folks who went to see it. Not because it wasn’t scary or well made, but because its title was HALLOWEEN III and they went to it expecting to see a continuation of the Michael Myers saga.
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1. Invent a time machine, throw handwritten copies of each Harry Potter book into a backpack, go back in time, kill J.K. Rowling and head immediately to the publisher that didn’t reject the manuscript for HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE.
2. Contrive to be born as the heir to a large fortune; earn a reputation as a vapid, if willowy, party monster; and appear in a poorly shot, amateur sex tape.
3. Imagine that the majority of your target audience can — on a good day — identify 12 to 18 letters of the English alphabet. (See James Patterson for the best example of this approach).
4. Write up a list of a hundred things that would be really fucked up to do while on drugs, pretend that you did all of them, and call the result “a harrowing memoir of one person’s struggle and eventual victory against the horrors of addiction.”
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You would be forgiven for assuming that the enduring cult popularity of filmmaker Kevin Smith would have something to do with his skills as a cinematic storyteller, but speaking as someone who has spent the past few days reading his latest book, SHOOTIN’ THE SH*T WITH KEVIN SMITH: THE BEST OF THE SMODCAST, I truly do believe that his success really does come down to the fact that he’s a Fat Guy with a Beard®.
Lemme explain.
I came to this conclusion a few days ago when I took my copy to work, with the hope that I might be able to dip into it during the occasional lull. As I toiled away at my labors, one of my co-workers came up to me and said that she had seen the book sitting where I had left it and immediately thought it was one of the dozen I had written a few years ago in a past professional incarnation. I asked her why she would think that and she said, “Because you totally look like the guy on the cover.”
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Ever since we announced our exciting giveaway contest, it’s been nothing but Kindlemania here at the ‘Gasm. At our weekly meeting down at an undisclosed location near the docks, the site’s contributors couldn’t help but debate just what Jeff Bezos’ dream baby means for the future of the printed word. I won’t lie and say that the conversation wasn’t heated.
Once we managed to calm down and bandage our wounds, it was decided that for Earth Day, it would be worthwhile to run a serious comparison between the new device and the traditional word-delivery system it has been designed to replace. Much has been made on how the Kindle will affect the world of publishing and the content of the printed medium, but by doing this, other, less obvious aspects of the two systems are inevitably ignored. Hopefully, this 10-scenario post will be the first step in correcting this mistake.
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