Literary parmesan
The Pretense In The Writing Industry Is Unbelievable
Do you want to be a writer or just a writing wanker?
Alright, I know what you are thinking.
But Frank, you hate writing about writing. You hate it to such a degree that you wrote an article about how much you hate it during your Medium puberty.
You’re wrong, okay. I never said I hated it. I just hate it when people make it their niche. Remember, I said,
Great writers like Stephen King write about writing, but they do it every now and then. They don’t have it as their primary genre. That’s just bloody weird.
So fuck you, this is an article about writing.
I’ve written this Novella or Novellino or Novelinski or Novelina or whatever the fuck writing wankers call a text that has precisely 20,282 words. So I put out the feelers to get some advice on what to do with it.
Some bastard in ‘the industry’ told me I should pay $100 for an edit letter, so I did. Turns out it’s a list of all the ways your text is offensive to everybody in the world. That shouldn’t have surprised me since I’m a year into a creative writing degree and have learned nothing except how to scan texts for racial or gender-based faults. I worked it out that I had paid around $7.50 per offensive trope that the editor pointed out.
So anyway, I wiped my arse with that letter, flushed it down the toilet, and put out my sweaty feelers on some online writers’ groups.
Have you ever heard shit like this?
First of all, congratulations on finishing your first draft. You have already accomplished much more than most people could ever dream of.
Thanks, Tony fucking Robbins. The worst thing is the people who say crap like this have usually published some series called ‘The Jack Flashcock Series’ that no bastard ever reads. And now they spend their time spewing the same cliches at writers who just need help.
Now stop being a ball-licker and tell me what to do next.
Before you engage an editor, you should put it in a dark, cold place where you keep your scat porn and let the moths eat it for a good thirty-two years while you keep flipping burgers for $9 an hour. This way, you can go back to it with fresh eyeballs and an even more desperate need to escape the hellish rat race, okay?
Fuck you and your fresh eyeballs. People are always talking about putting it in a drawer and forgetting about it. And look, I know in your head you’re like,
But Frank, it’s true, it's great advice.
Well, I don’t have time for that arsehole. I’m trying to make a career somehow out of being a writer here so fuck that. Now tell me how to proceed.
Okay, well, look. You should follow the advice of most good editors and rewrite the story many times. You will probably lose ninety per cent of your story in the process, and this is okay.
Oh yeah? Is that a fact cock-knocker? Well, I’ve rewritten this bastard about thirteen times, and maybe you chuck ninety per cent of your writing out because it’s an anorexic mouse turd, but why should you think that applies to everyone? Just tell me what to do with my fucking book, you piece of shit.
You need to get an edit letter now, which —
Fuck you. I know I have to spend one million dollars getting a proofread and line edit and maybe even a structural edit and whatever other shite. And to people like me with jack shit in the bank, that’s a real bastard.
Then again, I could always count up all of the ‘coffees’ that people have bought me along the way. That should get me at least zero minutes of editing time. Or I could tap all of my paid substack subscribers from the newsletter that I never write. Altogether that’s, well, zero. Maybe I should self-publish and fuck all this shit?
Yes, you can self publish through the Kindle On-Demand publishing —
What do you mean, Amazon? Are you telling me I have to give money toward Jeff Bezos’s Cock-Rocket projects if I want to be an author?
No, you can publish on Lulu.com instead. But honestly, Amazon is the biggest marketplace for writers and —
Yes, but you know that the money you put into Amazon doesn’t return to the economy, right? It’s like a big fucking leak in the bucket of the financial ecosystem. And the politicians don’t give a fuck cos it still shows in their GDP figures cos the business is being done. But there ain’t no return. Those billions are pissing out of the economy to build cock-rockets and pay for those billionaires to get niche lap dances instead. It’s a god damn joke.
Yes, but you really don’t have much choice.
Don’t I? Well, fuck it then. I might as well sell my cock on the black market as sausage meat for dogs then. How much can I sell my e-book for?
Well, it depends. Most beginning authors will give away their book for free or charge between $1.99 and $2.99 for a novella.
Look, it’s not a novella. It’s a novelinski, okay. And are you taking the piss? $1.99? So you are telling me if I sell 50 of these things, I might make enough to buy fifteen minutes with a real cheap crack whore who is having an end-of-financial-year sale? Fuck you. I’m selling it for $19.99.
Try, but you will never sell any.
Oh really, thanks, Madame Moone, fortune teller. Do we all have to be the fuck ferrets that buy into this ‘Your book is only worth $1.99 because the writing elite says so crap?’
I’d rather sell one book at $19.99 than ten at $1.99 because if you think it’s okay that I spend six months writing my anus out and spending my rent money on a politically correct editor so you can buy my book for $1.99 (Which literally won’t buy you anything in the real world), then you can fuck off and read Hemmingway instead.
I forgot to mention the seller will take their cut. Then there are taxes. But, look, you could submit it to a publisher, but they won’t publish it because it’s less than 60,000 words.
Why not?
Well, it’s just not financially viable.
Yeah, well, maybe that’s cos you are selling the fuckers for $2 each. Do you think Amazon has done everyone a favour? I think they are ramming their giant metal cock up your literary arsehole. What about a literary agent?
You can try, but again, they probably won’t bother because there isn’t any money in it. You will need to write them a query letter. There is plenty of advice on Youtube on how to do this.
A query what? So something like this?
Dear Sir/Madam
Please find attached my Novelinski. It is 20,000 words approximately. It is about a corrupt, fraudulent Therapist and his sexually obsessed patients. There are plenty of wanking scenes in it and a lot of swearing. And look, I know it’s only 20,000 words, but don’t be a cunt. Give a guy a leg up, would ya?
Yours sincerely,
Frank T Bird.
Well, no, there is a specific way to write a query letter. It’s a very precise structure. As I said, you can look on YouTube.
So what? Literary agents can’t read normal letters? Sounds like they’ve all drunk the spunk-flavoured Kool-Aid to me.
Well, look, Frank, I think then you have to have a look to see if your work is good enough to be accepted in the writing world. Have you heard the term ‘Good readers are good writers?’ That’s good advice.
Oh, the writing world, yes, where is that in relation to earth again? Is that the fourth planet behind Uranus? Or is it Urinis these days? Arsehole or piss? I can't remember.
Well, Im fucked then anyway, because I am a terrible reader.
I tried reading Hemmingway, that boring cunt.
Then I got inspired by the Beat generation and tried to read Kerouac. On the Road is like snorting Rhinocerous tranquillizer (Street name R). Let me sum it up for you.
— then we went to this jazz club and listened to this guy play sax while we drank this Spanish port, and Greenberg kept telling all these poems that he learned from Benicio del Smego, the seventeenth-century writer. After that, we all went back to my place, and there was this girl called Zheila, and we had sex a few times. When I came out to the lounge Greenberg and the others were all eating this brown bread with honey that they had stolen from the back of this supermarket. They were doing spontaneous poems and wanking each other off. Damn, it was the greatest night of my life.
Dharma Bums is the same but with more Zen terms thrown in.
JD Salinger is what I expected Kerouac to be.
Salinger likes to bitch about everything. He rants about stuff but in a negative way, and it’s hilarious. He makes Kerouac look like a damn lousy phoney.
I’m gutted that the beat poets were such boring bastards. I like what they tried to do, but I don’t think they quite got there. And I think people spank over them like they do over Hemmingway and all the other fuckers. I’ve experienced what it’s like to read a book and try and convince yourself how good it is because you have been told of the genius of that writer.
I found Bukowski mainly like that. Ham on Rye was brilliant, especially when he has his dong grabbed in the swimming pool. But Post Office was boring as fuck.
I woke up, and Jenny had left, so I drank a half-pint of whiskey and drove to work. Johnston was riding my ass again, and I wanted to kill him, but I didn’t. I just sat there and waited for him to call out my name, but he didn’t that asshole. So I went home and got drunk again and went out to this bar where all these Vietnamese guys hung out, and I offended them during a poker game, so we punched the crap out of each other, and I woke up the next day with a black eye and got drunk again after Jenny and I had sex. Then I went to work again.
There are authors like Vonnegut who I semi-enjoyed.
I read Slaughterhouse-Five on the recommendation of a friend, and when I finished, the friend looked at me and said, HOW WAS IT? like I had just lost my virginity.
It was alright. I said. I think it was probably a lot more out there when it was written than it is today.
I could go on all night about my hunt to find authors who aren’t boring cunts. Of course, there’s always Rowling, who everyone hates for having her own opinion. And literary cockheads sneer when you tell them you like Harry Potter because it’s just not fancy enough.
Margaret Atwood is fucking brilliant. I read half of The Handmaid’s Tale and realized her genius. Nothing boring about her. But I still can’t get back to reading her stuff because now I have an aversion to reading, thanks to all this pretentious shite.
I will probably end up self-publishing my Novellino somehow.
Maybe I’ll rob a service station with a breadstick hidden under a tea towel to pay for an editor. Cos honestly, who can be fucked dealing with the writing elite who jack off over the classics each morning and tell you that they won’t even read your stuff if you don’t conform to the exact specifications of some suck-up query letter?
Fuck them all.
