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| How To Make A New York Times Best Seller |
It was on July 7th, 2008, on a sunny, mild, oddly normal Friday afternoon that a life-changing event set in motion an inexorable process that would blast me out of my life’s slowly degrading orbit and send me boldly blithering where I’ve never been before. Let’s start with the triggering mechanism that got my dominoes tumbling.
It began on the worldwide web in a Yahoo News headline that caught my eye . “Odds of winning the lottery roughly the same as becoming a saint..” I long ago gave up on both of these likelihoods, but my curiosity was aroused enough to click on the full story. I learned that you have the same chance of being killed by falling airplane parts as becoming president of the U.S.. I was disappointed to learn that I have only a one in 3,000,000 chance of seeing a U.F.O.. The article carried on in this vein, stating the odds of truly unpleasant things: shark attack, lightning strike, death from food poisoning, flesh-eating bacteria (oddly, no mention of I.R.S. audit).
But my eye drifted toward a statement that affected me not unlike the hypnotist’s subject who has been given a subconscious trigger phrase which when he hears it, causes him to cluck like a chicken. By that I mean that once I saw it I burst into an uncharacteristic state of awareness and frenzied activity.
The statement read, “THE ODDS OF WRITING A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ARE 220 TO ONE.”
“Damn”, I cursed softly to myself, “That sounds doable”, I heard myself say. Odd talk indeed from someone who’s only prior ambition had involved walking on the sunny side of the street with like-minded companions. I knew from the onset, however, that this elation could be more chemically than creatively or spiritually driven. And Zolar was dead on when he said, “Aries people always have brilliant creative flashes that they rarely bring to fruition. Aries is the “A” in ADHD”.
On some other level I was thinking, “You’re way too old for this holy grail quest and way too spaced out to pull this off. This will actually require some hard work, old chap. And you know how you feel about that.” Would I listen to the nattering nabobs of negativism already trying to foment psychic discord in my fragile subconscious or proceed on my merry f*****g way? Would I jump off this train of thought and roll into the muddy ditch of despair as I had so many times before?
I decided to proceed in the manner of a psychic using the technique of automatic writing while the magic was in the air and the ectoplasm was still bubbling. Despite the fact that I had written little more than a few newspaper articles and a hundred or so bumper sticker slogans, I was beginning a mission to craft a New York Times Bestseller (hereinafter to be referred to as NYTBS).
What do I have going for me other than limited writing experience and an unscientific inkling that my planets are in alignment for the task? (1) I know 220 people, and as far as I know, none of them are attempting to write a NYTBS, so I must be the one. (2) People have told me that I am funny. (3) I have the ability to listen to Tim Lincecum work for his first no-hitter, give my wife an opinion on a new linoleum pattern, answer spam phone calls, and write simultaneously. This is a superpower which has gone unnoticed til recently and which I am banking on heavily to get the job done before I am swallowed up in the vast maw of non-being. (4) I believe readers just might be intrigued with the scenario of a superficially normal Joe mixing it up with the Steven Kings, Coonts, Koontz, and whoever writes that Chicken Soup gruel.
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Posted by mongrel1 on 2009-10-26 16:33:29 | Rating: | Views: 12
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