Wanna Throw Up? This Should Help.

Hey aspiring writers! Have you pretty much given up on ever typing your way to any kind of decent income in this era of people only interested in reading free blogs and not wanting to buy any book not written by a trusted celebutard? Good thing, because today brings this news from Publishers Marketplace:

Top celebrity blogger Perez Hilton's THE BOY WITH PINK HAIR, the story of a child born with a shock of fabulous hair that sets him apart from his peers, who uses the opportunity to find what makes him special and share it with the world even as some find this difference hard to accept or understand, with illustrations by Jen Hill, to Raymond Garcia for Celebra Children's, with Steve Meltzer to edit, for publication in September 2011.

Ugh, is there a pair of words in the English language more dreary and depressing than "celebrity blogger"? No, there isn't. Yes, Perez Hilton, the much not-admired gaywad who types mean/stupid things about dumb famous people for a living, has a book deal. A children's book deal. Somehow this is worse than Bristol Palin getting a deal to write a memoir. Bristol's a Palin, therefore she's a grifter who will gladly take the wads of cash that right-wing publishing imprints throw at her with abandon. We expect her to and would be a little disappointed if she didn't.

But this Perez shit is just crazytown. Are parents clamoring for more books by awful pink-haired humanoids? Who is going to buy this bullshit? For their kids? And read it to them?

In conclusion, I would sooner read Going Rogue: Children's Edition to my gay son (if I had one), because it's never too early for a gay boy to practice reading a bitch.

Anals Annals of Pour Copyediting,

Oh my God, I've finally done it for reel, y'aul, and done it real good. While reading the latest collection of words by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker last night between sets of squat thrusts at my gym—an article in which he once again turns conventional wisdom on its head, then concludes by saying "That's right, I said it"—I discovered the Holy Grail of bitter, unrequited authors everywhere: a copyediting error in the New F**king Yorker, ha!

This feet of eagle-eyed apprehension has rarely been accomplished in the history of this magazine, because the tyrants at the New Yorker send anyone on their staff who makes such an error against humanity to Gitmo to be "reeducated" by E. B. White and William Strunk Jr., the stylists behind English grammar/writing bible The Elements of Style. Sure, both men are sadly dead, but they left behind them a powerful series of books on tape. (Twisted Sister provides the "enhanced" incidental music.)

The mangled passage is rendered thusly on page 27 of the January 18, 2010 edition (also click on the above image for the photographic proof):

In 2008, his firm made five billion dollars. Rarely in human history has anyone made so much money is so short a time.

Correction: rarely in human history has there been such a frightful and unseemly mangling of the English language in such an august publication. As Stephen Doocy on Fox and Friends might put it in his powerful falsetto, "This is HUGE!" The sentence should obviously read "in so short a time." (Or "is so short of dimes"? Who knows!)

Did Sarah Palin edit this article?

In conclusion, the New Yorker can no longer be trusted with prepositions and the verb to be.

The Onion Provides a Glimpse Into the Present of Nonfiction Book Publishing

And boy is it douchey. Now all I need to do is access this guy's friends list, and maybe I can convince HarperCollins to publish this blog in a book!

Bitter, Resentful Unpublished Author Dept: Most Annoying "Deal" in Today's Lunch Weekly

Lord knows I’m not terribly interested in picking rotten fruit off the Publisher’s Lunch Weekly Deal Tree every week, but some of it is so low-hanging that it can’t help but smack you in the face and demand that you blog about it.

So here we are again, with me—a bitter, resentful unpublished author—bitching about the deals that have been made in the New York publishing world this week. You might think I’m going to single out Kathy Griffin’s just-inked deal for her memoirs. I’m not. You know why? Because there’s something even more hilarious that will soon be unleashed into the atmosphere, like a turd into a casserole dish. Witness:

Jackass co-creator and skateboarder Bam Margera's SERIOUS AS SH*T WATER, a collection of diary entries, travel journals, photos, stunt lists, drawings, collages and sex confessions, to Jacob Hoye at MTV Books, by David Vigliano and Michael Harriot at Vigliano Associates (world).

Yes, that Lunch Weekly blurb contained the words “jackass,” “skateboarder,” “stunt lists,” and “MTV books.” Whatever, that’s fine. This is all fine. I’m a fan of books and, sure, I’m glad (kind of) that Bam wrote one (kind of).

But can I just impress upon you how humbling it is for this nobody blogger and aspiring NY Times Bestseller List chart topper to know that, very soon, Bam Margera will be able to put the word “Author” next to his name, right next to “Sirius Satellite Radio Show Host” and “Inventor of the Garbage Juicer”?

Bitter, Resentful Unpublished Author Dept: Most Annoying "Deal" in Today's Lunch Weekly

As a bitter, resentful unpublished author of a freakin' hilarious book about my two-year romp through Tokyo (visit the website!) that my agent was unable to sell because publishers are somehow convinced that the topic just isn't interesting enough (and because David Sedaris visited Tokyo recently and included a whole chapter about it in his latest book, so obviously the subject has been covered exhaustively), I'm well placed to offer my dismissive opinion on the latest deals reported on Publisher's Lunch's Lunch Weekly book deal roundup.

One particularly irritating deal reported in this morning's Lunch made me want to eat my own hand off:

Tao Lin's SHOPLIFTING FROM AMERICAN APPAREL, a novella about a young writer who is caught shoplifting from an American Apparel store, to Dennis Johnson of Melville House, in a nice deal, for publication in Fall 2009.

Wow. That. Sounds. Fascinating. Now, obviously it's dangerous to judge a book on title and descriptive blurb alone, and I certainly wish Tao Lin all the best (even though I don't, really) but JESUS CHRIST, TAO LIN, COULDN'T YOU HAVE SPENT MORE THAN FIVE FREAKIN' MINUTES THINKING OF A TITLE?!

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Publisher's Lunch really upset me today.
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Here's how the next year will unfold: I'll slave away on my next book, which will ultimately not sell because its title isn't banal enough (the manuscript will later sell for $1.35 on eBay, after I'm dead); meanwhile, Tao Lin will win the Booker Prize for his next novel, Shopping at Key Foods While Consulting My Grocery List.