Friday, July 07, 2006

My Early Book Review

Early Book Review

I'll finish my novel in October and I expect it to be rejected, ridiculed, and even spit on. It will not be great or even very good. I imagine no more than four people will read it and they will only do so because they're friends.

It wont sell. In fact, Ill have to pay for it to be read by a small-time editor who will make notes on the book, throw the book away, and tell me how much I suck.

Hundreds of years after my death, a social phenomenon will sweep the literary world, motivating readers to dig up crappy books and marvel at their crappiness. My novel will be born again and new generations will find new ways to tell me I suck. Financial proceeds of any book sales will never go to any surviving relative of mine. Instead it will appear in the accounting journals of a global corporation who owns everything ever written. They'll have a special division of crappy writing where my picture will hang above the entrances to the buildings. They may even name the division "The B. Clifford Burke Division of Poor Literary Skill" in honor of my immense lack of talent, which future critics will hail as timeless. Of course, my name isn't Clifford, but that detail will be washed over during my own lifetime. What does the true name of a bad writer matter to anyone anyway?

Perhaps my book will be used in my lifetime, but not for reading, of course. Discount stores in small rural towns will collect and reproduce thousands of copies and advertise them as "cheap kindling". The paper weight industry will pounce on the commercial value my book presents, calling it a "perfect weight to keep papers in place." Babies will become potty trained with it, the homeless will construct shanty towns out of copies of the book, and even dogs will be allowed to relieve some nervous energy by chewing it to bits.

It will be a complete literary embarrassment to which books will be written on how not to write a story. It will be compared to such failures as Communism and the Hindenberg. In churches, sermons will be given to exemplify how my book is whats wrong with America. School children will be shown how to safely burn it. Couples will wear matching t-shirts about it. One will say I'm with stupid with an arrow pointing to the other shirt which will have a picture of the cover on the front.

It will become the most reproduced piece of writing in the universe, yet only four people will read it. Those four wont remain my friends for long and will demand some type of retribution for having spent time on such a pointless activity. I will be court ordered to sell my gull bladder in order to financially settle the four pending law suits filed against me. The operation will kill me and the doctors will install a copy of my book inside my body where my gull bladder once lived. They'll explain later how it proved to be a good fit to make it appear that I had died of natural causes, hoping to avoid a lawsuit of their own. By the time this information will have surfaced, there will be no surviving family members to pursue any legal action on my behalf anyhow. I will be buried in a modest grave whos headstone will say this: B. Clifford Burke - A waste of time, ink, and now earth.