bookfraud

Dear Michael Eisner:

I wrote this “bookfraud” fellow about Disney and someone said you were a whore! I found out that you actually work at Disney and that Disney owns ABC. Why a company that runs Disney-Land and Disney-WORLD wants T.V., beats me. But Three’s Company, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and I Love Lucy are the all-time best! America’s Broadcasting Company — bravo Eisner!

America’s CEO

I was mad that I had to pay $39.99 to go to Disney-Land because I didn’t want to ride the rides, but you probably have more important things to worry about, like the Acadamy Awards. Can you have Bob Hope’s clone host it this year?

Two suggestions:

1. Bring back Howard Cosell for Monday Nite Football. A true American!

2. Instead of Desperate Housewives, how about Desperate Chefs! It would be about the head chef at McDonalds. You could get Don Knotts to play the chef. Or the guy who plays Re-Run in What’s Happening. I can write it for a small fee.

Also, could you bring back The Mod Squad, except make everyone white.

Keep it up! Support our President!

Sincerely,

Lazlo Toth

Dear Sir:

Yesterday I went to the Disney-Land, the one in Anaheim. It costs $39.99 to get in (a rip!) but all the rides are free. I asked the lady at the turnstyle how much it costs if I didn’t go on the rides. She said it still costs $39.99!

Why should I PAY for rides I don’t want to ride? I don’t want to ride the stupid Magic Mountain but I have to PAY for it. It’s not fair! All I wanted was to get in the teacup and sing “It’s a Small World!” I don’t get it. Should other people PAY for all the items at my Mac’s place when all they want is an EggMcMuffin and Big Mac? No! Toth knows! (I have seen at least two Disney movies (Pinoccio, Bugs Bunny) so I should at least get a discount.)

Also, why do some people get Disney-WORLD and I only get Disney-LAND? They get a whole WORLD and I get just a lousy LAND!

Not Toth, but close

But you aren’t with Disney, so that’s OK. Did you really commit a fraud, Mr. Book? I have an idea when I read your web thing. Why don’t you go to Disney-Land and write about it? If you have to pay for stupid rides, you get to talk to the cartoon characters too, right? I bet you can get some good info from Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. They have worked at Disney-Land forever and live there. They can tell you why you have to pay for the stupid rides you don’t want to ride. They know why Mickey and Minney never had any baby mice! They know why Snow White had black hair when everybody knows she was a blonde! Then you can write about it! You like to complain a lot so this would be right up your alley. You can make a million dollars exposing this! It’s the American Way!

You don’t have to pay me anything, but you could maybe get a pass for Disney-WORLD or some hamburgers.

Bravo, bookfraud! Together I know we can do it!

Sincerely,

Lazlo Toth

P.S. why are you “book fraud”? did you steal a book? Was it “Yes I Can” By Sammy Davis Jr.? Worth stealing! The best!!!

After many months of spousal abuse (and an “incident” involving my visiting brother), I finally agreed to help fix the leaky bathroom sink yesterday. Wife, bless her, had spent a considerable amount of time trying to get this seemingly intractable problem resolved. (The correct part wasn’t in stock, they stopped making that kind of stopper, etc.) We looked at the problem and decided to saw down a plastic tubing to fit, using a crappy handsaw that contributed mightily to a retirement due to carpal tunnel. And then we had to saw it down some more.

I thought I had finally figured out how to replace the right parts, get a good seal, and make the damn thing work. But it didn’t, of course, try as I might over the course of two hours. This was just one of two sinks, by the way. Due to my incompetence, the other sink came apart, doubling our troubles.

Over the next 20 minutes, I lamented in colorful language my inability to perform basic house repairs, using such rhetorical tricks as “I am the biggest fuckup in the world!” and “What the fuck was I thinking? I can’t do this shit!” and “Goddamn fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!” while striking a wall with an open hand.

As I lay plumbing

Wife, again bless her, opened up the phonebook. “Let’s call a plumber,” she said, and I, having surrendered both physically and mentally, called the specialist. He came over in about an hour. The man had a moustache that did not flatter him and an Eastern European accent that indicated the man had been a nuclear physicist back in the old country. The plumber fixed it quickly and professionally and expensively. A leak reappeared but they came over this morning and fixed it, for free.

Besides learning several valuable lessons about self-loathing, hand-eye coordination, and the profound inability to use a pipe wrench, I realized that for the same reasons the plumber makes a living with water malfunctions, so will I probably always be able to find work due to writing malfunctions.

I know many people in executive positions whose skill with the written word approaches my skill in home repair; which is to say, almost none. As long as there are executives, I will have employment.

I was rather grateful to make this profound discovery. It gave me a sense of self-worth while easing the sting of the plumber’s bill, which, as Wife pointed out, could pay for a plane ticket. I was also grateful, because it gave me something to blog that was at least tangentially related to writing.

Also, I’m going to AWP. But I don’t want to write about it.

Somehow, I missed the Super Bowl Halftime Extravaganza. Instead, a friend popped in a semi-bootleg copy of Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior.

Of his many virtues, Tony Jaa can crack skulls with his elbows and seriously get vertical. The man has the screen personality and acting skills of a chunk of concrete, but he’s got the action chops (so to speak), and I’m sure he’ll develop into something worth watching. There’s a five-minute chase scene in which, among many things, he slides underneath a moving car.

Great stuff, but derivative, I’m afraid. Of the Man. Of the all-time greatest action star (and my favorite movie star) ever, a man whose on-screen exploits will never be topped because nobody will even attempt to copy the insanity of his stunts and fights. Of course, I speak of Chan Kwong-Sang, better known to us mere mortals as Jackie Chan.

(Wife, who likes Mr. Chan as well, is chuckling as she reads this. “I knew you couldn’t go more than a month without writing about Jackie,” she is thinking. “Jackie, Jackie, Jackie! Enough!” This is just the first Jackie post. There will be more. Many more. Including the autograph episode.)

There’s more to this than simply the wacky exploits of a crazy movie star. All I know about writing relates to Jackie Chan, though most of it I learned elsewhere first.

One way to travel

Here’s the derivative part. In Winners and Sinners, a movie in which Jackie guest stars, he tracks down a couple of baddies who’ve stolen something or other from someone or other in a park. The problem is, they’re in a car. Jackie’s on roller skates.

To give chase, Jackie hangs on to moving cars, trucks, motorcycles. He leaps over fallen bicyles and other detritus. He barely avoids crashing about, say 80 times. He flies through red lights and barely avoids oncoming traffic. As the chase alights a Hong Kong expressway, a VW Beetle crashes, impeding Jackie’s path. It happens so quickly, there’s no way to avoid hitting it. So, of course, he flies over the Volkswagen (don’t ask how), landing on his feet and continuing to give chase.

Now this is the important point. This should be the highlight of the scene. It’s an amazing stunt. But it’s not good enough for Jackie. He’s flown over the crashed car, and is hanging on to moving one. He’s in the middle lane. The crooks are getting away, though, because Jackie can’t get to their lane. He needs to get to the outside lane. He has to get to the outside lane. But there’s an 18-wheeler blocking him.

Even Jackie can’t leap over a moving semi. The camera shoots to a close up of his face: he’s looking at the ground, beneath the truck, face intense with purpose. The shot shifts to the pavement underneath the moving tractor-trailer, and back to Jackie, who’s looking ever-more-intently at the space below the 18-wheeler, and you think,No. No. He’s not going to do that. He’s not going to do that.

Naturally, Jackie does do that. He pushes off the car he’s hanging onto, and skates underneath the moving semi. You can tell they speeded up the film when he did the stunt, but still. I get goosebumps thinking about it.

How does this relates to writing? Simple: Jackie keeps raising the stakes. It’s not enough for him to chase down the baddies on roller skates, jump over automobiles, and put his life in danger. He’s got to skate underneath a moving tractor-trailer. (And I could name a dozen additional examples from his movies.)

The same goes for writing fiction — a writer must constantly raise the stakes. A work of fiction has to keep taking chances, whether it’s making each scene more vital than the last, testing characters’ resolve, or pushing the limits of the writer’s abilities.

A valuable lesson learned courtesy of Mr. Chan.

At least that’s what I told a faculty member at a writer’s conference when she queried about my “Rumble in the Bronx” T-shirt. I’d been drinking vodka, with Red Stripe as a chaser, not a good combination at any age, much less at 37. She was drunk enough to concur that one, can, indeed, learn about writing from my beloved Jackie. She was not drunk enough, however, to confer any compliments upon my stories that she’d read earlier.

N.B.: Is there something seriously wrong with the comment system? I’ve barely been able to post to other blogs the past 24 hours. Too slow, doesn’t load, error messages. Feh.

I like to keep Wife happy for reasons any married male can understand, and one of the ways is to clean up the place when she asks. After bitching and moaning that I have to do something really important, like this endeavor.

So I found myself vacuuming Sunday afternoon instead of watching the vital 13 hours of pre-Super Bowl coverage on Fox. Suddenly, midway through my carpet cleaning tasks, I caught an earworm of the most wretched kind: “Afternoon Delight.” I turned off the vacuum. I turned it back on. I banged my head against the floor. I beat myself with a cricket bat. I shot up 100 percent pure heroin. But no. It would not go away.

There is a special place in you-know-where for this song, and the band that sings it, the Starland Vocal Band. (Chew that over: the Starland Vocal Band. A “band” with this name actually existed. They actually had a #1 hit. They actually had a TV variety show with David Letterman.)

In the ninth circle of Hell, the Starland Vocal Band croons this abomination through an iPod fused to my eardrums, endlessly. That, and Satan plays tennis with my vital organs.

Please stop

It’s not just the syrupy, cloying, nauseating country tune or the perky vocals, which recall more of church hymnal than nasty, pre-dinner shagging in which precious bodily fluids are exchanged. It isn’t that they stretch the word “afternoon” into sixteen syllables like they were going to have an orgasm when they finish singing it. It’s the word delight. It sucks. I hate hate hate hate the word delight.

Writers, more than the rest of the world, have words that bother the living crap out of them.

Delight is one of the most suck-ass words ever devised.

Why? You’re asking. Why would one word make this otherwise reasonable man turn into a raging language sphincter?

1) “That is so delightful!” Would you want to share some Afternoon Delight with someone who said this? No!

2) I constantly picture the word used in association with Elizabethian drama, especially Dr. Faustus: “Oh, how the sight of Helen doth delight my soul!” “Delight me, Mephostopholes!” “How your breasts fill me with delight!” Bravo Marlowe? No!

3) In a prior job, I had to interview someone who worked for a credit card company that had won an award for “customer quality.” If you’re wondering what the hell credit cards have to do with quality except to destroy the quality of your credit rating, I asked this executive the same thing. He said, “Our mission is to deliver customer delight.” Customer delight. No, no, no!

What the hell is that? I asked.

“You know, customer delight,” crappy credit card executive said. He went and used that heinous phrase another 28 times in two minutes (I counted). I wanted him to die. I wanted to throw up through the telephone, and he would choke on my vomit. (You can’t dust for vomit.)

I hate this word so much that I triple checked the body of my novel to ensure it does not appear. If someone said, “I will pay you $1 billion to publish your novel, as long as you give it the title Busload of Delight!,” I would say No! No! No! Go delight yourself!

There comes a time in every blogger’s life that he or she will resort to cheap tricks or submit to laziness rather than work hard, and submit a blog that’s crap anyway. This is such a post.

I am semi-obsessed with Dante’s Inferno. You have sinners munching on the back of other’s heads, tears freezing in eyesockets, popes and politicians tasting firery damnation, demon dogs, Satan doing a non-stop mastication on Judas, Cassius, and Brutus — what more could you want?

I’ve always speculated that I would probably find myself either in Limbo (ha) or just a few circles down (Lustful and Gluttonous). So when I found the following site, I was justifiably excited. As another person I’m obsessed with would say, It is the greatest online test of all time.

Much to my consternation, I was assigned to the Sixth Circle, the City of Dis. I was hoping I could at least make the Seventh Circle, but no, I’m just a mere heretic.

What I want to know is, where do unpublished novelists go? Or do they simply endure hell on earth?

Can’t wait to see where bloggers end up.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter:

The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell - The City of Dis!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Take the Dante’s Inferno Hell Test

As waxed upon earlier today, temperment informs one’s writing. So take the Bookfraud temperment test!

Tell what mood you’re in and fill in the blanks. Crab libs.

This story is about ____ (noun), in which ____ (proper noun) decides that ____ (proper noun) is a ____ ____ (adjective, noun) and she must ____ (verb or verb & noun). In one scene, a ____ (noun) ____ (verb) a ____ (noun), and when ____ (proper noun) ____ (verb) the ____ (noun), a ____ (noun) decides to ____ ___(verb, noun). There is a revelation near the end, in which ____ (proper noun) confronts her ____ ____ (adjective, noun) and with ____ ____ (adjective, noun) says, “____.” (whatever the hell you want).

Like a lot of others, I have a 9-to-5 job that pays for the fiction jones. I come home, and after dinner and cleanup, and if I can pry myself away from Smackdown! or American I-dolt, I park myself in front of the computer and write highly inspiring stories of love and redemption, tales that feature bluebirds, puppies, and ice cream. I do this despite my exhaustion and profound desire to pick at my toenails.

Surprise! I really don’t write about bluebirds, puppies, and ice cream unless they are used in the commission of a crime or cause a painful death. (It’s amazing what you can do to someone in an ice cream vat, not to mention the damage that a feral puppy pit bull can do.) The only time I have to compose is after work and weekends — I’m cranky after work with exhaustion, cranky on the weekends because I’m missing out on doing something fun. You know, the things normal people do. Wife claims I’m just a curmudgeon, which is true.

What I’m realizing is how much my mood at the very moment I sit before the keyboard informs the tone of my fiction. “No shit! you’re saying. “Yeah, no shit!” I say back.

Yes, this is no revelation to anyone who’s bothered to write, but I’m starting to wonder if my cynical, hypercritical, stone-hearted stories of human cruelty and death and destruction and worlds engulfed in blazing Armageddon would turn into bluebirds and puppies if, say, I wrote when I’m not so spent or down — instead, when I’m drunk, high on coffee, or the post-coital bliss that I will not detail here but which the mere mention of will certainly generate the majority of comments to this post.

Regardless, as I continue my transformation to a modern-day Jaggers or Fish/Abe Vigoda, it’s clear that I won’t become a better writer if I was of better temperament, just a different one. As I’ve said before, those of us who write fiction are by nature introverts, weirdos, cranks, or just simply insane.

(The rest of the post was cut out, and turned into a separate post, which makes it seem like I’m really working hard at this.)

All civilian marriages are all alike, but each writer-writer marriage is messed up in its own way.

To wit: at dinner last night, I uttered a bon mot of some great effect, like “I eat, therefore I am fat,” or “This pad Thai isn’t as good as the last time.”

Wife looked at me with larcenous intent and said, “That’s funny. That would be a great title.” As in, a title to a short story. Though it had never occurred to me to use “Brown Rice Is for Hippies” or whatever I said for my fiction, Wife’s interest made me want to keep it, like an eight-year old who doesn’t give a crap about his toys until his little brother wants to play with them.

“No, you can’t use that. It came out of my mouth.”

“You didn’t even realize that you said it,” Wife replied. “I’m going to use it.”

The unwritten rule among writers is One Shall Not Steal Ideas Though You May Covet Them. Wife and friends have, to some extent, codified these rules so they still remain pals. I imagine Super Friends Writers around the globe who write have similar treaties.

Don’t steal ideas

But people of low character break this rule all the time. I know of at least one victim whose purloined ideas ended up in book form. My ideas have yet to be stolen and published because my ideas generally suck. Therefore, if my accidental brilliance was coveted by Wife, I knew I must have it.

“Damnit, Wife, it’s mine,” I said, trying to reestablish my household hegemony. “Mine, mine, mine!”

Wife shook her head, disappointed in my juvenile behavior once again. (A husband’s main purpose is to be a perpetual disappointment to his wife.)

“You’re not going to use it,” she said. “Five minutes from now, you won’t even remember what you said.” She was right, of course, and now the idea is hers. Though she now can’t remember it, either. Whatever it was, it had to be brilliant.

Though few, this was not the first such clash. My brother, a smart and witty storyteller himself, was relating to us the tale of a friend whose marriage ended in spectacular, operatic fashion, emblemized by some creative vandalism to his wife’s property. As soon as my brother finished his tale, Wife and I looked at each other and said, “Are you going to use that?”

“You people are vultures!” my brother said.

Wife took the idea, but she was not able to use it. As part of our agreement, once an undetermined statute of limitations passes, the other person can use said idea, and so now, in proper hands, I shall take my brother’s tale and work my magic, in a story that will be completed right before the next time I vote Republican.

Actually, since Wife is of superior talent, if she couldn’t make hay out of my brother’s story there’s no helping it.

What do other couples fight about? Money? Who cleans the bathroom this week? Project Runway vs. South Park? Wait, we argue about all those, I lose, and just forget I brought up the topic.

Simply, we also fight over weird things. Do married visual artists argue about who gets to paint the fruit basket still life? Do married filmmakers rumble over who gets to film the “Leave Brooklyn – Fuggetaboutit? ” sign in deep focus? Do married musicians fight about who gets to write the opera about Tonya Harding?

Next, the story you’ve been waiting for: Bookfraud’s top 100 Moments in Chicago Cubs history, if he can find that many.